![]() The story begins with you, “the stranger,” opening a book and being whisked away to the island of Myst. The slow progress is a quirk of “Myst,” but it’s not entirely unwelcome. ![]() The only issue with VR here isn’t the tech – it’s that progression in “Myst” can take a very long time, and wearing a headset for hours on end isn’t exactly pleasant. Cyan’s greatest strength and most unique trait as a game developer has always been its ability to craft bizarre yet immersive worlds, so VR is a shoe-in. The graphics are better than ever, and if you have a virtual-reality headset, you can explore it that way, too. This is where Cyan’s 2021 remake of “Myst” comes in – it’s the same game the world knows and loves but playing out in real time. To its credit, Cyan did a fantastic job giving players the sensation of real-time movement using scrolling effects and capturing things from a multitude of angles. Whatever perspective Mead’s Cyan gives you, you’re stuck with – you can’t freely and seamlessly walk around their worlds. The drawback to doing this is that the environments are technically 2D on your own display. Video games that use pre-rendered graphics, including “Myst,” achieve their incredible look using similar techniques. Recall that Pixar’s “Toy Story” hit theaters in 1995 and looked incredible for the time – that’s because it rendered scenes with massive polygon counts on very beefy computers, then took snapshots of those scenes playing out frame-by-frame until they had a movie. was able to achieve this because “Myst” used pre-rendered environments. The Spokane area’s legendary indie game development team Cyan Inc. ![]() Even then, the graphics blew me away – most 3D video games still looked pretty blocky, while the worlds in “Myst” approached photorealism. It feels bizarre to be talking about a game that hit shelves in 1993 when I was born one year later, but “Myst” was one of a handful of games my parents installed on our older Mac OS 9 computer until it finally broke down in the early 2000s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |