They wanted to make it third person so you could see your avatar and interact with the world and other players in a more tactile manner, which threw off the fanbase a little bit who liked being faceless cyphers. URU (You Are You) was originally supposed to be an MMO Puzzle Game set in the Myst Mythos, a very ambitious design even today. Cyan was able to focus on the next big thing: URU. Broderbund was absorbed by Mattel, and Myst III: Exile was given to Presto Studios of Journeyman Project fame. They had signed deals with Broderbund to let other developers make Myst games, but Broderbund was in dire financial straits in the late 90's, and Riven sales weren't enough to make up for other business deals. Riven was still a success, but not as much as Myst, and Cyan eventually was burned out as a company. Myst was the surprise success in 1993, and they took all that money to make Riven in 1997, which was even more ambitious, if flawed. Similar to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, this was the endeavor that almost killed Cyan as a company. I'll be picking and choosing a few games to peek in on, but not committing to the full series again. As for me, a few years ago I started replays of the series and got midway through Myst III: Exile before burning out. You can get the new one on computers/Xbox/Oculus, and RealMyst Masterpiece on Switch/Mobile. If you haven't played the original, or just haven't played it in years, it's highly recommended (by me). The Rime Age from RealMyst hasn't been recreated yet, but is alleged to be coming in a later update. They have since added in a patch to restore the original FMV, and I say turn that on immediately. The only detractor from this version (when I played) was they had replaced the original FMV with 3D renderings, which were not on par with anything else in the game. I appreciated this from a time perspective, but as a kid without having anything spoiled, I legitimately agonized over the decision of which pages to give to which brother, especially as the game got closer to the conclusion. They tweaked it for modern tastes, now you can pick up both red and blue pages in each age on a single run, no need to go back in afterwards for the other one. I played through the new version on its PC release last year, and thought the game as a whole still stands up. The one-two punch of Myst and the Marathons impacted me just as much as Mario did when I was in early elementary school. As a 13yo, my brain was at the perfect age to absorb the concepts of a game being created as both a puzzle and as art, and postage stamp sized FMV on a 14" monitor sealed the deal. It meant I couldn't play all the fun DOS and Win95 games that I would read about in magazines, but I did get Myst before the PC owners could. My mother was a teacher, and got the educator's discount on Apple products, so the family computer through my middle/high school years was a Macintosh Performa. I've purchased and played every one of these except for the Oculus version, and consider the original one of my formative gaming experiences. Under a year later, they slightly tweaked that version and released it on computers and Xboxes as MYST, coming full circle. In 2020 that version was ported over to Unreal Engine 4, and released as a VR exclusive title for the Oculus platform. That version was upgraded over a decade later as RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition, which used the Unity engine to bring the polygons on par or exceeding the original renderings. RealMyst was the first big departure, switching out point and click for a FPS-like control scheme, and rendering everything in objectively worse polygons instead of a pretty slideshow, but it added a new small Age as a coda. Myst: Masterpiece Edition first upgraded the graphics from 8-bit color to 24-bit. MYST (2021) - The OG puzzler from Cyan has been remade five or six times, depending on what you consider different games. In the old forum, we had a nice thread from when Obduction was fairly new, talking about Myst and various inspired games.
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