Let's Play Riven (2024 Remake) Part 1 - A Mysterious World on the Verge of Collapse
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- Watch more of Riven and the Myst series! • Let's Play The Myst Se...
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Game Description:
Uncover a story of intrigue, betrayal, and a civilization teetering on the brink of collapse as you solve intricate puzzles to unlock the secrets of Riven. Built from the ground-up and expanded from the award-winning original game released in 1997.
“I know what he’s doing… He’s watching you.”
Travel to Riven, a beautiful and mysterious world on the verge of collapse. Explore this mysterious place, solve its puzzles, reveal its mysteries, make a daring rescue, and escape.
VISIT A MYSTERIOUS WORLD
“I am Gehn. I assume you’ve heard of me.”
Riven takes you on a journey through dense jungles, awe-inspiring caverns, and monolithic structures. Explore a world bent to the whims of a man who sees himself as a god and where every corner will immerse you in an otherworldly adventure.
IMMERSE YOURSELF IN A SURREAL LANDSCAPE
“There’s a great deal of history that you should know…”
Riven rewards careful observation. Challenge Riven’s cunning puzzles, deftly woven throughout its narrative. The environment of Riven will reveal the story of this world as you make meaning from seemingly disparate bits of information and learn everything you need to know about this world.
UNRAVEL RIVEN’S SECRETS
“...it may be time to give this inexplicable mystery a second look.”
Who are the mysterious island dwellers you encounter during your exploration? What purpose does the giant golden dome serve? Why is this world on the verge of collapse? Play Riven and discover the answers to these mysteries- and more.
ABOUT THIS REMAKE
Created by the legendary indie developer Cyan Worlds and based on the smash-hit original released in 1997, Riven has been lovingly revisited by its key original visionaries to expand the epic narrative of the Myst universe.
Experience Riven like never before - with free movement through a real-time 3D environment. This brand-new, re-imagined, and expanded version of Riven offers a deeper story, new captivating visuals, and a journey that stays true to the original release while also expanding on Riven’s breathtaking world.
REVIEWS
“It's beautiful. Stylish. Timeless.”
90/100 - PC Gamer
“a majestic piece of art, and a world worth exploring all over again”
100/100 - GAMINGTREND
“The 1997 classic is reborn as one of the year's best puzzle games.”
9/10 - PCGamesN - Ігри
22:04 Fun fact, all of the journal pages in this game are actually hand-written! (That's not just a handwriting font.) The preview stream I mentioned in another comment featured the developer who did the calligraphy.
In English yes, sadly in the French version it's a font (nice though) with a few underlines & sketches
@@yester30 French sucks anyways
"You wouldn't do 3D for a loading screen anyways." This *is* a VR game so they might actually be rendering that in 3D. The loading screens for Firmament were 3D, at least in VR mode. (I haven't played the Myst remake in VR.)
the fact that you spend like 10 minutes musing about the lore while reading the journal makes me
A) love you
B) love that this game is so rich that it allows for and fosters such musings and conversations
according to analytics, 50% of all people who reach the journal part of the video skip the entire section lmao
@@KeithBallardAone thing I'd add is that the prison book really isn't an over complication, the further level of disguise is necessary to fool Gehn who would otherwise read it for what it is. Plus the simple "link in with no link out" concept is what got him trapped on Riven and we see what came of all that lol. There I went the extra mile and responded to the lore dump section that everyone skips 😂
Edit: yes that room that Atrus was trapped in by his father in the book is the same room he's trapped in during the games, heh
I love what they have done. i wish my grandpa could see this. He was a pro at the old PC game that had 5 disks. He even had a little notebook.
Both MYST and RIVEN came with their own notebooks. There were no such thing as taking screen shots back then! Kinda added a bit to the game at the time, actually! You felt like you weren't just wasting your time playing a computer game when you periodically had to pause and write down stuff (or draw pics) of stuff you thought may be a clue!
5:17 "I'm pretty sure linking books just always had a clear slideshow." That's true of most ages, but (to keep things vague and spoiler-free) the corrupted linking window is a symptom of what's going on with the age of Riven. I also checked and that same effect is present in the original version of the game (though it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment so I definitely don't blame you for not remembering).
Bizarrely, the linking books between Age 237 and Riven are crystal clear in both directions (in the original, I have not yet played the remake). This makes no logical sense, because those books are described as being grossly inferior to "true" D'ni linking books due to the available materials on Riven, so if anything, they should be worse than the Descriptive Book we use at the beginning of the game.
@@NYKevin100 In the original, it was explained.
Some space to avoid spoilers....
It turns out there is an extra element that is needed to power up the Riven-made books to make them work. Gehn has tried a brute-force solution with his book domes, but Catherine did some research and figured out a more elegant method.
I don't think your reply actually address what they said. They're saying that the other linking book (not Atrus's) to Riven has a clear picture despite the claim that Atrus's Riven book has a messed up picture because of Riven's instability. It does not appear to make sense that Catherine would have a higher quality image on her Riven linking book than Atrus has on the actual Descriptive Book of Riven.
@@KeithBallardA I explain this in my head canon as Atrus having the actual Descriptive Book of Riven itself, not just a Linking Book. The difference being, a Descriptive Book is the actual description of the age itself while a Linking Book is just a link to it and doesn't describe the world. If you write in and make changes to an age's Descriptive Book, you make actual changes to that age. But when you make changes to a Linking Book you're just changing the nature of the link to it (this is covered in Atrus' journal he sent with you). But it is an interesting oddity that those linking books have clear panels. It begs the question as to why Atrus couldn't just write a separate Linking Book to Riven to get a clear picture.....but I suppose the answer to that would probably be that you cannot write a Linking Book to an age unless you have precise descriptions of a location for the link to "link" to, which is impossible for Atrus as he hasn't been there in 30 years and has no idea what the actual changes to Riven during that time entail.
But yes, the linking panel to Riven in the intro is supposed to look like that and looks just like that in the original game as well.
@@KeithBallardAWhether you think it makes sense or not, the linking image is indeed supposed to look like that, and it did in the original.
I know I'm late to the party, but to put my two cents in: I think the creating vs preexisting worlds concept is the result of a soft retcon.
The idea that you could write a description of a world you dreamed up and enter it is more elemental--Simpler, a more harmonious union of the in-universe Art with the "creativity birthing new worlds" idea that underlines Cyan's entire existence. It's why the history of Stoneship age starts with Emmit, Branch, and Will just living on a rock with no parents or families or past: They're characters in a book, and Atrus hadn't given them a backstory. It's why he can write in a massive ship that didn't exist before, and why Riven is fundamentally dying, because its author is a bad writer and the worlds he writes are lifeless.
But there are all sorts of weird moral considerations to that, and particularly if you have a certain kind of religious background. The Millers have cited Narnia and The Lord of the Rings as inspirational, which are classic fantasy works that reflect the religious beliefs of their authors. What fantasy elements exist--other worlds and magic--are constrained within a Christian metaphysical framework, and don't step on god's toes. It's hard to do that with the Art if characters are literally creating new planets and people, so the concept gets introduced that all worlds are, ontologically, created by the Maker (who is literally named Yahvo), and Descriptive books just create connections to places that already existed. This means we have to handwave the in-universe existence of retcons like the Stoneship Age, or the idea that Gehn's shitty joyless writing style could kill an entire reality.
