by tachzusamm » Sat Sep 28, 2013 11:55 am
When I played MYST the first time, the overall graphics quality was astounding high for the year it came out. I was impressed in the first place, but while proceeding through the puzzles, I more and more forgot to have a look at visual quality. It was like exploring a world, because everything did fit together.
The same happened when I played RealMYST; this was during MOUL while we had a GameTap account. We explored with 3 players in synch while talking to each other via Skype. For example, one explorer said "okay, let's turn left now", and the others followed, each one on his own screen. We in fact turned RealMYST into a Multi-Player game. But again, I forgot to be impressed by visual quality after a while, because everything did fit together. Of course, the quality was better than MYST, but not THAT high that I would have shout "amazing". And still, the scenes, buildings and surroundings did fit to each other. It gave an impression of "beeing in the world".
Now, when I see screenshots of the current status of "RealMYST Masterpiece", I get an impression that it does not fit yet. In Myst Island for example, the space observatory looks of course better than before; I like the shading and the shadows. But the library for example looks somehow misplaced; their walls seem so flat and shadeless.
The same applies to Mechanical Age. I like how the bridge on the left looks, and the banister. Nice shading and shadows, and the beach looks okay for me. This is really an improvement. But why is the gear-wheel at the banister rusty (which is okay), whereas the gear-wheel on the beach is made of very few faces with ultra-sharp corners (as it has been ever)? This does not fit at all. And the house looks totally false there; textured, but flat walls, with an absolutely false looking shading.
In my humble opinion, just adding plants here and there, adding dynamics shadows to "some" objects just for the sake of to show you can, is not enough. It may be my personal preference, but I think it's not the absolute visual quality that makes a scene look impressive; it's more how everything fits together. And that's not the case yet. Let's hope this is really just a WIP currently.
Besides that, I guess (though I can't know) that Cyan does not really develop a completely new, revolutionary game engine. My assumption is that it's still based in many points on plasma. Brilliant visual quality we are used to nowadays from current games is mostly based on new game engines, like cry engine, unreal engine, or others. I don't know all of them. But those engines are not only capable of handling *much more* polygons than plasma can - plus most of them automatically can fade out objects which are too far away, and reload them automatically when needed - they additionally make it much easier to a designer to create the world. They mostly don't rely on something like a "Max plugin"; they come with their own editors, especially designed for game creation. Heck, do can nearly play the complete game WHILE working in the editor, and do your tweaking while you're in it (like: design - play - stop - tweak - continue - stop and add something again).
Don't get me wrong; I still appreciate what Cyan does, and I'm totally aware of how much work this must be to completely re-design every part of Myst - but I just hope they can and are willing to do better.