Did Myst really kill adventure games? I've heard about how

By "Myst clones", people are talking about CG adventure games that came out around the same time or after Myst. It was something talked about in gaming mags, but no reviewer ever seemed to point to an actual clone. Pixel artwork and sprite animation was used for graphical adventure games for a few years after Myst was released. By the late 90's pretty much every graphical adventure series had switched to 3D. By '99, the demand for adventure games had mostly dried up.

I wouldn't say Myst killed the genre. It gets flak for being almost brain-dead easy and for getting a new generation of casual gamers into the market, and probably rightfully so. Far too many successful graphical adventure games came out after Myst, I don't know where the "Myst killed adventure games" meme came from. I would say that Doom, it's multiplayer, and the FPS's that came after it had a far bigger effect. The graphical adventure games did very well against the likes of Wolf3D, Doom, Doom 2, and even Quake. Quake's massively popular multiplayer probably did more damage to graphical adventure games than anything.

Fans of the series say Myst and Riven are the only two good titles, and the rest vary by personal taste.

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>>4121418
>>4121541
Myst clones certainly exist. People used to term to refer to any first-person slideshow-style adventure game with prerendered graphics (which Myst popularized, even if it didn't invent it), but there are some pretty clear imitators such as Schizm, Alida, and Aura: Fate of the Ages. They imitated not only Myst's mechanics but visual style and puzzle approach (lots of walkways, ornate machinery, and symbol-matching). There's also the RHEM series which is a low-budget one-man creation with also zero story but tons of hard puzzles and maze-like layouts. Pic related.

As for the Myst series, Myst 3 is considerably more simplified and easier than Riven, but is still a superb-looking game with decent, if not great, puzzles. Myst 4 is very uneven. Some areas are gorgeous, some puzzles are excellent, but there is a bunch of cheesy FMV acting, stupid mystical woo-woo bits, and frustrating moments (though I didn't think anything was unfair). Myst 5 is all in realtime 3D and the worlds feel considerable smaller and limited. It's got some good moments but mostly feels like "eh, an okay-ish Myst game, this time in true 3D" with a lame gimmick. I think the entire series is still worth playing but you can probably tell I'm a fan.

>>4121418
And finally, no, Myst didn't kill anything. It spawned new games and didn't hurt established ones. It's not like the next Monkey Island game was ruined by being turned into a Myst clone or anything like that. In fact, some of the most well-regarded adventure games came out well after Myst, such as The Longest Journey in 1999 (which I personally thought was boring, but still).

>>4121541
>It gets flak for being almost brain-dead easy
Since when? The first Myst isn't that hard, but I've never heard people complain about it because it's "brain-dead." If anything the haters are usually saying it's sooo annoying because you pull a lever on some confusing mechanism with no clue as to what it does, even though that doesn't really happen.

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>>4121541
>It gets flak for being almost brain-dead easy
huh

>>4121880
You know "too intelligent" meme?
Well this is is in /vr/ form

>>4121418
Certainly killed my interest in these type of games.

>>4121541

lol, there is literally a puzzle that was programmed incorrectly and if you don't solve a previous puzzle in another world you will spend hours going in circles until you realize you need to brute force every possible option.

>brain dead easy

There used to be lots of salt against Myst among adventure game fans, mostly because Myst sold about twice as much as all other adventure games out there combined when it came out, but also because it didn't have much of a story compared to high profile adventure games of the time, and because the puzzles were just puzzles, and weren't really engineered to feel like they were part of anything bigger.
The problem was not that it supposedly brought the casual audience to adventure games, the problem was that publishers saw that Myst sold much more than every other kind of adventure game and decided that every new adventure game that came out would have to be like Myst. Of course there were many other great adventure games that were not like Myst that came after it, but they were a small minority compared to the rest of the games that came out.
Ultimately I'm not sure whether Myst killed adventure games. I'd rather think that they were doomed anyway and that Myst and Doom marked the end of an era in computer videogames.

>>4124783
There is no puzzle in Myst that is "programmed incorrectly". I can only assume you're talking about the mazerunner, but the clue in the Mechanical Age is just an extra hint. You don't need it to solve the maze, and you certainly don't need to brute force the maze. The maze has built-in hints that let you figure it out. You can solve the Myst ages in any order.