Personally, I think the creating Ages angle is more parsimonious, and it wouldn't excuse Gehn's behavior even of it were true. He is, as a villain, an abusive father, deluded into thinking he's owed obedience from his children and that he has the right to do with them as he wishes. But if the distinction of actual creation was that important to the Millers, or other members of the Cyan team, that could explain why it became an in-universe talking point. I don't know anything about their beliefs or if they've ever commented on this, though. It's just what this looks like to me.
Honestly this whole project is fascinating to me. They basically made a whole new game from the ground up, made things better and more functional, more modernized, it shows that the devs have a real appreciation for their work and want to see it reach it's full poyential without the limitations of 90's technology.
Btw that effect on the book at the start isn't a bug, that's how it looked in the OG game.
Correct. It is due to the instability of the Book / Link / Age somehow.
Fun fact in the original there's a pair of eyes spliced into the flickering shots like a subliminal effect.
@@lifeisnotaproblemoh, really? Huh
@@Mike14264 Atrus’ journal mentioned that his “patches” to the Age improved the image some, but he basically still has to detected small variations in the bad image. In this version, at the very beginning, on the left side of Atrus’ desk you can see the device he uses to measure the differences.
As for the Trap Book idea... considering Gehn would have linking books back to his home base on his person, as any sensible D'ni Traveler would. Prevents you from moving or acting mid-Link. So that would keep someone trapped without the ability to use their own Linking Books to escape.
Unlike the Prison Worlds that the sons were sent to, Gegn would have some way back on him in case of betrayal or trap... so the Trap Book would act as a failsafe to keep him from escaping on his own.
That being said, burn the book, cut the link... and anything "Traveling" mid-Link... well Given what Gehn has done... he's too dangerous no?
And I don't think you can fake a Gate Window location, that's why Atrus had to modify a D'ni linking book. No other bait would be as effective.
I find it interesting that they changed the layout of the first island slightly. Putting Gehn's hologram mechanism behind the rotating room forces you to do some puzzling before leaving the island. At least I'm pretty sure that it was possible to basically ignore the rotating room until much later in the original game.
Seems they've added quite a bit, especially the new numbering system. If you already know the base 5 system, it kinda breaks the immersion and process.
I think they moved the school as well? I remember it being on an island in the middle of the lake, though that was years ago.
@@jothki Yes, I also remember the school being on an island
@@GreatWightSparkoh, they changed the numbering too? Hmm, well that's pretty interesting!
@@Mike14264 not changed, just added a new layer. The totems replaced the cool animal puzzle, it seems.
Edit: ok, they replaced the eyes and silhouettes.
Well, I've seen enough to know they changed so much that all my old Riven notes are going to be useless which is a good thing. Looking forward to solving all the new puzzles.
welp, I guess I'll be back to this video in a week or so after I've seen what's new. not every day you get to play riven again.
we know Keith is a REAL gamer because he never remembers to look down (or up) :P
The D'ni Art of Writing does NOT create worlds. It is established very clearly in canon over and over. Does it make sense that editing the descriptive books can then cause alterations in the Age? No. It's D'ni magic! (or God's magic, really, as again canonically speaking the D'ni did not create the Art but it was rather relegated to them from the Maker, Yahwo.)
URU takes priority in the canon, or at least would have, with the MYST series being simply works of fiction created in that world and all the metaphysics of the games being speculative as they don't show "what really happened" 1:1. The series also retcons itself as it goes; MYST4 retcons the Prison Books into being actual Prison Ages. It seems this point was not retconned in the Riven remake so at the end of the day the "Prison book" may not (or does not) canonically exist. It's a plot contrivance. Unless I'm missing something or Cyan says otherwise, I guess.
I just want to add, upon reflection, that it could just as well be that Prison Books are canon, and Myst4 retcon should be disregarded as being "below" the Cyan level. Who knows at this point. Can someone ping RAWA again?
I might have to try this. The last time I tried Riven was as a tween, and I had no concept of taking notes while going -- making the game almost impossible. While the concern about designed frames is valid, I'll admit that I think the continuous space would help me have a better sense of location; harder to get lost!
8:11 "Look at this old-timey cursor, you can count the pixels on this thing." I watched a preview Cyan did on their channel with some of the devs and they called that out as a deliberate callback to the original game. There are different cursor options in the settings if you want something different.
Honestly my favorite part of the game. They should implement "the hand" in the Myst remake too.
@@thomasg86That would be pretty neat actually. And new models for the characters made by the same character designers of Riven too, while we're at it 😅
This is quite the conversion! Love how they brought this 2D masterpeice into the 3rd (and VR) dimension.
I always thought of the D’ni writing technique as a mix of both discovery and creation. Straight up creating worlds works on its own if it’s pocket dimensions and not whole worlds because there’s an infinite regress problem with creating whole planets that can be linked to; they need to orbit stars so that star would also need to be created, does this disrupt the orbit of other stars? Are whole galaxies also then necessary to be written into existence to accommodate the star that has the planet you want to link to? Etc etc etc. I’d rather it be pocket dimensions for ease of use. It’s really best unsaid and left to the imagination since it gives us the fun philosophical debate from the books
I kinda figured you couldn't fly from Age to Age in a spaceship, even if they were being created. Like they exist within their own reality, as if you're creating a simulation.
I kinda feel like the art work from those old Yes album covers are what's left of Riven after it broke up being just chunks of planet floating in space.
I'm really interested in the changes they've made to the puzzles, not just the really obvious ones like the wooden devices but also little changes to the domes. I noticed too that the alerts/encounters with the villagers haven't triggered (I hope that means they're not omitted completely). When it came out I played it, all my aunts and uncles played, even my mum who is not interested in gaming in the slightest had a try. Riven is more or less written into my DNA by now.
i am loving this !!!!
33:58 to answer your question if the prison book is destroyed with a person that is trapped than it simply forces them to link to the age that the prison book was supposed to link to this is how sirrus and achenar survied dispite having their books destroyed. Also atrus did not know that this was the result of destroying a prsion book in myst since he had never done so before
It's uh... it's actually a bit more complicated. That's mostly a fan theory. Basically, Trap Books aren't canon. Or, well, stopped being canon after the third game. They're just a simplification of what actually happened - Sirrus and Achenar did link to Spire and Haven, the Myst game simply changed and simplified the story to make it work in a video game format. They were never actually stuck in a static-filled purgatory, nor even in the void between links.
Heck, you can't even talk to whoever's holding the book through the linking panel, not only because there's no "magical window" that spawns in front of you (especially noticeable when you remember that Atrus also managed to do it somehow), but also because sound can't travel through the linking panels. These things were only done to allow you to have actual characters to talk to, to better understand who they were, because realistically, you wouldn't be able to talk with any of them.
