Myst "URU" .... anyone else played it?

[RicknMel]

Hi gang!
Some of you might remember that Mel and I enjoy playing the Myst games together.
Well, we recently got URU, and are almost done with it.

I think it's the best Myst yet, as far as graphics and puzzles, but I can't stand the VERY clunky controls for walking/turning/jumping ..etc.
I feel like an idiot trying to do something as simple as walk or jump over something.
Luckly, Mel does 99% of the playing (controlling).. I'm just there for moral support.

Opinions on the game in general?

[Gumdrop]

Well I have not baught/played the game yet becouse of the "clunky" controls you mention, but I do like the Myst series so I may indulge when the price comes down. I also read that the puzzles might be a little too easy compared to other games. I found this to be true of Exile, although the Materia age had me frowning for a while.

Did you ever get round to playing Exile? I remember you said you would wait until the price came down and you had a new system. Riven is still king, but Exile is worth getting hold of.

[RicknMel]

Yeah, we played Exile a while back. We liked that one too.
Isn't that the one where they first introduced the "freelook" thang?

You're probably right about the puzzles being a little easier in URU. Maybe thats why we like it.

The first MYST was terribly hard and confusing for us. I consider myself fairly intelligent, but we got soooooo lost in the first Myst with those goofy puzzles that had no ryme or reason.

I like the satisfaction of being able to figure things out on our own. So far, we looked up very small 1 hint for one puzzle, and totally cheated on another. But other than those 2 times, we've solved everything else on our own.
And for the record... the one we totally cheated on still makes NO sense to me. (Typical "classic" Myst puzzle)
We're currently about half way done with the last "age". And I have to say again how I LOVE the Myst eye candy. I could just walk around and look at stuff all day.

[Peter Smith]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for posting this. I stopped at Riven and became absorbed with Thief, but I ought to buy another. I really enjoyed Myst and Riven. My first exposure to all-night gaming.

[Rommel_1891]

I played throught the original, I loved it. I want to get RealMyst, the full motion version.

I tried to play Riven when it came out, but I couldn't get into it. If I see a RealRiven come out, then I will. The frame to fram movement drove me nuts after a while. Honestly though, I don't really have time to get into a game like that anymore.

[Old Man]

I fully intend to get Uru when I've upgraded my old computer. In fact, I reloaded and played Myst, Riven, Exile and realMyst and I've been keeping up at the Uru forums. Yes, the controls and the simplicity are noted as poor by not just a few.

It seems Uru is intended by Cyan to be primarily a MMORPG and that's what I'm curious about (not quite as wide-eyed as I was for the first Quake on-line experience until coming across the dark side but still looking forward to this.) Sad thing is it doesn't appear to be quite ready for online play yet. And at ~$10/month subscription they'd have to produce a new age almost monthly to compare to the single-player version.

Of course I'm waiting on Thief III for the computer upgrade but then we'll see. Uru Live should be in better shape by then anyways.

[Edit/Update]My wife just walked in from her w/e 'shop 'til you drop' with Uru: Ages Beyond Myst which she had intended to get me for Christmas so that removes all the doubt. I'll be there.[/Edit/Update]

[Gumdrop]

I too baught realMyst and was looking forward to the new age. Well, the original ages do look fantastic... particularly the Stoneship & Channelwood ages, but the new age (Rhyme?) was a bit of a letdown. The thawing effect is really nice, and I spent a long time at the end of one of the piers...

watching the whale-like creatures swim past

...but all in all not much to it.

I will buy Uru though, so am interested to see if the updates are more substatial. I hope the music is as nice as the previous games.

[Peter Smith]

Here is a review. It looks good, so I guess I will buy it.

[littlek]

Never played any of the Myst series. So do you just run around, solve puzzles to get from one place to the next and oogle the scenery?

[RicknMel]

Thats pretty much it littlek ,... but you make it sound so "blah"


But the puzzles are very neat. And the scenery is awesome.
There are some places that really take your breath away.
The "worlds" you visit are truly beautiful. And I'm serious when I say that I could walk around the worlds for hours just to look at stuff and play with the machinery and equipment you find.

