I recently found your channel and have been binging your Myst playthroughs. You deserve way more recognition than you have, your playthroughs are fantastic. You have gained a subscriber and I look forward to seeing where you go from here.
Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying the playthroughs! 🫶 I've been really enjoying the whole Myst series, as well as some of the other games that Myst fans have been recommending to me
2:09:45 - Something I didn't realize even after solving how to access the underwater door was that the white, lit circles on the control panel of the sub show you which heating elements are still active!
On the "games shouldn't be rushed" discussion: I was reminded by Tim Cain recently of an old Paul Valéry quote: "Works are never finished, just abandoned." The same is true for games. You only have so much funding before you miss payroll, at which point the game has to be either released in whatever state it's in or cancelled. Unless you are exeedingly fortunate, there will always be compromises, cut content and rushed bits. So many classic games are barely held together with duct tape and chewing gum. Just enough to make it not fall apart.
Yeah, this is why I'm 50/50 on the "game deadlines" discussion point. At some point, you have to draw a line under your project and go "this is it, it's finished", and yes it could always be better, more polished, have more content, but you must finish projects or you don't have a studio at all.
@@thatdesignfeelgaming I also intended (but forgot) to mention the documentary series PsychOddyssey which I whole-heartedly recommend to anyone who's even remotely interested in how gamedev works. It concerns the development of Psychonauts 2 by Double Fine. I recommend playing the game first, of course after playing Psychonauts 1. See also: Tim Schafer's other games, inclduding but not limited to Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Brutal Legend and Day Of The Tentacle.
FYI (since you mentioned it in the vid. . .) - You can load and "fire" another set of marbles from the starry expanse only after the first set gets "downloaded" into the tray of the energy machine thingie back at the temple. I did it to see if it changed anything in gehn's linking book. It didn't. ;)
38:17 Turning on these lights didn't have an animation in the original, and it never occurred to me to think about how they work. It's funny that they eliminated one means of accidentally stranding the submarine at the gallows by allowing you to ride the gallows back down, but added a new one by adding the secret passage that closes behind you. Still, having a call button is a better way of resolving that problem than implying that someone swam to the gallows and rode the submarine back while you weren't looking. Or two people took a boat there, one person returned in the submarine, and the other person returned in the boat. They usually don't have NPC's behind the player's back mess with the state of things the player can also change the state of, and for good reason. 54:22 I imagine it's possible to make FMV work in VR with locked POV, but only if you film it with the kind of camera 3D movies use. I wonder how much that would have costed compared to character models and animation. 54:56 I saw a bit of a VOD of someone trying this game and hating it, and in the bashing fest in the comments, someone referred to the FMV of the original as "cheesy as hell." I really don't see what they mean. The use of FMV in Riven seems to me comparable to greenscreen use as routinely done in TV and movies. In a modern movie, the backdrop may even be wholly CG just like in a game. I guess "greenscreen + movie = okay, greenscreen + game = bad" suggests that it's not about the quality of the execution in the case in question, but rather, the nature of the associations brought to mind given what the quality of execution has historically been in general. I don't think the possibility that you might overlook an item you need to progress, like the lens, is any worse than the possibility that you might overlook a clue, or a button. My only objection to the lens as a concept is the conflict it creates between the most strategic way to play (looking through it at all times) and the most pleasant way to play (enjoying the sights directly, unfiltered). If it had been up to me, I might have suggested making the item be goggles that allow you to see the paint but otherwise don't change how things look, so there would be no reason not to have them on all the time once you find them, but gate finding them until well into the game. All that said, asking myself "is this a Moiety thing?" served me well in deciding when to try the lens. 1:36:32 If you look through this telescope before you've picked up the lens, you can see the sparkling of the lens where it's attached to the rocks beside the fish. 1:44:08 The original Riven has several little tricks that amount to Gehn designing his own structures to be needlessly inconvenient for himself to traverse. Of all those, I think the elevator under the elevator strains my suspension of disbelief the most. I really like the touch of having six totems, not five. Five is an obsession of Gehn, not of the Rivenese, and the Moiety would if anything be overtly inclined to subvert it. 2:03:52 I think what's happening is that the submarine powers the heaters while it's on them, but it takes them a while to cool off after it leaves. I was once in a water hole at the time the heater finished cooling off, and was inundated by water. The screen went black, and I was teleported to the walkway above. Apparently the Stranger can swim after all, just not voluntarily. A jarring experience to have in a Cyan game. I was surprised when they said in an interview that you'd get to see more of Tay, because I couldn't imagine what they could have you do there that would make sense. It certainly wouldn't make sense to require you to solve a puzzle in order to leave, because the Moiety are on your side, and wouldn't have reason to hinder you in that way. Maybe they could have added more set dressing that illustrates the culture, but that's all that comes to my mind.