Prison Ages are simply books that link to ages with no returning linking book in them. Destroying a Prison Age book simply cuts the connection to it, just like removing the pages of one.
Basically, the Myst and Riven games are just retellings of events that happened in-universe, but with creative liberties. Everything associated with Trap Books and whatnot are the most noticeable of them.
@@Mike14264Exactly. Officially, Prison Books exist to make the "real" events into playable games. In the "real" world, the book Atrus gives you would lead to a room that looks like K'veer but is, in fact, in a different world entirely. Presumably, Atrus would have anticipated that Gehn might have the Stranger "prove" that the Linking Book is safe, so he included a hidden Linking Book back to Riven in a secure location somewhere on the Prison Age, along with a means to instantly destroy it.
@@micahbush5397 yeah, that's an interpretation I honestly enjoy! Tho it comes with a slight flaw, the idea that Gehn might link into it first, and risking him finding that hidden linking book. But I assume Atrus would warn the Stranger about it, urging him to play along Gehn's cautiousness, and assuring him of the book's safety by linking first.
@@Mike14264 you did not explain how then they were able to get them out of those prision worlds if the books were destroyed ?
@@D3monL3A1 the books that were destroyed were only linking books. The descriptive books were still safe, and Atrus could write any other linking books to these prison ages whenever he wanted.
My favourite of the Myst franchise~ ❤
Oh hey, 3D Atrus doesn’t look completely horrifying in this one. That’s a promising start.
Great idea, Atrus. Send someone you barely know to trap your dad in a prison book… along with a diary that straight up explains the whole plan.
Ah, the classic debate over The Art. Despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary, I tend to agree that ages are created rather than found. It’s the most reasonable explanation, IMO, for why an age's inhabitants retain all of their memories even after significant alterations to the associated descriptive book (e.g. Stoneship).
Edit 6/27: I appreciate the insightful replies, genuinely, but I realize now that I framed this whole thing completely wrong. I don’t need to be convinced that the linking theory is right-like I said, that’s where the evidence points. Ultimately, I just prefer the narrative implications of the creation theory.
The main antagonist in the Book of Ti'ana shares the D'ni protagonist's shock at the suggestion that they are gods of creation. It seems core to the culture that the Art is not seen as an act of creation but of describing a world that exists. I think there's room for both. You can have a multiverse that is finite, where small changes do affect an existing world... but make too many or the wrong ones and "the band breaks" as the video puts it, and the link shifts to the new, more closely matching world.
It's basically a change at the quantum level of the age's reality. The fact you switch to a slightly different possibility while also still remaining in the same reality. If the changes were too significant, you'd pretty much link to a completely different age, and that's where the people in there would have no memory of you, or be outright completely different. There's a very fine balance to strike when it comes to pushing the limits of the Art, I imagine.
A problem with the view that Ages are created by the Art is that the Ages described frequently include unspecified elements; for example, when Atrus wrote his first Age, Inception, he noticed that there were birds singing, despite the fact that he didn't write birds into the Age. If he had actually created the world, then it would have only contained what he described.
Reply to the edit: ah, well, that's fair 👍
-gehnist lol-
man. the 90’s come flooding back to me!
You like to vent about Myst lore being inconsistent, don't you? :3
(insert the cat-meme here)
To be fair, they had a whole book where an in-universe character muses about the reasons behind those inconsistencies
39:06 The evidence that the ages aren’t really created is in the book of Atrus novel when Atrus visit one of Ghen’s age. This age was an island surrounded by a thick ring of mist that the inhabitants had an unspoken rule to never sail near or trough it. Atrus managed to convince a group of fishermen to let him go with them and they ended up trapped in the mist. After they narrowly escaped with their live, the terrified fishermen told Atrus that the mist was their patron deity before Ghen arrival. This prove that the inhabitants had their own history and religion prior to Ghen’s arrival. Atrus also noticed after writing his first age the presence of bird despite the fact that he never wrote anything about birds during the age creation.
Those strike me as weak evidence. If you're manifesting an entire civilization via what's basically magic it's not unreasonable that they'd have backfilled history and memories, as opposed to having (from their perspective) blinked into existence five minutes ago. Just like how rock formations themselves imply millennia of geologic history. Similarly, a bird appearing makes sense because it's made pretty clear that writing ages is massively complicated and often has unintended consequences. So he made an age that would result in a bird that he didn't explicitly write in.
@@KeithBallardA But Guen clearly saw the worship of the mist as something he never wrote about as well as a threat to his rule. It just seems strange that the book created an already established religion that was not written in the descriptive book and that came with specific rules and dogma. And more intriguing, the mist deity is implied to be real as after the expedition, nature itself began to turn against the village and especially Atrus who persuaded the fisherman to sail to close to the mist. It’s never made clear if the mist was actually a god or the produce of the inhabitants superstitions but it was enough to threaten Guen as an obstacle to his divine image. So like any good colonialist tyrant (you were spot on in that assessment), he try to forcefully ban the mist worship. It fail despite the influence so he tried to get rid of the source of the mist by warming the ocean temperature. It got rid of the mist… and doom the island to natural disasters and famine. Ghen was not only a tyran and an abusive father, he was also a colossal moron that lack basic scientific knowledge such as the intricate connection between the sea temperature, the climate and the ability of the water to sustain life. All because he was butt hurt that he couldn’t completely erase their belief. Your right that colonialism ruin everything.
I don't see any of that as a contradiction, really. If you create a complex world it'll have weather patterns, geologic history, and evolution among its creatures. Similarly, if you create a civilization, it'll have its own cultural reaction to its world. Like the people of Riven and Channelwood, the indigenous people of the Myst series are consistently portrayed as less technologically advanced than the D'ni or modern Earth, and always religious. So the island people worshipped the mist. What we saw was Gehn simultaneously failing to understand the complexities of The Art, the world he created, the people who lived there, and his son, all at once.
It makes zero sense to say that the books don't create the worlds, but for some reason they can be used to edit them. Riven is edited while both Gehn and Catherine are there, and they're still there after the edits despite Gehn not being a native and Catherine specifically being the Catherine that married Atrus, an outsider, not some random replacement multiverse Catherine. If we were merely linking to another Riven in the multiverse, Gehn wouldn't be there to begin with, and Catherine would be a different version of herself that never traveled to Myst. It would also defeat the purpose of "saving" Riven because we wouldn't be changing the Age at all, but linking to a different, similar one.
None of the Myst series makes all that much sense to me if Descriptive Books don't create Ages. If Atrus is convinced that Gehn is delusional for believing so, then Atrus is deluding himself to scrub himself of responsibility for the power he holds. If he acknowledged that he was creating these worlds, ethically, he would need to stop.
While I tend to think they are links and not creations, I think the way the 'changes' by Atrus are explained (I can't remember if in the books or pseudo-canonically via Rawa) is that small changes with quantum-scale-like impacts will actually alter the substrata of that particular Age, whereas macro changes will jump the link. Not sure how much sense that makes, but then to me it similarly doesn't make sense that, if Ages are created, large changes also have run off effects that have nothing to do with the change (i.e the people in Book of Atrus mist Age losing all memory of Atrus because of the changes to the mist).
