Be sure to check it out.And that’s my advice to all of you not just Atolm4 and other Myst fans.I finished the demo today.It’s very good altho fairly short (for a puzzle game I mean;you can be stuck for hours :P).The talked-about NPC facial expressions are indeed remarkable.The music seems to be taking a more Riven approach than later myst episodes which is excellent by my standards.
The scenario is very beautiful and my last comment on the blendness of things could have been a bit premature.It actually feels right.
The new element (the slate) is promising.I’ve heard lot of easter eggs are planned for it.This week I plan on ordering the Myst V limited edition and in 20 days I hope Ill be playing it full guns blazing :D!
I’m not sure if I’ve welcomed you to the forum yet Atolm4, so welcome if I haven’t. I also wanted to highjack the thread for a minute to talk about the Myst V demo, which I finally got around to playing. >:)
I also thought it was really nice; very beautiful scenery (in both locations), promising additions to the formula (the slate and FPS-style control) and the puzzle in the demo was pretty well thought out, and reminded me very much of Riven. I’ll probably be going out and buying Myst V myself when it’s released, something I haven’t done with a Myst game before (as opposed to picking it up several months late, I mean).
That said, I did have a few gripes about what I saw in the demo; for one thing, the FPS-style movement (which I really welcome) didn’t seem to be implemented as well as it could be. Not having an “always run” feature was kind of annoying, as I ended up holding the run button down practically all the time to get around at a good speed; having you run as default with a “walk” shift button would be a nice alternative. Also, I seemed to have bizarre difficulty getting through the rotated doors in the final tunnel when using FPS-stlye controls; I’d keep getting “stuck” on the lip of them, and have to slide around for a few seconds before hitting the right spot that’d let me pass over.
I also thought that the free movement of the new control scheme drew attention to the silliness of some “area boundaries” in ways that the old point-and-click scheme might not; for example, the way you can’t jump over the knee-high gates in Direbo, or walk into the ankle-deep water, or get over the low rocks in Noloben. I’d have preferred more functional (rather than just pretty) level architecture than that really, as free movement and invisible walls kind of counteract one another. If I’m trapped, I want to be trapped by impassable cliffs and thirty-foot drops and open seas and boiling lava, not gates that I could jump over in real life. =(
But yeah, those things aside I really did enjoy the demo, and I’d certainly recommend it to everyone who likes this sort of thing.
Well the sea wall is a pretty standard feature of game featuring the sea.Take Halo 2 for example.You just got to get used to it : while playing Myst you always have to picture yourself as one big fatso uncapable of lifting any of his legs more than a third of a meter high
Sea walls I can sympathise with, I mean the puddle wall in the first area of the demo. I’m guessing it’s a hub area that’ll ultimately connect to several different Ages, but the shallow water and cute little gates that stop you getting anywhere else seemed pretty bizarre even by Myst standards; it looked like the place was designed by a landscape gardener and that someone later had to slap in a heap of invisible walls to make it work properly. It did look very nice, though…
By the way Gehn, when playing the demo, did you manage to make a second symbol light up on the bottom of the starting pedestal at any time? Before I finished the thing properly, I somehow got a second symbol to appear next to the Noloben one, and when I clicked it, the demo ended (with the usual BUY PENTIUM 4 NOW!!! advert). I thought it might have been something that appeared if you were taking too long, but it didn’t turn up on my next try, which also took quite a while…