>>4126708
>non-Myst clones became a minority after Myst came out
Citation needed.

I never liked any of these games much, but there is a direct clone/parody of Myst out there somewhere because a friend who was really into them made me sit through him playing a bunch one day. If my memory is right I think iy even had John Goodman in it... But that seems odd. Maybe he was in Myst and this was a knock off actor... I don't know it was a long time ago.

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>>4127180

>>4121923
>meme
No, I'm just saying what I've heard from hardcore adventure game fans. Unlike shit like Zork or Sam and Max, Myst had puzzles based on logic. At the time a number of adventure game fans complained that it was painfully easy, and quickly beaten. They praised everything else about the game, especially the graphics, but the difficulty is considered low among adventure game fans from the era.

What are the hardest puzzles in the game? The power puzzle in Stoneship? There's 32 buttons, and you only have to find one. Even if you don't find the obvious clue, you can bruteforce it in less than 5 minutes. The mazerunner? There are FOUR noises. If you are unable to figure out that these FOUR different noises pop up and have meaning, then you may have brain damage. The entrance to the age with the mazerunner is difficult, because Cyan thought a music based puzzle would be a good idea. That's pretty much it.

>>4127180
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyst

>>4124783
>The game is easy because I gave up.
That's some great logic. I can see how logic skills like that were able to help you get through the game so easily.

>>4127204
>because Cyan thought a music based puzzle would be a good idea
Are a lot of people just tone-deaf? How hard is it to copy 8 or so notes when you have a keyboard right there that recreates those notes?

>>4121418
>Did Myst really kill adventure games?
No. It wasn't even good anyway. It sold so much by netting a good packaging deal and was basically something for retards to look at on an overpriced business machine they bought.

As for what killed adventure games, adventure games killed largely adventure games.
There's a spot on article from OldManMurray.
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

>>4121541
This guy also has the right idea with FPS games. Despite being separate genres, FPS games sort of stole the fucking show since they were the new hotness and everyone had FPS fever. Either way, if you were only down for adventure titles shitty design was largely your bane.

I have a friend who raves about Syberia which is apparently still around as a franchise, so adventure games aren't completely dead.

What's the best /vr/ version of Myst to play nowadays anyway? I know it's on loads of platforms and some of them for free, and I'm fairly sure I've played some version of it at least briefly.

I'm not sure if I'll actually play it much though. I think my attention wanes too much with this genre so I end up never getting very far.

>>4127294
I think the GOG Myst Remastered is probably it, though the game being so old can be prone to crashing running on Win8 or higher. Save often if you do play.

You can probably pirate it pretty easily. I hear decent things about the console port for the 3DO, and I bet it would be more "stable" to play it on there via the 4DO emulator with the mouse controller ennabled... However you might miss out on the hints that come with the Remastered edition.

>>4127301
Cool, thanks anon.

>>4121418
Don't know anything about it killing adventure games, but my personal ranking is III/IV > Riven > Myst >>>>>>>>>>V. I'm torn between 3/4 and Riven; Riven was fun and beautiful overall but Spire and Amateria will always have a special place in my heart, they really resonate with me for some reason.

On a related note, I can't wait until the Starry Expanse project gets finished and I get off my ass and remake 3/4 in a modern engine.

I flat-out hated V, though. The story made little sense, and the switch to real-time really hurt it IMO. The Ages were small and felt very contrived and artificial (even more so than the Ages of 3, which were /designed for a specific purpose/ in-universe). It just felt very sloppy to me.

>>4127340
Riven hasn't clicked with me yet. Making the world so big makes it feel like I am constantly either getting lost, or leaving behind something important. The lack of notes (so far) has made it somewhat guesswork as to what I am supposed to be doing. It was a lot easier to tackle Myst in chunks.

>>4127263
Well, tone deafness is a part of it(many stories online of people having musician friends handle it for them, or just never reaching that age period), the other part is those sensitive sliders. Even knowing the exact notes you need, it can be tricky getting the sliders into the exact spot. I think someone mentioned you can move the sliders with your keyboard's arrow keys, but I've yet to test it.