In any case, I kinda like that at least in BoA it is left ambiguous as to what is actually happening, as the actual interesting aspect of that character wise is that Gehn and Atrus's views of the Art tend to reflect their own ideological and ethical positions (and biases). Gehn and Atrus are essentially now the writers of history and the overlords of the Art now that the D'ni are basially entirely gone - the truth of the Art, and the D'ni at large, is what the victor of those two make it to be. That is a thread that runs through all 3 books and to a lesser extent the games.
No, read the book again. They create the ages. They create the indigenous people within them as well. That's why it's such a sin to burn books. You're killing the inhabitants. Also, either atrus or then (I don't remember) warmed the sea to remove the fog, which caused its own set of issues.
The bird however.... You're right. He never wrote anything about the bird being there which IS WHY he is was so stricken by it.
51:11 The idea that he takes credit for the ways the Age is falling apart is probably right, and the more interesting point thematically, but practically speaking, he does also have a firearm.
His firearm is just a dart gun, so it's only slightly more effective than the blow darts that the Moiety use.
@@KeithBallardA In the original, lacking a reason to believe otherwise, I assumed that since Gehn resembles colonizers from real-world history in a lot of ways, his weapon is a means of lethal force that serves a purpose for him analogous to what guns did for them. In this remake, I have now seen that the table the weapon is leaning against in his lab has darts on it. That does muddle things a bit.
Question, If all these worlds are creations, which one is the original world? Was it the D'ni's home world?
Yay!!! I hoped you were going to play this!!! :D
And yes the book is supposed to be blurred to Riven because Riven is falling apart!
Also cyan says its canon that they just link to worlds not create them that said that has changed over time and over the years and i agree wirh you them "creating" ages makes way way more sense the more you think of the story in the games.
I dunno, the fact they link to existing worlds always made more sense to me, even when you think about the spawning of new objects in the ages through additions to the book.
Read the books. They absolutely create the ages. Flora and fauna included. The biology of the plants and animals, as well as the resources. Cyan and the miller's have a slight different perspective because at a particular point, the brothers were no longer involved in the series of myst, which is when it all went to shit and the Uru bullshit got introduced. From that point forward the storyline stopped being about a man and his family, and suddenly became about some magical creature that created worlds in a single stone tablet and then from there it just got more and more twisted as they tried to say that the bahro and the people of d'ni have some intertangled enslavement ordeal. They should have just kept it a continuation of the original cannon but they couldn't because of the miller's owning the rights to the story of myst, and the books. After Uru, cyan eventually got the rights and was able to bring myst back for 5. Playing myst online Uru live was just an abomination as far as storyline goes but it does do a better job thing the story of Uru and myst together in a more believable way, until they mention that d'ni is just an underground city in New Mexico and not some magical world in and of itself.
You can actually have a better experience by skipping all of the Uru fillers and just running myst 1-5 as a stand alone series... Even tho 5 has a little bit of that Uru bullshit in with it.
@@northwindhighlander I uh...
...detect a slight amount of salt here 😅 To be fair, I never played the games beyond Riven, although I was planning to try out Uru Live Again soon. I always have a soft spot for those early 3D exploration experiments, especially after hearing that some fans are still into it.
SO EXCITED FOR MORE KEITH MYST CONTENT, AHHHHH
I remember when i first played this game as a kid. Riven felt so huge, unsettling, alien and scary. The puzzles were difficult and it made it feel like you were really trapped there. The amount of immersion you have when you are kid isnt something that can even be described. The game feels so much smaller to me now but ill never forget that feeling
Excellent. Thanks for the preview.
The guy falling into the "hole" as you called it is Atrus, jumping into the star fissure with the last linking book out of Riven. ofc Gehn depicted himself as casting out a great adversary from his domain.
This remake is just trolling its old audience. And I love it!
Did anyone else find Myst a big scary as a kid? I think it was the surrealism and stuff, which was totally foreign to me when I was like 10 years old.
If they remade REALMS OF THE HAUNTING, then my ultimate reliving childhood games dream would be complete.... well, maybe toss Crusader: No Remorse, Little Big Planet and Broken Sword in there too.
I know why they are doing 3d for the characters, but I prefer them as the FMV they had been.. it sort of looses some of that something special that made you feel like you were there
i think the idea with the prison book is that the gateway image is a VERY tempting place for gehn (d'ni ruins), so he's very likely to try to use it. He would be unlikely to go somewhere else where he has no materials to write books
Wow. I remember when you first played Riven you were patient and allowing yourself to accept it on its own terms and really got into it. This time around you're nitpicking everything. It's like I'm watching a completely different person play it this time.
literally all I remember about the Riven comments last time was them complaining about how I have no attention span and am too impatient and stupid and that's why I walked past that one lever, etc
also, I'm discussing the story at excruciating length how am I not "getting into it"?
@@KeithBallardAEh, fair enough. I guess there's no pleasing people no matter what you do. I can only speak from my experience, though, and in my opinion you were more forgiving and/or trusting of the original game. Idk.
I did notice that you were familiar with the lore by now. Which is cool! But that of course is a result of you getting into the older games when you played through this series before. I already said you got into it then. This time around it just feels like you're more cynical about stuff, for whatever reason. I'm probably wrong/misunderstanding, though. I just hope you end up enjoying the game again.
I had a great time! The game is also clearly in need of patches. A lot of stuff is busted or unpolished in ways that is clearly a mistake, or literally breaks. That's just the nature of things. Me mistaking the weird water rifts for a genuine simulation glitch doesn't change that.
@@KeithBallardAhaving watched this LP and the original, I've noticed how much your personality has changed too - you might have new software/hardware, but you seem happier and more comfortable. Good for you, Keith .
I think you kinda have to knitpick in these kinds of games in order to have any progress. I know I learned a lot from you doing that, things I did not correlate in my playthrough. I also think it's brave to play puzzle games on UA-cam, when sometimes you spend hours without any real progress
"..they are creating worlds by writing books.."
That's not how it works, canonically. Gehn also fell for that train of thought.
EDIT: Please, make sure to als look up and down wherever you go, you seem to be missing out on tons of stuff only ever looking around horizontally.
I wanted to play myself, but couldn't resist watching your playthrough after all :D Exciting to see, what the screenshots that Cyan has shared and that I've seen, Riven looks stunning.
Nothing stops you from playing it as well! Gotta support Cyan! :)
@@agahnim0196 you are damn right :D i look forward to picking up the updated game versions for myst and riven :)
you went to the edge of the cliff but didn't look down - and still got the achievement.
Also yes, the linking panel was supposed to look like that.
I like some of the changes,others not so much,i also find a few of the door choices to not be the greatest like the school door being a sliding one and the sound doesnt really suit it
Currently stuck and done for the night,having fun
Heck, with some of the Riven puzzles I couldn't remember the answers immediately after I finished them. This one stands out to me as my least favorite of the series with the least amount of puzzles that were fun or made sense.