Some of the puzzles really make you think outside the box.
For example.....

In one "world", you come across a VERY dark cave you must get through. We got stuck there for hours. There's no way you can "luck" your way through it, Turns out, that there are some fireflys (lightning bugs) in another world, and when you walk through them, they follow you. You need to go get a batch of them and make them follow you from world to world so they can guide you through the cave. They are very finicky though.... you can't run ot get wet or they leave you, and they will only let you jump once before they leave you. So not only did you have to figure out to GET the fireflys, you also need to figure a way to get them into the cave without running, jumping more than once, or getting wet.

Very strange stuff.

[littlek]

Didn't mean to sound that way...I was in the middle of grading some very poorly done papers that my students did. I did visit the site that Peter posted and you are right, those scenes are spectacular. I may have to start playing those. Do you recommend to just jump into Uru or start at the first game in the series? And will the first Myst play on WinX with a Pentium 4?

Those fireflies sound fun...I like unpredicatable tweaks like that.

[Gumdrop]

More fireflies?! I have had enough trouble with them in Curse of Monkey Island!

Littlek - There is a 10th anniversary DVD boxed set of the first 3 games, but it depends on how much spare cash you have. I would play realMyst instead of the original Myst, but if you also play Riven, you could be in there for quite a while. Riven is a tough nut to crack, and it was only after many hours visiting all the islands that I finally started to see how everything fit together.

[theBlackman]

No to the original question, but I just got the demo so I'll took a look.

Have not read the thread just in case there are spoilers. I have Myst 1 and 2 and Riven, so this is just another gambit to suck me in.

[RicknMel]

littlek .....
The earlier Myst games might help you get into the brains of the designers. Maybe help you to be thinking like they think when trying to solve the puzzles, but....

The 1st Myst and Riven are "point and click" interfaces.
Meaning, that you can't "walk", you just point in a direction, and you are transported to the next "scene". You can't even look around. It's just a series of pictures you jump to and from.
Kind of hard to explain unless you've played a game set up like that.

The 3rd one (Myst Exile) added "free-look", where you still "point and click" from scene to scene, but at each "scene" you can freely look around as if you were standing still in Thief.

URU is the first game in the Myst series where you can actually walk, run and jump almost anywhere you ant to go, very similar to Thief. (except the VERY clunky control bindings)

But with all that said.... they are all great games IMO, and you need NO experience in the previous games to play the later games. They don't "intertwine" at all.

The only one we haven't played is "RealMyst". And unless we see it in a bargain bin somewhere, we probably never will.

[theBlackman]

RicknMel I have Real Myst. Have not played it yet. You may just end up with a copy. I find I am not a real true Myst fan. So in time you might get lucky.

[RicknMel]

Originally posted by theBlackman
RicknMel I have Real Myst. Have not played it yet. You may just end up with a copy. I find I am not a real true Myst fan. So in time you might get lucky.

No... I'm married now.... I don't get lucky anymore.

What don't you like about the Myst series tBM?

[theBlackman]

Interesting story. Interesting puzzles, but for some reason it has a tendency to make me "ho hum". Not bore me, just does not fire my interest all that much.

I am serious though about donating it to the RicknMel collection. If I don't fire it up soon, then for certain you may get a belated Xmas present.

Or maybe:

[Vanguard]

Myst, Riven, RealMyst, and Exile. That's as much money as they get from me for that piss poor game. Yeah, the graphics are great but you are never *in* the game. You get lots of POVs (point of views) where you get a bubble view of beautiful scenery around you. Nothing is 3 dimensional (except the ingame movies they play, like you watching an elevator pod going up and down). The game has as much 3D as a painted canvass.

You don't get to lean over anything. You have to stick to preset paths (except in Real Myst which had the ability to roam anywhere in the map but didn't get used in Exile much to the disappointment of Myst fans). I never felt that I was actually there. More like a little floating droid zipping around fixed paths showing you lots of scenery. If you want to look at lots of exquisite but static 2D scenery, you can get it for free on the Internet.

