Myst 3: Exile(Plus, something for everyone who has ever played Myst)

Well, I’m probably going to be getting Myst 3:Exile for my birthday(August 17- send money only). I’m curious as to what some of you Dopers think about it. I know other threads have been done on this(quite awihle ago), but I’m interested in fresh perspectives.

First, I know it wasn’t done by Rand Miller and the other people who were involved with Myst and Riven. I met Rand Miller about a year ago at a conference.

It was really interesting to hear what he had to say. He showed us previews of two projects he had been working on, both that even his colleagues at Cyan hadn’t seen yet.

One was Real Myst, which came out around Christmas last year. I was impressed with the technology but let down with the idea. I had hoped he was working on something brand new, not re-hasing the old game.

He was. After he showed us a sneak of Real Myst, he showed us what he and Cyan were working on. You see, he mentioned that Myst 3 never interested him since he felt the story ended with Riven. Besides, Riven had been torture to make and he wanted to go a different direction.

The project he let us look at was a multiplayer type of Myst game. Again, it isn’t connected to Myst itself, but is in the same vein. You compete with other players(not against) and are moving through an ultra-real world, which opens up to you slowly.

Examples? Well, we saw some “people” running around a light-house(yes, a light-house) and they had to turn three cranks together to open up the windows and let the light pour out. This might not be in the game, but you get the idea.

He seemed genuinely excited over the technology. Cyan is known for making complicated games that work on simpler systems. Even though this game is online, it will work with modems and on computers with less than the top systems.

Anyway, I just thought I’d mention that story as well. Now, what did you guys think of Myst 3: Exile? Good game? Similar to Riven and Myst? Tell me whatever you like.

Exile definitely built upon the Myst legacy of lavish graphics and atmospheric music. In those regards, it was everything I’d hoped for. The story was a logical continuation of the previous two games as well. The relative ease of quite a few of the puzzles was a bit of a letdown, though–the game tends more toward the simpler mechanical puzzles of Myst than the abstracts we found in Riven. (I sometimes use the D’ni numbering system just to mess with people’s minds.). Still, I’d say that it’s an enjoyable game and a worthwhil addition to the series. (Note that I had no trouble running it, although I’ve heard that many systems don’t like it.)

And an early happy birthday to a fellow game geek :slight_smile:

I thoroughly enjoyed Myst 3: Exile - OK, to be honest I’m still enjoying it, being on the last puzzle (I’m pretty sure it’s the last puzzle) for a week because my life keeps interfereing with my hobbies and I haven’t had time to play.

Anyhow - it certainly does build on the legacy of Myst and Riven. The graphics are lush and lavish. The music and sound effects appropriate.

I did not have any trouble running it on my computer system.

As for the puzzles - I can’t say that I got stuck on any of them, but on the other hand it did take some keen observation and work for me to get some of the solutions.

I did think that the Bad Dude™ was trying to do an impersonation of Jack Nicholson on an evil day, but then, he is supposed to be crazy and mad as hell so I didn’t find it too bothersome. Except for getting whacked on the head with his hammer. That’s a bummer.

I’m curious - did Mr. Miller elaborate on why making Riven was “torture”?

I probably liked Myst III Exile better than I liked Riven.
There were too many places in Riven where the game just stopped while you wandered around wondering what pointless observation had to be made in order to continue. Basically it degraded into “go to every scene and click everywhere hoping to find somethings that’s active”. The conceit behind Exile is such that at least you have some sense of where you are going and why. The graphics were, as usual, spectacular, although in one of the worlds, I found them too be sufficiently abstract that I had trouble detecting the paths from the scenery.

I’m liking Exile a lot. It took a while to get it running on my machine - I had to wait for a patch - but I think we are about 3/4 of the way through it.

Right now we’re stuck on Voltaic. We figured out the steam, but can’t figure out which settings on the valves will let us progress.

I was frustrated by Riven, I thought some of the puzzles were too abstract. The animals - especially the frog shape in the mouth of the cave - were too difficult. I was playing on a laptop and just couldn’t see a lot of it. It forced me to cheat.

Riven was an exceedingly difficult game for them to make over at Cyan. It was incredibly ahead of its time. Each image(many thousands) took nearly 24 hours to complete layering. At first, they thought that they would need a few super computers, but they ended up needing way more than they thought.

He loved making both games, though. The problem with Riven was that they wanted to make it photo-realistic(they did), but wanted it to run on 100 mhz computers with only 8 meg ram(it did). At the same time, they wanted it out for Christmas 1997(it was). They were putting in huge 120 hour work weeks and things like that. It hurt their family-life, as you can imagine. Both Robyn and Rand Miller are conservative and devout Christians and Riven was becoming almost like an idol to them(not that they worshiped it; it just got all their attention).