But my take-away: Why is the book so HUGE?
And I definitely preferred the old characters/movie vs the art for the characters in this version (all of them felt off). The landscape though? That's wonderful to see in full/clear screen.
That's the Riven Descriptive Book.
A Descriptive Book is what you write when you create the Age (or create the initial Link to the Age); it describes the entire thing in detail. A Linking Book (that's the small ones) is a description of the location in the Age, with references to the Descriptive Book.
Think of it like in programming; a Linking Book calls the function that is written in the Descriptive Book.
the environments look so good but the 3d models of people.... pls Cyan I am begging you, just use FMV it fits so much better and is so much more charming...
Yeah, rendering 3D people isn't Cyan's strength.
explain how on earth they could insert footage of people into a 3d game where you can move around in space. not to mention how perfectly you have to nail the positions and lighting and 8 minute one-take monologues of actual actors, with zero flexibility to change anything or use alternate takes after the fact. it just isn't feasible in any way shape or form
@@gregkrazanski Yeah, I think they were able to do it in Obduction mainly because the actors were always on a screen, behind a window, or 2D holographic projections.
Trust me, compared to the remake of Myst, it does a far better job. And I don't think they'd be able to use the same FMV without it looking... well, bad, low res, and flat. The only other option would be using different actors. I feel like some Myst fans sometimes just... aren't aware of the fact there have to be compromises.
They actually changed a lot in this version of the game, so even if you remembered everything from the original, it would still basically be a blind playthrough.
Regarding the water, there is some kind of microorganism in it that is repelled from heat. So anywhere there is heat you get those unnatural formations.
Despite the changes you will have a huge advantage to a brand new player.
Too cynical. You keep assuming things are glitches when they're actually intentional parts of the story. Give the creators a little more credit.
You should watch Keith's LP of the original game and see the Struggle of the Cursed Cursive! One episode was simply reading 😅
I noticed when I was wrong. But the game is also glitchy enough that I get stuck in animations and have to quit out, and the environmental sound subtitles are bugged so that they only display in exactly one place, and the shimmering light on the ocean starts flashbanging the border of my screen, so... Actually I'm completely on point.
That's not how computers or video games work.
The game has several obvious mistakes and glitches throughout it lol, you're talking out your ass because you clearly came to the comments to fanboy. Meanwhile the real developers will obviously release a patch fixing these things so I don't know what you're bothering. It's in everyone's best interest to point shit out. I obviously have a capable PC as a guy who literally covers games for a living.
@@GreatWightSpark I'm hoping this time the game provides an option to substitute a more readable font. Yes I know the handwriting was supposed to be more immersive but IMO it hurt the game overall - too much "player versus UI".
Lol, calls the rifts in the water "graphical glitch"
I realized lol
Regarding the whole "creating worlds vs. writing links to worlds debate," it must be remembered that the Art is considered "a gift from the Maker." Assuming a theistic view in which all Ages come about by the will of the Maker, one can then bring in concepts like divine foreknowledge and free will: The Maker knows all Ages that will be written, and so is able to create every universe people will ever link to (and more). While the D'ni cannot create Ages, they can, in some sense, will them into existence, and through the Art can direct the course of the Ages, though the changes they make must be carefully thought out and must conform to what is physically possible, or else the Descriptive Books will shift to a new world. Changes that are possible but poorly thought out will be implemented, but they will also cause unintended consequences and could destabilize the world. For example, when Gehn altered his 37th Age to make the cold ocean warm, the physical mechanism was the planet's magma currents changing to heat the ocean around the island. However, thanks to Gehn's sloppy writing, a side effect was increased volcanic activity that caused the whole island to be uplifted by hundreds of feet, giving the appearance of the ocean having receded.
As a rule, the D'ni never altered Ages once they had been written. This may have been, at least in part, because they expected to be judged for the choices they made, and choices that brought about the premature destruction of worlds, even unintentionally through carelessness, were expected to warrant severe punishment.
1:27:32 - It's called "baleen", if you're interested. Unless it's in a duck's bill, in which case they're called "pectens".
Or a penguin's maw, which is a Sarlacc.
Yeah, when you think about it, the whole Prison Book or Trap Book debacle is a bit odd. As we saw with Myst IV, a prison could be perfectly well made with a linking book to an age that has no linking books to anywhere. Now, Gehn may carry a linking book back to either Riven or Age 233... but if that book is like any of his others, he'd need to build some apparatus to actually make them work. Still, he'd be wary and well prepared, but maybe less so if under the belief the book would lead him to K'veer, where Atrus is with Riven's descriptive book.
Honestly, while the technicalities of these Prison Books may not just seem unnecessarily complicated but also not even canon anymore/anyways, they at least serve as an elegant simplification of the trick to capture Gehn, or how the release of Sirrus or Achenar would happen: you use it and get stuck in a black void, and switch places with whoever uses it afterwards. If we were to do it in a way that actually follows the canon, you would need to account for many things. If Gehn will only use the book if you use it first, Atrus would somehow need to have left a linking book in that Fake K'veer age, probably back to Riven (because he wouldn't know about Age 233 anyways, and anywhere else would risk Gehn escaping Riven if the plan went wrong).
That would mean, in order for the trick to work, that we would _absolutely_ have to be the first ones to use the linking book anyways. Furthermore, after we lure Gehn inside, there would have to be some hidden away spot for us to hide, where the hidden exit book is, as well as a means to destroy it as soon as you use it, like a large lit torch to let the book fall in, dropping it right after you link. Would be a cool setpiece... but it's also quite convoluted. The special rules of a trap book, on the other hand, allow for this elegant solution.
I also wouldn't say the canon way is more controllable either... unless you're _immaculate_ with the prison age's description, the layer of randomness that comes with the writing of an age could always allow for an unpredictable element... and if that's the case, who knows how Gehn would craft his way out of his prison. He may be a rather incompetent writer, both of ages and in general, but he ain't stupid. He's intelligent, clever and cunning... that's why Atrus wants a fool-proof way to trap him... even if it can be ruined by whatever fool decides to link to it afterwards. That's why he asks you to help him, given you've been clever enough to help him. Hopefully.
The best way to have a prison book is likely to just build an actual prison on the other end of the book, which is ironically what Gehn does in both Riven and Age 233, albeit with tiny cages that have a funny lever that's literally in the same room lol
There's a lot of jankiness going on with the prison books as a plot point, and it all seems to come from Myst being a kinda sloppy, very old and early video game. The whole game is about learning the logic of its world and books, but then the prison books just introduce whole new rules right at the end of the story just to make the betrayal of the brothers make sense. Even that's sloppy and confusing for players, because apparently both brothers are in a prison book, but Atrus is in a regular book because he needs you to bring him a linking book and doesn't replace you if you make the mistake of using the book incorrectly. It gets super convoluted really quickly because of the two separate rulesets, when the concept of trapping someone in a regular linking book is already complicated enough.