>>4124783
What puzzle are you talking about? I have no idea what you could mean by this

>>4127552
The maze puzzle in the Ruined Age or Cataclysm Age (w/e the one is with the sound puzzles). An early puzzle in the Mechanical Age gives you the sound cues for the cardinal directions, which shows up later (or concurrently) with the maze controls.

>>4127551
>Well, tone deafness is a part of it(many stories online of people having musician friends handle it for them, or just never reaching that age period)
Maybe it's because I play piano, but it is inconceivable for me to think that someone can hear something and just not repeat it. The sliders were a little sensitive but with 12 possible positions you whittle it down eventually.

>>4127204
>>4127551
The only real issue with this puzzle is how sensitive the sliders are. All you actually need to do is count the key positions and move it accordingly since the sliders are a piano as well.
>>4127632
>it is inconceivable for me to think that someone can hear something and just not repeat it
Not everyone knows notes and humans are extremely bad with audio.

>>4127343
I thought I was the only one. I loved Myst but can't get into Riven. It might have something to do with the boiler posted in this thread that I haven't figured out.

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Required reading:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

>Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Mosley in order to fool a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop's only motorcycle.

>In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake moustache. Utilizing the style of logic adventure game creators share with morons, Knight must do this even though Moseley does not have a moustache.

>So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.

>Still, you might think that you could yank some hair from one of the many places it grows out of your own body and attach it to your lip with the masking tape in your inventory. But obviously, Ms. Jensen felt that an insane puzzle deserved a genuinely deranged solution. In order to manufacture the moustache, you must attach the masking tape to a hole at the base of a toolshed then chase a cat through the hole. In the real world, such as the one that stupid people like me and Adrian Carmack use to store our televisions, this would result in a piece of masking tape with a few cat hairs stuck to it, or a cat running around with tape on its back. Apparently, in Jane Jensen's exciting, imaginative world of books, masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair.

>At the end of this puzzle, you have to affix the improbable cat hair moustache to your lip with maple syrup.

>>4127291
>Old Man Murray
>people are still using a humor article like it's some kind of well-researched thesis
It's a funny article and the puzzle deserved to be mocked, but no, "some adventure games had dumb puzzles so that's why they died" is not correct. The real tl;dr is that they didn't die, they got less popular because other games took over. And most studios did a bad job of updating their series to take advantage of new tech (think of all the examples of clunky 3D graphics and controls), so they ended up with bloated costs but disappointing reviews and sales.

>>4127632
>An early puzzle in the Mechanical Age gives you the sound cues for the cardinal directions, which shows up later (or concurrently) with the maze controls.
As already stated, you don't need that clue to solve the maze. That's just an extra hint. And no, you don't have to brute force the maze either--the beginning sections of the maze teach you the sound-direction relationships by giving you limited choices and/or making it clear when a guess is wrong.

>>4127967
>He posted that shitty ass Old Man Murray article

Every no taste faggot everytime

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>>4127291
>There's a spot on article from OldManMurray.

>>4128020
>>4128018
>>4128009
t. samefag jean jensen cuck

>>4127294
>I have a friend who raves about Syberia which is apparently still around as a franchise, so adventure games aren't completely dead.
Meh, it's barely even an adventure game. It's more like a semi-interactive movie.

>>4128009
>but no, "some adventure games had dumb puzzles so that's why they died" is not correct.
but no, most adventure games has dumb ass puzzles, so that's why they died is correct in part. And as I noted, yes other games also had a reason. And no, they didn't die as in they were wiped from existence and memory of course, stop being retarded. They became less popular as in really very few people really play them and they barely get made these days, that's called a dead genre. The genre is not active. The same way as I'm sure every-now and then an amateur dev pops up another shitty version of pong - pong as a genre is still well dead.

>>4128020
>article written before reddit even existed

>>4127198
my buddy had this it was spectacularly bad. john goodman was in it

>>4127198

Why does nobody make parody games anymore?

>>4128796
From the way you write, it's no surprise you don't like puzzles.

>>4130358
Lawsuits. Big companies are obsessed with "defending their image" and won't tolerate a lot of things that would have been done earlier. Nintendo and the C&D's they send out is a notorious example.