I agree, I think it's a nice touch to keep the submarine returning home diagetic rather than having it magically teleporting. On the topic of the lens, I discussed this point a bit in the finale episode - I agree that it's not much different than missing a clue for a puzzle, but the difficulty is that it's usually easier to see if you're missing a clue than it is to see that you're missing an item. For example, it was easy for us to work out that there is probably a sixth totem because we were reasonably confident we'd deciphered the numbers correctly. Or we could be reasonably certain we'd missed a clue relating to the base strike force for the marbles because there was critical information missing that couldn't be acquired inductively. I'm genuinely not sure, if you missed the lens, how you would know that you were missing something 🤔 I hadnt realized that the heaters in the water worked that way - I bet being on the ground when the heater turns off could be a jarring experience in VR! 😅
@@joshuaoehler5796 It will tend to trip up players nonetheless, since you don't discover how until you go to Tay or if you're paying close attention the moment you exit, and it's easy to discover the passage before having been to Tay.
BEST TINY TRAIN: 1.Amateria 2.Riven underwater logging cart & maglev system (tie) 3.Voltaic WORST TINY TRAIN: 1.Selinetic mazerunner 51:52 I really do wish we could have seen an anteatermoose tho.
I'm going to give partial credit to the Obduction tiny train. Not a Myst game of course, but it's the one that looks most like a train, so I think it gets a pass
1:36:30 - This moment blew my mind. I never found the Moiety telescope. Instead, I found the symbol about 10 seconds after picking up the "lens of truth". Just walk forward a little ways and look up. The perspective is odd, but if you've played OG Riven, that shape is unmistakable from any angle!
Oh that's interesting! I didn't realize you would be able to see the fish from the bottom of the beach itself, but that does make sense! How did you link up the fish to the Prison-island totem then though?
@@thatdesignfeelgaming I wasn't able to make an empirical connection, per se. I suspected it was meant to be viewed from a different angle, but I couldn't figure out was that was. Eventually, I had matched up all the other animal/totem-number combinations and so I made a logical assumption that the two loose ends went together.
Fun to hear youre in to movies. But are you just streaming them or collecting? I have 1800 movies on DVD and Blueray. Plus a lot of series. A lot of brittish ones. All Poirot with David Suchet, all Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, all miss Marple with Joan Hickson. They dont play they ARE! The young ones, Bottom, Space 1999. Original Uk Narnia. All a touch of Frost, Lewis, Morse. I can go on... 😀
I have a dvd/Blu-ray collection, but I usually only add to it when I want to watch something that isn't available somewhere I'm already subscribed, or if it's something that I'd definitely want to watch genuinely on demand (like, sometimes when I have a sick day, nothing makes me feel better than putting on Terminator 2 again) With regard to the IMDB top 250, we're just finding them to watch. Many of them are old, so the library is a pretty good resource. I think Metropolis and M we actually got from the library because obviously those are considered films of historical significance!
"FMVs make a game look old" ehem, might I draw your attention to Control? :P Tho obviously the old footage would be too low quality to fly today and would probably need to change at least some things (in addition to having a fixed view when characters are on screen), I'm just saying it *is* possible to do it without making the game look dated.
Maybe I mean more generally that fmvs make a game "feel" old, rather than "look" old. In a similar way that 60fps video for a lot of people looks "less cinematic" because they're used to 24fps instead. I totally agree there's no "technical" reason to state that you couldn't have fmv in a modern game
@@thatdesignfeelgaming I think it's just time, the burners don't shut off right away. It's possible to trap yourself down below (temporarily) by spending too long in the cave.
