Originally Posted by TurtleFu
Has anybody played Myst? I've heard nothing but good things but I want some EMF opinions.
Also, I can't decide whether to get the Masterpiece or Real Edition.
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Dunno about any of the later editions, but the original was a disgrace to gaming.
Every 3D-like thing the player saw, was pre-rendered. "Progressing" through the game, was like navigating through a web of occasionally-animated photographs. You jump between nodes in that web (the map), and within each node (each "place" within that map) there's only 2-4 angles (all of them completely predetermined and static) in which you can examine your immediate surroundings. Each angle is at best a looped video with weather, wildlife, torchlight, or some man-made contraptions in regular operation - or it's just a completely-still image. This was why the game required players to install Quicktime on their computers - Myst in its entirety was literally a bunch of webbed-together videos (or panoramas), with some YouTube-like potential to click on certain sections of the image to jump into other videos.
The sad truth is, you could port the entire original Myst (and its first sequel - Riven) into YouTube. If a looping feature were to be introduced into YouTube, users could have precisely the same experience as launching Myst from a CD-ROM. There is no other highly successful "videogame" franchise I could say that about.
The gist of why the early Myst projects make me so angry, is because the "game" was 99% graphics and 1% interactivity (and I'm not fucking exaggerating). Even the Metal Gear Solids and Final Fantasy XIII are nowhere near as over-compromised for graphics as Myst originally was.
What they may have done in later years, was remake Myst with 3D rendered in realtime - where you'd be free to look at things from any angle you wanted. If there's such a thing as a Myst game that doesn't want to install Quicktime on your computer, then I'd say go for it. Otherwise, there
are recent games (such as Crysis or Dead Island) where you roam around in fully-interactive 3D which looks at least as good as the pre-rendering anyone was doing during the 1990s.