I'd like to see how the scene played out where all four family members managed to get trapped inside of different books, but by the third or fourth person they didn't seem to think they should be a bit more cautious. Like I get that the brothers were last, but damn, how did this play out logistically. The first game has the hardest story to swallow at times lol
@@KeithBallardA yeah, it's a bit of a weird idea still, probably the best idea they had at the time when the lore was not yet really settled down. I like the ultimately simple idea that it works as a one-person prison that flips you over, it makes the betrayal of the brothers obvious, but yeah, not ideal.
Actually, they do bring awareness of how... unclear the story in Myst is. The game isn't exactly how the actual events went. Not just due to how the Prison Books work - in true canon, Trap Books don't exist. The pages would restore the links to Spire and Haven, the ages where the brothers trapped themselves in, and you'll go there either with no way to return (you'd be trapped with either brother, try to guess how much time to live you'd have in that situation), or you go there with a Myst linking book, they ambush you, snatch it from you, and leave you there while letting the book fall into the abyss/water, trapping you.
There's other things that are not accurate, like the size of the island, the lack of other places of protection beyond those of the ages that survived the arson, the lack of bedrooms for Atrus and his family... in general, I really wish Myst would get a full reimagining that brings it to the world-building level of Riven really.
Riven is the reason I found your channel in 2018!
So bummed my PC is too new for the old game and too old for the new game 😮
1:17:50 just noticed that the screws are also 5-pointed 😅
Demo works fine (40-70fps) on a ~10 year old PC (Skylake 6700k with 1060 6GB) on high. Good optimizations as far as I can judge (before getting to Jungle Island and foliage)
@@NirreFirreI tried; it didn't. Don't have the spec.
43:20 The "87" isn't a reference to 1987, it refers to Year 87 of the current D'ni "century," a unit of 625 years called a _hahrtee fahrah._ Riven takes place in the D'ni year 9462 DE, which is (15x625) + 87.
Do you know which real-world (Gregorian?) year that corresponds to? I think one of the spin-off novels said it was late 1800s, but I don't recall the exact year.
@@CoastalSphinx 9462 DE corresponds to the year 1806 AD.
Ever since playing and finishing the original Riven I've dreamed about someone e setting up a retail space with a high end Desktop, High end Audio and VR glasses so you could actually enter the World and interact as if actually there. Maybe call it Riven World. Whats the ultimate for me personally. Imagine exploring Riven and interacting with the puzzles directly.
4:22 Yes, an agent of the CIA would have a much more comprehensive briefing than Atrus' speech. The difference is that losing Riven will not hazzard you getting shot or beaten to a pulp. Remember what happened to Otto Warmbier that allegedly snatched a poster.
I think they went backwards on how they display people in this remake, but the water effects are great improvement.
I also understand why you prefer to believe the ages are created due to your distaste for multiverse stories, I'm personally fine with it, it all comes to how it's handled and Atrus isn't gonna be testing books to write ages to have two Stoneships with two Emmits, two Branches and two Wills. Heck, he never wrote them into the age anyways, if he tried to rewrite Stoneship verbatim again, he'd probably meet new people, meet no people at all, or even see something completely different.
I like to think the changes done to the ages with changes to the books are more creative than just "meeting different copies of the same people". Unless Atrus specifies the names of every single villager of an Age, if he linked to a distinct but virtually similay _described_ age, I think he will meet completely different people, or no people at all, or maybe even a completely different culture. That's the beauty of infinity - so many factors must be taken into account that we often don't consider.
As for how they can change an age if they didn't create it? Uh, quantum oscillations. Before Atrus wrote the boat into Stoneship, nothing in the book said there was a boat there... but nothing said there wasn't a boat there either. The possibility of a boat being there exists, it's just undefined, invisible. It's like quantum physics: it both exists and doesn't exist until we define it, or until we open the box/link into the age. It's like imagining multiple versions of the same place, all with their own differences, but all translucent, overlayed on top of each other. The really accentuated outlines, common to all versions, are what's described in the book. Everything else, the endless mess of possible objects, is all that's yet undefined.
I know it seems more intuitive to believe they're creating the Ages... but that just makes you like Gehn. The D'ni themselves always believed they weren't age creators either. They merely linked to the branches of the Great Tree of Possibilities, as they called it.
The "that just makes you like Gehn" always feels like a weak response. He can be correct about something at some point, and acknowledging that doesn't mean agreeing with his morality. The thing either works a certain way or it doesn't, regardless of what the bad guy thinks.
The possibility of the boat existing doesn't apply. Atrus visits the shipless version of the world first, so he has already observed that it doesn't exist. It is not Schrödinger's Boat. It didn't exist, he knew it didn't exist, and then he created it by writing in the world that he already observed.
From The Book of Atrus we also know that rewriting an age doesn't re-roll the people RNG. It's the same people. Gehn keeps altering a single world and Atrus keeps revisiting the world to meet the same people in it. They're never new people or no people. It's the same people, until the rubber band snaps and their memories apparently reset. So yeah, you either believe that the edits to the world became too large to reconcile and the people lost their history, or they were replaced by a an entirely different world with copies of the exact same people from elsewhere in the multiverse. The latter makes less sense than the former because they are still editing the worlds one way or another, so why overcomplicate things by pretending that they're linking through the multiverse on top of also definitely editing the worlds.
I went over how Atrus potentially has motivated reasoning for not believing himself to be wielding godlike powers. As far as the D'ni? Other comments claim that they had a religious relationship with The Art, believing it to be given to them by The Maker, making the belief that they were creating worlds sacrilegious. That's hardly evidence of any kind, really. It's extremely motivated reasoning lol
@@KeithBallardA yeah, fair enough, probably. I still think it makes some sense, given how it's more of a localized change, rather than a whole reality switch. I dunno, maybe it makes more sense using the precise words from Watson himself, which I don't recall from my mind sadly. The fact it's something so hard to control also kinda tells me how these things aren't created, but yeah, even still, the idea of linking to a pre-existing place can seem like the less intuitive reasoning.
4:26 Actually the viewport on the book is meant to be blurry and messed up, because the Age itself is unstable and falling apart. I think it's a little awkward here because unlike the original version, Atrus doesn't seem to acknowledge it at all, and barely gives the book any attention.
omg, I have been a Cyan fan ever since, but after firmament issues (was even a backer) and playing talos principle 2 and dlc from croteam, which is fantastic and completely bugless, compare the look. Cyan really should work harder. sry.
I actually kind of like how some of the issues with Gehn's world almost look like glitches since canonically that's basically what they are, coding errors made by the one that wrote the world
At that rotating room, if you pressed the button and hopped into one of those viewing recesses, you'd just get entombed with no way out x_x
The CGI characters ruin it for me. I'll stick with the original.
If it is an infinite multiverse, the there are an infinite number of Gehns that got trapped on an infinite number of Riven's. The strange thing would be never ending up with 2 or 3 Gehns in the same Riven. That could be explained if there was some effect that prevented linking to a world where a version of you already exists. But then linking books should occasionally fail to work for some people but not others. In such a case other people would find a duplicate of the person that could not use the linking book.
