The opening scene is quite different from the trailer.
As per Lin Lixin's request, all scenes featuring characters in the trailer were cut.
Instead, it adopts a completely first-person perspective.
The plot, which was originally conveyed through dialogue, has been changed to be narrated by voice-over.
But the overall story is pretty much the same.
The game's cutscenes occur earlier than those shown in the trailers.
That is, right after the Linking Book was discovered.
In the pitch black, only the twinkling stars in the sky could be seen.
This is, of course, a reused technique from Stars!
It has minimal performance overhead, yet produces excellent visual results.
An ancient, thick book fell from the sky, landing heavily on the ground and startling a patch of light. It flickered briefly before dimming.
A small hand-like cursor appeared on the screen, pointing upwards with its index finger.
As Lin Lixin said at the press conference, this is a game that doesn't require complicated operations.
Aside from the necessary hardware, all you need is a mouse.
Of course, you can use a joystick, but it's definitely not as convenient as a mouse.
While this design sacrifices some operability, it results in an extremely low barrier to entry for beginners.
In a sense, though not entirely accurate, this design approach is precisely one of the reasons for the success of Myst.
This is still a very important reason.
In the 1990s, especially in the early 1990s when Myst was created, the barrier to entry for PC games was still very high.
To play games on mainstream PCs, players in this era typically need a very complex knowledge base.
You need to know at least some DOS commands to use various PCs in the Wintel camp.
You also need to learn how to install games, configure memory, set sound cards and display specifications, learn how to use the keyboard, and so on... These prerequisites are enough to deter many players who just want to relax.
A huge number of families, teenagers, housewives, and girls are filtered out by this large funnel.
This has resulted in Adventure games, despite their immense popularity, remaining largely confined to the geek community.
So Microsoft solved the first part of the problem with Windows 3.0.
Myst solved the latter half.
In an environment where other games at the same time either required a lot of command input like traditional Adventure games, or required quick reaction combat awareness like Doom, or simply dumped massive amounts of content on players like Theme Hospital and Civilization.
Myst took a completely different path.
It's not a complete simplification to the fast-paced, arcade-style gameplay that sacrifices depth of content.
It's not like "high-end PC games," where you need to spend hours just to get started.
It chose a very clever and compromise solution.
While maintaining ample content depth, the controls are simplified to the extreme, placing no pressure on the player.
Myst is not an arcade game; it doesn't need to quickly drive players away, and it can make them happily spend money to start over. It doesn't rely on table turnover rates; it only sells buy-to-play copies.
In the world of Myst, players only need to perform one action on the computer.
Click.
Whether it's movement, interaction, or puzzle-solving...
Any action or operation can be performed with just a click of the cursor.
There's no longer any need for complex keyboard input, no need to learn how to recognize the keyboard layout, and no need to worry about complicated or difficult-to-use operations.
It's important to understand that even after the turn of the millennium, a large number of cyber illiterate people still exist, and those who can use the 9-key input method are already considered exceptional individuals.
Many middle-aged and elderly people, due to slowed thinking and inability to keep up with the rapid development of technology, have no choice but to use voice input and handwriting input.
For many people, typing on a keyboard is a really difficult thing.
Not to mention that while thinking about which key to press, you also have to consider what reaction to make and how to operate it.
None of these exist in myst.
There is no death, no punishment for failure, and absolutely no negative feedback. At most, you might encounter some puzzles that you can't solve, causing temporary frustration.
There are no quick-time events (QTEs), and no high-pressure environment like in " Hotline Miami " where even a moment's lapse in concentration can lead to total defeat.
It also doesn't have the complex button settings that fighting games require a whole set of command inputs.
It just sat there quietly.
It's like a thick, ornately bound book filled with beautiful pictures, displayed on a bookshelf in a library.
It's waiting for you to open it.
Ron now, and all the players sitting in front of the TV or computer right now, are like guests walking into a library and standing in front of the bookshelves.
What they need to do now is, naturally, just like Jones in the trailer.
Open the book and enter the world of the Myst.
It's a film directed by Spielberg, a top-tier Hollywood director, and features a large crew and personal guidance from Lin Lixin himself.
From a purely visual perspective, the entire project surpasses that of ordinary games. In terms of cinematic language and visual guidance, Myst has achieved the pinnacle of what video games can accomplish in static scenes.
Ron looked at the thick book "Under the Starfield" in the dark scene and clicked on it without thinking.
That's what makes a great scene design.
It allows people to immediately grasp where the visual focus is.
There are no excessive elements deliberately piled up to highlight the richness and sophistication of the content.
It was so clean that it was almost free of any impurities, yet it made people feel very comfortable.
The book slowly moved closer to the screen.
Through the tattered cover, so worn that the contents were almost illegible, one could vaguely make out its name.
myst
It's almost identical to the one Jones found in the trailer.
Click again, and the book page will finally open.
In fact, the original version of Myst didn't even have a basic page-turning animation. Because the entire game project, frankly speaking, was essentially a massive... PowerPoint presentation.
From a modern perspective, Myst is indeed a magical work.
This is a massive PowerPoint presentation that incorporates Apple's latest multimedia technology, enabling the display of videos, animated GIFs, and other effects on a static page.
Adding the ability to jump between variables and conditional statements, this thing is theoretically Turing Complete.
However, since Gamenova is making it, there's no need for it to be so shabby.
A page-turning animation is essentially just a masking motion, which doesn't consume many resources. It can also be implemented using existing code, so we just did it without much effort.
"Whoosh"
The book's pages are turned.
Just like in the promotional video.
There was no text, only a photo pasted on it.
The following scenes were almost identical to those in the promotional video, except that the perspective was changed to first-person.
When the screen lit up again, he found himself on a wooden boardwalk at the edge of the island. A mast lay overturned in the water beside him, indicating a shipwreck.
The stone steps directly in front of you spiral upwards.
On a hilltop not far away, there appears to be some kind of gear-shaped structure, which is clearly a legacy of the " D'ni Civilization ".