That is why it has taken so long for their next game to come out(it hasn’t yet). They wanted to take their time like they did with Myst. Sort of like Stanley Kubrick with movies. After 2001, he took his time on projects.

IMHO Myst was much better then Riven. Riven just had too many possibilities. At 1st it was cool to be able to travel from one island to another to work on another puzzle. But after the easy ones were solved it was just too hard to find where the remaining peices were on the 5 islands. Hard to explane but the Myst puzzles just made sense, but riven seemed to be all over the place. It looks like (from posts) Exiled is back to Myst so I will have to get it.

Apparently, I’m in the minority regarding my puzzle preferences. The modularity of the puzzles in Exile was nice, I’ll admit–you generally only have to look in a limited area to find everything relevant.

I still love the creepy number-game in the classroom, though. Of course, I spent hours last weekend translating (manually) the Feanorian Tengwar on the borders of a game map in order to get one minor clue to the game.

Broomstick, if you’ve been hit with the hammer, then I would say that you are indeed at the final puzzle. There are multiple solutions at that point, BTW, which make some changes to the ending. I shall say no more. :slight_smile:

I just started playing Exile recently, and I too find it more like Myst than Riven.
It took me a while to get into it because i was so distracted by the scenery. It’s so beautiful! :slight_smile:
[sub]I’m not finding the puzzles easy at all…hee hee[/sub]

Rose

Whew…I thought I was the only one who found Riven too ****** hard!!

I thought Myst was a fantastic game, and I barely noticed the “stiffness” or whatever of graphics the designers harped about. What really made it work was that you could solve the puzzles in any order, and each of the worlds was complete in itself. There were some tough puzzles, to be sure, but they were for that world only. Furthermore, there was a clear arbiter of progress…the pages. I knew when I was moving ahead in the story, and after the first few tries it wasn’t hard at all.

Riven…feh. First off, every single puzzle is incomplete. Every. Single. One. This is absolutely maddening. Furthermore, the puzzles don’t link to each other logically…good lord, how is the typical computer gamer, much less me, supposed to connect symbols, colors, and marble locations, especially since not one of these elements has a complete solution?

And I’d like to strangle whoever made that ****** marble board. I’m telling you, this is COMPLETELY UNSOLVABLE. Even after I know the exact procedures to arrive at the solution I can’t solve it. It’s madness. It’s insanity. It’s lunacy.

…too bad I’ll probably never play Exile because it’s so expensive. Plus I’m kinda cynical about computer games right now, if you haven’t guessed.

Marble board? Where was that? Is that the thing with the animal shapes and sounds?

I believe DKW is talking about the board thing that you have to place “marbles” on in order to power up the books.

If you haven’t finished the game you may not have got to it yet. It is one of the last puzzles (although you can get access to it quite awhile before solving it IIRC).

I really enjoyed Riven. I would reccomend playing it with several different people and pooling your resources. Some solo play and some time spent working on it together. It is less frustrating because you can really help each other by working together.

I think those that prefered Myst to Riven were traditional gamers who like to play solo and get frustrated when they get stuck on one simple problem for hours. (I could be wrong though).

No - the marble board was a puzzle that had you place diffrent color marbles on diffrent parts of the board in order to find the linking book to the bad guys (forgot his name) world.

The color was based on the dni’ color symbol system and a ‘security pannel’ room which by is self is not overly difficult (also there might be other ways to get the colors). The position of the marbles has to do with the placement of those spheres that hold the linking books. The board has a grid that has a very rough representation of the 5 islands. You must put the marble in the spot that represents the sphere. Remember you never have a map of the island and all you are looking at are slides - very hard (no impossible) to make an accurate map.

I enjoyed Exile much more than I enjoyed Riven. The entire design of Exile actually seemed to be closer to that of Myst. The puzzles were much more “hands-on” than those in Riven; you had to spend time adjusting objects rather than writing down symbols to solve each puzzle. The storyline was pretty good, too. And the graphics were outstanding.

I didn’t have any trouble running the game under Windows ME. The only real problem I encountered–which is also mentioned several times in the documentation–involved attempts to ALT-TAB out of the game. Attempting to switch out of the game like this would cause it to crash.

I actually solved the puzzles in Riven quite easily - I used to get stuck in stupid ways, like not realising there was a passageway behind the doors, or trying to figure out what the last animal was (which I solved by trial and error).

I think I’ll get Exile, though. It sounds like I’d enjoy watching it on my new monitor. :slight_smile: And I’m a sucker for pretty graphics.