All of these worlds needing to have had the exact same inter-dimensional history with other worlds in order to function as alternates, with zero crossed streams or contradictions, just starts to sound like increasingly convoluted self-delusion by the characters to avoid having to accept the responsibility that they genuinely have power over these worlds.
But it also makes the entire story pointless. If we believe that he's only linking, then Atrus isn't saving Catherine, or Riven's people with his changes to the book. He's just abandoning them to die dozens or hundreds of times until he finds a Riven and Catherine that was already ready to be saved without intervention. What a lame story lol
But that's obviously incorrect too, since we enter the book that he's still working on, and he still arrives to meet us at the end. So it's the same Riven the whole time. There are infinite contradictions to the multiverse idea, whereas the idea that they have power just makes sense. It's a clean story. You can summarize how it works in one sentence instead of writing several articles worth of explanation where you jump through hoops to justify the multiverse stuff.
@@KeithBallardA There would be an infinite number of Atrus's working on an infinite number of Riven books. The fact that an Atrus arrives proves nothing. You can't prove that the multiverse is false only that it is very improbable. I'm not saying that a multiverse is the correct interpretation only that you have not proven it false.
The problem with trying to disprove it being a infinite multiverse is that, if it is, anything that can possibly happen will happen an infinite number of times.
This game came out at a surprisingly brisk pace. Also this might be one of, if not the last *big* Cyan game, they've said they probably want to make more bite sized games after this. So I'm gonna be savoring this one.
No Myst 3 remake? Damn I was so hopeful...
@@jrioscouto I don't think they'd remake Myst 3, since Cyan didn't even make that game in the first place. Also there's less need. Myst 3 has panoramic pre rendered backgrounds, letting you look around freely. That to me was the biggest problems with Myst and Riven, the fixed first person angles. Just being able to look around is enough for me, no need for a remake.
@@LittleWeevil I thought Cyan and Ubisoft made Exile, whereas Revelations was purely Ubisoft Vs Cyan's URU (though of course Miller was involved in Revelations.)
@@GreatWightSpark I believe Exile was made by Ubisoft and a team called Presto Studios, who are known for the Journeyman Project series.
Ubisoft could probably just upscale the game somehow, that would be the best option I think
I can’t get this running on my computer D: Thank you for doing this LP!
If I remember correctly all of the assets for the original Riven were lost/gone. So this game has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. Which is why there are more problems/glitches. But it is also why the models and visuals look so much better as well. Plus they have had a lot more practice after having done more games and all. Also I believe the journals were all hand written and transferred into the game. I remember the person who did it talking about how they hadn't worked on penmanship in so long and now they all of a sudden had to figure how to write in 3 different people's style.
It´s not like they could simply import any of the assets from back then and slap modern textures on it. It´s a completely different engine and technique nowadays. But I like that they didn´t rebuilt the game 1:1 but switched some details and puzzles up to give the players, who know the original, new challenges.
Just finished watching your let's play of MYST Remake and now watching this!
This was my jam back in middle school.
Another fur into Riven? and the Myst series? I'm not alone after all!! XD
The VR version is great!
Interactive modern art
they should have kept the motion capture with real people. .these redos are terrible
someone likes the "F" Word, I see
so the new starry expanse area is a thing... It's basically a sort of fast travel system? Can we just ignore this entire expanse thing? The void of the starry expanse breaks my brain, cant do it. Small changes are nice but I didn't expect a cosmic-horror section in this chill game.
This is the first game I played that I learned you can’t just simply play through it. You have to record what you find to convert it later to make sense and solve puzzles. Great game. Don’t see this remake aging well but at least the OG will to me personally
1:37:21 the moment I saw these, I almost instantly realized, it's related to those totems with the rotating knobs. The figures on them look familiar at least. They might actually be Rivenese numerals!
they never spoke of giant daggers/swords/axes in the landscape in the book Riven so its more likely that Gen made them after he was trapped there and it would make more sense since he was using that projector to make himself look larger then life like a god of the age of Riven
In the original, you could look over the edge right near the beginning and see the guy who got darted laying at the bottom of the cliff. He was thrown over the edge once he was drug off screen.
The new animated people kind of throws me off as the OG felt a lot more realistic with the live action, or my nostalgia skews memory!
It is astonishing how technology advanced in last 30 years to make it possible to render in real time!
wait a minute, you are supposed to wait 15 years to play this one as well
last time you played a myst game you were a random cute dude and now you're a hunky furry
You've got to find a way to turn off the fire. ^_^ Try looking up when you're pulling all those levers.
That legend intro is back with modern environment
Personally, I like all your added comments. They're what I'm here for. It's like another person playing this series compared to last time because you pretty much ARE. Last time around, you'd only played Myst and had hardly gotten into Riven at all yet. You didn't know when the games were being contradictory or weird. Now you have all the games and the books under your belt, so you can spot the cracks that these games, great as they are, definitely had. It's a really interesting shift in perspective, I'm eating it up.
Personally, I always thought prison books being voids made for a better story. I never really liked the retcon, but part of it might be just that I really don't like Myst 4, for any number of reasons, so I'm resistant to any major retcons it brings in. But, at least for me, I think if the prison books aren't voids and are instead just straight-up other Ages that can be linked back to (as Atrus does in 4), it takes away a lot of the impact of Atrus burning the books in the first game when you know what it actually means. It isn't the final move it looked like. You might argue that doing so at least prevents Sirrus and Achenar from roping somebody else into taking their place, and that's true, but it takes a lot of wind out of that move for me. Plus, if it is just normal Ages on the other side, why does using one swap its user out into the real world? Wouldn't it just have you both in it? I dunno, it is a retcon, but it breaks previous plot points in order to justify a game that I really don't like in the first place, so I always preferred the void representation of Prison Books.
Whether Writing creates a world is another interesting question. I actually ran the FATE-based TTRPG for Myst, Unwritten, and I decided that it just found a matching world in the multiverse, but that was largely because my players were definitely going to be a repeat of Gehn if they thought they had any claim to ownership of it, no matter how frail, and that wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to run. But that's another scenario entirely. I think this is one of those things that canon very much twists back and forth on, another one of those cracks. Because the explanation that it creates the Age makes sense, but the devs keep insisting that that isn't the case. There are established mechanics for how Linking Books work, the real-life Richard Watson, Cyan dev, has on paper that it does just find a matching world along the multiverse, and that's what our resident "good guy" Atrus believes, but then you have things like worlds being editable up to a certain point while still markedly being the same world with consistent continuity, which, as you state, is DEMONSTRABLE god power. You could maybe explain this up to a certain point (perhaps you are in a new Age, and the people in the new Age are remembering an alternate universe version of you...?) but there's no support for that anywhere, it's just theory. And what does that mean for Relto? How do you have the same Age linked to any number of times, but always a different version? In the end, the actual creators of the series keep contradicting their own evidence constantly in order to twist Atrus into being right. Half of the contradictions are just explained by "Atrus and Catherine and Yeesha are just really good Writers" which seems sort of a cop-out. I love these games, let nobody tell you otherwise, but I'm rarely in them for a consistent plot, because there are major seams when you look closely enough. I guess that's what happens when you just throw some stuff together for your first game and then have to retroactively justify it later.