It was one of the first point and click adventures anybody was actually interested in. The rendered graphics made people flock to it, because it looked better than any other game. At some point there were so many copies in existence they were giving them away free. 3d graphics cards, Quake, and other games might have had a hand in killing off those games.

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>>4130358
>Why does nobody make parody games anymore?
COD is a fine example of self-parodying games.
Also, NFS.

>>4130992
>reddit

>>4126873
>Citation needed.
I meant compared to non-adventure games, not to Myst clones.

>>4130992
Cod being a joke does not equal it being a parody of itself. Or not an intentional one, anyway.

>>4121418
Traitors gate and Schism are two definite Myst clones I owned. They're probably more contemporary to Riven than Myst (I got then around 2000 or so) but they were still point and click exploration slash puzzle games

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After Myst there were a pretty surprising number of "First Person Pre-rendered Point and Click Adventure Games". Entombed, Shivers, The Lighthouse, Buried In Time, etc...

In my mind, most of them missed out on the two things that made the Myst series great. First is the incredible work on getting an immersive atmosphere and sense of place. Cyan always went above and beyond with their designs and concept, and tried very hard to push the boundaries of the medium.

Second was the quality of the puzzles. I think Myst still holds up because they are done so well. Everything can be worked out through logic or deduction. There's almost no bullshit "how was I supposed to figure that out!?" moments. Many of the other games of these types have inscrutable puzzles or rely on trial and error.

I guess I mean to say that it's actually really difficult to make a good one of these. A few developers could pull it off, but there were far more who fell short. As dynamic real-time graphics started moving past its previous limitations, the pre-rendered games became less compelling and eventually settled into just a handful of developers making highly niche titles.

>>4131576
I hope with the advent of VR we get more puzzle games in the style/theme of Myst - as in, actual puzzles like the electric chair in Revelation or the fire marbles in Riven, not just "pick up item and use it on door".

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>>4131576
>quality of the puzzles
Agreed. It's shameful how many adventure games even today think it's okay to just cram a 15-slider or Tower of Hanoi in there and call it a day. For all the people that want to hate on Myst and not give it its due, they should compare it to the 7th Guest to appreciate all the things Myst was trying to do differently. The 7th Guest had beautiful prerendered graphics, too, but it also was loaded with wacky, nonsensical puzzles with no believable purpose in the environment, much MORE cheesy FMV acting, and animations whenever you tried to click to move anywhere. Myst 1 has its share of silliness, but it's damn near elegant in comparison.

>>4130457
>It was one of the first point and click adventures anybody was actually interested in.
>no one was interested in adventure games before 93
>sure, Kings Quest was on it's 6th game by the time Myst rolled around, but no one actually played that stuff!

>The rendered graphics made people flock to it, because it looked better than any other game
>stuff like The Journeyman Project never existed

>>4131576
Buried in Time was a sequel to another First Person Pre-rendered Point and Click Adventure Game, one that pre-dated Myst. The majority of your post reads like Cyan fanboy fanfiction.

ITT: A bunch of millennials try to discuss history they weren't around for. There's a handful of people here who actually know what they are talking about, but the rest of you need to neck yourselves.

>>4132445

I was around for it though. Earliest memories are of playing games like Space Quest on an Apple IIGS. The irony is that I even owned a copy of Journeyman Project that came with the first CD-Rom drive our family got (and I loved that game). I just accidentally remembered the name of the game as its sequel's name.

I won't argue about being a raging Cyan fanboy though.

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Myst is a pretty good game, especially for the time. Riven is a damn near masterpiece that is still fantastic and looks superb even at low resolutions. It's one of those games that really feels like genuine artists worked on it. Every view is like a painting.

>>4127678
You're supposed to feel lost, out of place, like you are wandering alone struggling to figure out your objective. It's like the sense of isolation that Super Metroid gives. If you're at the boiler then you are like 3% into the game and the cohesion of the structure hasn't even begun to start other than "this is how you move and open doors".

You know how you are completely alone? What if all of a sudden you came across a native person here or there, who was frightened by you and quickly ran off? What if along your travels you realized that you had entered an island from the other side and that that world is much smaller and more interconnected than you had first thought, and this was an element in solving a puzzle later?

Keep going dude, Riven is easily the best of the series.