The only reason I continued playing any of the Myst series was the puzzles. The music is great, too, and it would be nice if they provided the music in a file format where you could just play the music and environmental sounds. But the gameplay sucks. They use decade old technology and still want to charge $35 for a game which is basically wandering through a museum of fine 2D paintings (that wrap all around you). Unless URU changed its mode of gameplay (i.e., if it is still like the prior games in the series), they get some artists to draw correlated bubble views, do a storyboard, and use decade old gaming technology to sell to the suckers that think it would be a game equivalent to those currently defining the quality of gaming market today. Just because it is released now doesn't make it a new game. Maybe released 7 years ago it might've been considered impressive.

Since their download of their demo at http://www.gigex.com/pc/title/downlo...8&source=00001 doesn't work (no download starts), I can't see what they might be trying to foist on their fanbase again. My opinions are based on the prior games in the Myst series. I've heard no huge boom in the gaming news extolling Uru's fantastic game engine or gameplay mode. From articles, like http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure...t/review.html, it's really not a 1st person game anymore. Instead you wander around like a hoverbot looking at your avatar. Super yuck! I've played those games before. I've never felt I was *in* the game because of it. And with the bubble view of 2D scenery on fixed paths, I definitely would not feel like I'm in the game.

If Thief3 was nothing more than a bunch of missions strung together which ran atop the old T1 engine, I wouldn't bother wasting my money on it. FMs are a plenty that already run on those old game engines. Uru looks to be a new set of bubble views slapped atop a decade old game engine. Nothing I want to waste my money on.

[RicknMel]

Vanguard.... URU isn't like the others. You can walk/run/jump/look/climb almost anywhere you want to go, similar to Thief. And it also doesn't have to be 3rd person. You can toggle back and forth anytime you want to.

Besides the annoying controls, the only other thing I didn't like was the fact that you can't pick anything up. For example.. There's a few items you need to move things from point A to point B, (like moving a box so you can climb up on it) and you have to push them around since you can't pick them up. You can, however, pick up things like books and scrolls to read them.

[Huntress]

I just got the demo of URU (with DE_IW ) in my PC Gamer mag's disk and when I get my other machine back (yes, I'm still in wait mode) maybe I'll plug it in just to take a gander. I'm not very good a puzzles but the way RicknMel describes the world, I'd kindof like to see it However, with the mess that DE_IW's demo turned out to be, I don't care to do all the tweaks that are necessary to have it play half way decent What a let down that has turned out to be for me. I just won't accept the terms they expect you to like in order to play "their" game It isn't just one thing, you know, the changes in the game/gameplay...it's many many reasons combined that discourage me from going along with their idea of what they think the PC community at large will want on their HDD's....sorry I got a bit off track but this is really nagging at me!!!! Ta and Good Hunting!

[MsLedd]

Ugh... the game sounded like a lot of fun, but the controls were SO bad I couldn't stand the demo. I really wish I could enjoy it, but I was clawing at my face and banging my head against the keyboard from the incredible suckiness, there was just no way.

Pity.

[edit]Huntress, I will say that the full game of DX:IW (with the patch) takes care of much of the problems the demo has.

[Huntress]

Yea Ms. Ledd, I'm aware of the fixes..both ways...forum and minor patch they made later. Not enough for my perferred way of playing. I thoughly enjoyed and still enjoy the original...am on my sixth or seventh play through as of now...and they took too many things away from the game/gameplay that has ruined it for me to want to have it anymore If they screw up T3 in a similiar way...which looks to be happening...I won't get it either and that will bring the conclusion to buying anymore IOS/Eidos games for me! They can keep their Xbox made for games and ports to the PC...ain't for me folks Ta and Good Hunting!

[RicknMel]

"incredible suckiness"
LOL

Are you talking about URU or the other game MsLedd?

[MsLedd]

Rick, sorry I was referring to URU... it certainly looks interesting and fun, but I just can't handle the suckitude of the controls :/

[Saturnine]

Msledd: Did you try playing it in first person?
I played the whole thing in first person and it was fine, I liked the game a lot although Riven still beats the rest.

btw; Did you manage to get a big enough rack on your avatar?