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Rand Miller Speaks About Myst V: End of Ages

The following is a transcript of a meeting at the 2005 E3 with Rand Miller. Rand was genuinely excited speaking about what is planned to be the concluding game in the Myst series and his enthusiasm was contagious. The accompanying screenshots in no way do justice to actually seeing the stunning graphics in person. Be forewarned, there are some minor spoilers in the transcript.

“It won’t be everybody’s favorite Myst Game, but it will be some people’s favorite Myst game.” – Rand Miller

Myst V is the final episode in the Myst series – the grand finale. But, I have to say, just to set expectations, that we’ve done the grand finale the way it should be done.

We didn’t add explosions or furry, little singing creatures in trees. Myst is about quiet, subtle, interesting situations. But there are dramatic consequences, its that same Myst feeling, that subtle exploration that has some dire consequences in the choices you make at the end and its very reminiscent of the first Myst on a lot of levels which was wonderful for us.

The first thing you notice is different is the real-time 3D. As far as visual Myst games go – not including RealMyst – this is the first from the ground up that was built in real-time 3D and that presents some interesting problems for us because the toughest part of real-time 3D is its hard to move around in. The interface is a problem and we wanted the interface to be as easy to use as the original Myst. We wanted to play the game with a mouse and one button to get through the entire game. So we actually built, essentially the equivalent of a classic interface were you can actually play the game by clicking and moving point-to-point not knowing really anything about real-time 3D to get through the whole thing. What I’ve said basically is that my mom can now play a real-time 3D game because there is no way she would be able to manipulate controls. So we move you from place to place. Anyone who is used to Myst and wants to play it that way we take you to the areas that you can focus on, we frame the shots - all those things that you would miss if you didn’t have the benefit of flowing through the landscape which is so cool. It’s my favorite part.

But of course, for those gamers, now that we’re state-of-the-art as far as our graphics and 3D goes, rather than reinvent that interface we just used some standard gaming interfaces for the full mode almost like a first-person shooter type of controls sort of like RealMyst.

RealMyst was kind of an attempt to please everyone. We tried to build an interface that novices could use easily and experts wouldn’t mind and I’m not sure we pleased everyone. For this one we said, “You know what, let’s keep them separate.” Classic mode will be point-and-click and the people who play first-person-shooters, they know what they want, let’s not rebuild that and so you pick your mode and it’s actually been pretty satisfying

Myst V is another one that is different for us in that there are no live-action characters. Once you make the switch to real-time 3D, the live-action characters seem disconnected. They don’t fit as well in the environment, the continuity’s not quite there. But we did decide that we would try to do the real-time 3D in ways that no one has ever done and we’ve done them as well as we could. That included full-motion capture – the studio did motion capture. We put cloth simulation physics on the clothing so it feels like they’re in the world. One unique thing we did was that motion-capture captures the subtlety of human movement, but rather than try and animate bones and a face by hand, we actually mounted a camera on the actor and captured the face movements as they’re acting and we take that video and project it onto the model of the face so that we hopefully get some of the subtleties that you might miss if they’re hand animated. A raised eyebrow here, a scrunched-up face there – the little things that mean so much. That’s stuff you can’t hand animate, it’s not the same as hand-animated motions, there’s something about actual human stuff that comes through. It’s actually the performer, it’s his face, it’s what he did with his eyes, it captured everything he moved and we built it so he could turn his head and look at things and we would still capture a solid facial expression.

The game character, by the way, is also etched in our decision to make this game more accessible as far as ease of play and getting to the different places. Myst games have progressively gotten – well, there are two types of people who play Myst games – there are the explorers, and frankly they’re the people who want a vacation on their desktop and then there’s the puzzle solvers and I think we’ve pleased the puzzle-solvers as we’ve progressed. But we kept hearing, “I can’t even get to the places without the books, I need the hints, I want to see these beautiful places you’re creating.” So we pulled back. For this game in particular we made accommodations that say we’re going to let you go almost everywhere without solving any problems and we’ll devise a character who’s actually part of the storyline. Part of his job is to say, “I am here to help you.” Now you have to decide whether or not you trust him and how that plays out in the end, but it works really well in allowing people to see the worlds that we’ve built.

Another aspect that goes along with this character – we’ve added a lot of unique things to this Myst. It’s the finale, so we’ve tried some new things and its always risky, but there’s these creatures, who are in some cases very bizarre, that I’m sure people are not expecting. People may have seen them in Uru or heard them talked about in Uru, but in none of the Myst games are they mentioned. We wanted a way to communicate with them and no Myst game is going to have dialogue boxes with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ options. What better way to communicate in a Myst game in particular than to write - to actually be able to write. You can actually travel with slate, it plays a large part in the game and you can write whatever you want on it. As you wander around you’ll actually find symbols that look like they’re appropriate to write on the slate. You don’t know what it means, it’s the creature’s language. But you draw it on the slate to try and instruct the creatures to do something and they’ll try to understand what you wrote. They’ll try to interpret it and if you can, you can tell them to do things.