Enjoying your return to Riven so far. Thanks for the video!
Maybe linking to an age destabilizes reality in the area to the point where you can "Edit" things as well.
Gehn writes ages by cutting and pasting everything from older unrelated books so his ages are awfully unstable and break reality moreso than Atrus's and Catherine's ages and the repairs have been done to try and repair the damage to reality.
Almost at the end of the video, this is great so far, I'm most excited for the time when he finds the zoom-in wheel on his mouse!
thanks for this early sharing!
I understand that I don't understand this universe, but the plot feels overly complicated. Given that the puzzles rarely seem to connect to the greater plot, other than to move you forward, it just feels a bit much.
The puzzles definitely connect to the plot. Riven is peak Myst in the way that it marries its locations, puzzles, and story so that solving the puzzles is largely dependent or complementary to understanding your surroundings. You're not walking to random lore-dense locations and solving unrelated crossword puzzles or anything like that.
Wait a minute!!! I've tried to turn that lever out at the end of the dock in the sulfur lake at least 2, if not 3 times, and it's been frozen! I came here today because I've been stymied, and I think that lever is my only real option at this point! Guess I'll have to go back now and try again. . . :/
EDIT: Ok. . . I'm using a PS5 game controller, and it turns out that instead of just clicking on the lever to toggle it between positions, I had to hold down the X button and move the right little joystick thingie in order to move it. Just fyi for anyone else that may come across this. . .
Hey man, love the commentary
7:40 my inner 9 year old from the 90s is screeeeeeeamingggggggg it looks so beautiful
31:17 (About how trap books are an overcomplicated solution.) The original creators of the Myst series agree with you! The entire concept of the "trap books" is non-canonical to the Myst universe despite featuring so heavily in the first two games. The explanation is that they were a contrivance invented for the video game adaptations of Atrus's story that were published in-universe, and that those games are what we have IRL. Myst 4 significantly retcons what happens to Sirrus and Achenar to explain what "actually" happened to them instead of them bieng trapped in trap books.
I was really, really disappointed with that. The entire problem in 4 was the first game where I thought: "Oh, yeah.. this is Atrus' fault, 100%."
My interpretation was that the brothers were trapped in the either between ages, but when their books were destroyed they were pushed into their respective ages. As for their ploy, it was just a crude version of what the father did.
@@Artimidorus Atrus has always struck me as a bit of a John Hammond (movie version, not book version) character: he's generally kind and seems to mean well, but he's also myopic and careless, despite his best efforts. He's not a bad person, but he's also not a person who should have the amount of power he does.
Bro I’m so fuckin happy you’re playing this again. I’m gettin it in vr I don’t even care that the graphics will be shit, did you see the original version on ps1?! Yes I’m old
The original version was on PC. The PS1 and Saturn versions were ports. The original PC version still looks great.
It was WOW effect on PS1 now its just memories
Been waiting for almost 2 years for this re-release! Guess I know what my next Steam purchase will be. . . ;)
(edit): Oh damn. . . Just heard you got an early access release. Guess I'll be waiting a bit longer. . .
It came out today, I think he timed this vid with the release.
It's out. I just got an early press code so I had time to prepare instead of having to try and record and render and upload a two hour video on launch day, which would have taken all day and come out like eight hours later.
@@KeithBallardA 👍
6:37 I absolutely didn't understand what happened there - I thought the book closed itself and that somehow killed the man from the inside. I don't know if this was the intended interpretation in this version (no spoilers please) but... I felt like watching the original and it was so much more clear what is actually happening on screen. I've been meaning to watch it for a while now and maybe this is my cue? I do wonder which Let's Play is/will be better...
I don't think him grabbing his neck and passing out is meant to be ambiguous at all, since it basically always means the same thing in movies. Especially with someone immediately appearing to drag him off.
@@KeithBallardAPlus the obvious whizzing and puncture sound effects.
@@KeithBallardA Huh, I'm not familiar with such a trope nor movies with it.
What tripped me off the most is how it seems that the book is closed before the swooshing sound even finishes and so the "impact" sound seemed to come from the book closing as that was the only visual thing happening at the time.
Certainly not a deal breaker but, seriously, this cinematic is much more understandable in the original.
1:07:48 Watching as a VOD is almost as good as skipping cutscenes, I can just fastforward!! xD
Is this game going to come out on the iPad?
I don’t know, however I think there is a version of the original 1997 version on iPad
This needs a console port
NOOOOOOO THE ORIGINAL ACTORS ARE REPLACED WITH 3D !!!! WHYY CYAN WHYY!!!!
But rest of the game is made prettier. .. : ( Im going to get it.....
They have two valid reasons to do so. The first is that the original FMVs were recorded in SD quality which would clash pretty badly with the highly detailed 3D environment. The second is that this is designed to be in VR which requires at least 3D video to ensure the characters don't look like a cardboard cutout but the original video was only 2D.
To address these issues they could have either recorded new HD 3D video with new actors or (as they chose) use 3D models to recreate the look of the old ones. They actually did use motion capture to record actual actors (there's a behind the scenes video about it on their UA-cam channel) so it does have a little bit of an FMV vibe you wouldn't get from hand animation.
You seem to forget that Atrus isn’t responsible for the state of Riven. It was his father incompetence and hubris that led to it falling apart. If he doesn’t to anything to slow down the inevitable doom of Riven, Catherine and her people, this is her homeworld, won’t be able to escape in time. That world is simply to far gone. Atrus is not evil like his father or his sons, but he is deeply flawed and he does recognize his own mistakes over the series.
I'm aware that he's not what made Riven what it is. I'm saying that since The Art so often involves creating and/or toying with real people's lives, it's an unethical practice that he should have stopped. But he didn't. He's continued to create populated ages despite the events of The Book of Atrus.
@@KeithBallardA I don't recall any evidence in any of the novels that the Art of creating books is unethical, by any measure. The idea that the D'ni create worlds is a mistaken and appalling conceit of Ghen's childish imagining.
Of course it's unethical, it's a form of power over an entire world of that people live in. It's colonialist, and consistently ruining everyone's lives throughout the series lol. The stories of most Myst games and books are explicitly about why this power shouldn't be used
@@KeithBallardA I think there's several intermingling concepts on trial here. One is creating an (imperfect) world. Two is interfering with it after. Three is explicitly not interfering with it for any reason - even to save it from annihilation. Neither is inherently ethical or not. My point is that the whole concept of ethics falls apart when applied to scenarios of extreme power imbalance.
Ah, but Atrus _is_ responsible for the recent collapses. See, he spells it "Whark", while Gehn spells it "Wahrk". If they could just agree on the spelling for the fish monster, I wouldn't have to go traipsing around the islands, getting shot by poison darts, and getting sick on bouncy trams.
1:33:17 Sliding door with a hinge door sound effect