If you drop the slate and walk away from it, the creatures appear, look at the slate, read it and will then do what is written on the slate. They can even change the Ages. It’s part of the mysterious storyline how that works. In an interesting way, through the creatures, you get the feeling that you’re changing this world. There’s deeper things going on than what anyone understood at the beginning of this and what Atrus even understood about the Art of Writing.

We’ve put a journal in the game itself so you can take pictures or type in your text. An interesting addition to the journal is that any picture you take is actually a saved game. But you don’t ever have to use them to restore your game, in fact you don’t have to use the journal at all. You can play through the game without saving and when you quit and start back up, it takes you back to where you left off. But, as an aside, every picture you take, you can return to that spot if you want to. Every speech that you hear, every time that someone talks to you, rather than making you write that down, we went ahead and just documented it like you would if you were there so you can refer to it because there are some very rich speeches and there’s pieces of things you might want to go back and reference.

The slate itself is a very useful tool, but it also can be a burden. You have this huge piece of rock that you’re carrying with you. Well, guess what, you come to a ladder you can’t climb the ladder if you’re carrying the slate. So you have a dilemma because part of your goal is to take that slate with you and in addition to that its very useful because you can use it to command the creatures to do things, but you can’t get to the top of the ladder with the slate. And if you drop it, many times the creatures will come and take it away and put it back on its pedestal. So the problem is “How am I going to get this slate up there?” Anyway, new kinds of puzzles that are a little different than “How do I power this up and make this work” because you have to think about them a different way.

The dynamic aspect of real time – even though it was a risk for us because it is not quite pre-rendered quality – the idea that it is real and dynamic makes it feel real to me. It opens up the ability to move the clouds more realistically and make the grass wave and put birds that dive into the water and make the water ripple in ways that we’ve attempted before but have never been able to do so realistically. There’s also other aspects of the dynamics like the windows, there’s an especially interesting segment about the Gate Room and how if we had pre-rendered the Gate Room then when doors or windows are opened or closed then there have to be doors in the background - all of those things had to be considered, but not so in a real-time 3D environment. So we went crazy with this and put windows all the way around the structure and I don’t have to worry about pre-rending all of the objects. If I open a window, then I can see on the other side if it is open or closed and we’ve actually incorporated that into some of the puzzles as well. This is actually a good example of where the nodes work just like Myst. They take you to the point, take you to each window as you walk around the structure. They take you to the things you need to manipulate. For people who are used to Myst, they’ll be able to get around just like they’re used to. For gamers who want to try their hand and seeing more and going everywhere, there’s an easy way to do it. We’ve even provided an intermediate mode for people who don’t necessarily don’t want to feel like they’re playing an FPS and maybe want a little bit more of the classic feel. So a little bit different idea where the screen moves much like it did in Myst 4 where everywhere you point you move, but when you click you move there relative to real-time 3D.

There are plenty of Ages in the new game; some that will be very satisfying for Myst fans. We’ve built it so that you need not have played any of the earlier Myst games. We do notice a lot of the history and story and for people who are interested they can read about it and see more if they want to know or they can play without knowing. There are six pretty large Ages and a few minor ones.

The two main characters in the game are meant to be both familiar and non-familiar. Yeesha is grown-up and we get to see her in all of her eclectic glory. This is where you have to make some choices with her; learn a little bit more about her. You’ve seen her in the last few games growing up and we know a little bit, but now she’s here

We also meet a new character, Esher a D’ni, who has never been in any of the Myst games. He’s the guy who’s been around though, he knows things that he’s done first to other characters, so he has an entirely different perspective, one that may surprise people. There are many similarities in this one to the original where there are two people telling you things that are sometimes at odds and in some cases aren’t. And they don’t seem extremely antagonistic against each other, but in the end there’s a substantial choice you must make with interesting repercussions some of which will be surprising.

We have a certain ability to look at things in maybe a different light or to skew things in a way that hopefully may be more enjoyable to people. It’s one of those things that you never know. Myst was successful out of the blue and we may never have anything like that again and you know what, I’m satisfied with that, I’m happy with that. But it’s also very satisfying for me to look at things in a different light and try again with a unique perspective.

The main thing we’ve talked about in making this game though - and I should touch on this – is the idea of story being interactive and a lot of that has to do with adventure games not being as popular and not selling as many units and what that means. Adventure game is a broad category that is sometimes hard to peg down; hard to nail exactly what that means. From our point-of-view adventure games are about taking story and wrapping gameplay around it. Which is not necessarily the way the rest of the industry works. Most games you see take gameplay and they wrap story around that. So those two perspectives are very dramatically different because it means that one aspect is at the core. In adventure games, story is the core, in other games the gameplay system is the core. I’m not saying one is better or worse, people are entertained in a number of different ways. The reason that story is important is that’s the potential for this industry to mature a bit. The story aspect is what touches people’s emotions. Stories are what teach me something about myself and the world and that’s the artistic side of this industry and that’s the part that excites me.

Myst V E3 Trailer