gaming question.

[solipsistnation]

Okay, so here's the big question.

We now have the ability to create games as beautiful and immersive as Myst was when it first appeared, but with free motion and real-time 3D graphics. In fact, the real-time rendering capabilities of a modern computer far outstrip the SGI render farm used to create the original Myst games, or even the updated-slideshow version of Myst. We're getting close to the ability to render in realtime landscapes as beautiful and alien as Riven's chain of islands. Far Cry's archipelago vistas certainly echo the seascapes of Riven, and the mechanical devices of Doom 3 are as complex as the devices in Myst and Riven. The technology is here, so where are the games?

Clearly, this is not a new idea, but I think that the first try at real-time Myst-like gaming was severely flawed. Arguably, the true first attempt at real-time Myst, the cleverly-named RealMyst, was even more severly flawed. RealMyst ignored years of first-person gaming interface development and attempted to use the same sort of click-to-turn interface as the original Myst. The result was a slow, painful trek, with pauses to orient onesself before moving forward in a straight line and pausing again. It was unfortunate that the designers didn't even see fit to give the option of multiple possible interface styles.

Uru improved on this somewhat, although an unfortunate dependance on jumping puzzles marred the demo. Worse still, Uru was flawed in more crippling ways. Uru itself was an ambitious project, but was crippled by several miscalculations. First-off, I'm not sure people
were ready for multiplayer Myst, and the company itself certainly wasn't ready for the initial burst of interest or for the resources required to support a multiplayer world of that scale and complexity. The initial number of accounts was limited and people who would have been interested simply couldn't get accounts, and drifted away. Uru has since been re-released as a standalone game, without the online aspect. One is led to wonder why UbiSoft did not simply initially release a single-player game based around that engine and add multiplayer later. Myst was originally a solitary pursuit, and that style of game retains its appeal.

So, what is holding back the development of puzzle and world-exploration games? We have Morrowind, which gives players a vast landscape to explore. We have Far Cry, which brings unprecedented detail to that landscape. We have game engines capable of driving complex puzzles and devices and plots, and we have a whole group of gamers with nothing to play. Myst brought
casual gamers to the computer, and was one of the top-selling games of all time, topped only, I believe, by The Sims. Have the puzzle gamers all migrated to life simulations? I find that hard to believe.

The time is right for immersive worlds and engaging puzzles to make a comeback. Where are the games?

Comments

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

I wish I knew. I blame short-sightedness; otherwise I can't imagine why the market has been abandoned.

The best part, to my mind, was playing them with you. I used to look forward to that constantly when we were in the middle of a really good game. It's hard to get that same kind of project out of any other type of computer game.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

I think there are insufficient numbers of people who can design realistic worlds that can be rendered easily (even with current hardware) and who are in the same place as people to write the software, working for companies that can actually produce and release software.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

This is just a matter of somebody wanting to do it enough to gather that sort of group and throw money at them until they produce a game. Many of the current crop of shooter designers have come out of the fanbase, moving from game-modding to actual game design. There's no reason this shouldn't work in other areas.

[invader-haywire.livejournal.com]

This is just a matter of somebody wanting to do it enough to gather that sort of group and throw money at them until they produce a game.

Okay this is the sort of answer that everyone thinks is the right answer but actually isn't. My understanding is that the game industry is not doing as well as everyone thinks. There is a lot of competition out there, nevermind trying to deal with differing platforms and hardware. It is a lot of work and by the time you can go that extra mile, your behind on the tech and a company that is pushing the tech limits is going to get the better glory.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I think there is still room for innovative companies to do interesting things. They have to be very very careful, though-- Looking Glass is a good example here. Their games did well enough that they could have sustained themselves had not their publisher screwed them over.

Perhaps it's not so much the money as the ability to gather the right group and put them together with resources?

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

I know of at least one game designer who would love to do RPG design, whether multiplayer or single-player, who has been unemployed for four years. She can't be the only one out there.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

I suspect some of the difficulty is actually in creating the multiplayer puzzles. When one person solves it, do you reset it for someone else, or do you leave it solved for the world? How do you make them significantly challenging for large numbers of people to work on cooperatively? How do you create a plot arc so gigantic that it will hold people for years without repetition?

That's what I see as the real challenge .... by eliminating combat, you force the game storytellers to have to work very very hard for an indefinite amount of time, and I'm not convinced that it's as easy as it sounds. (:

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

People have done it, though-- there's still a small market in slideshow-roaming games. Check the cheap end of the software shelves in Best Buy-- they usually have a few.

And I'm not really talking about multiplayer puzzle game things here, but more about single-player games. I think that part of why Uru failed is that they aimed too high and weren't prepared for that sort of requirement-- the shared puzzles, the infrastructure required for a massively multiplayer gaming experience, the management and administrative requirements, or anything like that.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was under the impression from your previous post that you were wondering why there weren't more multiplayer puzzle games, not why there weren't more in general.

I'm not sure about that one. There are plenty of cheap ones, as you say. It may simply be that people don't want to put in the effort to create a really killer one. It's very easy to rip an engine and do an FPS. With a puzzle game, you have to put a lot of creativity into it.

The last excellent puzzle game I played outside of the Myst series was Zork: Nemesis. That was a long time ago.

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

I think you've hit your answer right here. The games that do exist are on the cheap end of the software shelves in Best Buy. That echoes what I'm pretty sure is true -- the market simply doesn't exist for RPG/puzzle games in the US. Try Japan instead.

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

One detail I forgot: both RPGs and puzzle games take an inordinate amount of time to write. Look at any new gaming platform, and pay close attention to what kind of games come out for it first. You'll always see arcade-style shooters, side-scrolling fighters, and similar twitch games long before the puzzle/RPG genres start to appear. Development time for a believable world with a lot of back story is a lot longer than development time for rudimentary characters beating the snot out of each other in a fixed arena.

[jon3.livejournal.com]

I think the first place we'll start to see this immersiveness is in the MMORPG arena. Look at some of the screenshots for the up and coming games, and I think you'll start to see that is where it is creeping in first, not in FPS games.

Some of the first truly beautiful, yet hardware abusing graphics came out in Turbine's AC2 game. If you've seen Warcraft 3, while the graphics are typical Blizzard Fantasy in nature, the models and scenery are extremely well rendered, and movement is becoming far more fluid.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I agree that this is where we're already starting to see it, but there are problems with that sort of non-combat-based puzzle and multiplayer-- see alhandra's reply, above.

It'd be nice to see a decently-paced single-player game like that, though. One of the things that was good about Myst and Riven is that they weren't constantly intense and pushing at you. You could make your way through them at your own pace, solving puzzles as you had time. You could always have two or three or more puzzles going on at one time, and could move between them if you were stuck on one of them. That's harder to reproduce in multiplayer, since people don't necessarily get stuck on the same things. While that means that your party could blast through a series of puzzles (if you had complementary skills), it also means less incentive to roam around and try random things, which was another nice thing about Myst...

[brainiac69.livejournal.com]

I read an article in some mag this weekend that a new Myst is coming out. I don't know if that'll satisfy your needs or not...I'm very not up on computery gaming these days.

[that-xmas.livejournal.com]

First, the pay-off has to be there. I think that game publishers think the money isn't there for all the time, energy and effort a puzzle game requires. Which means some tiny company with a big idea has to put out the first game and make gobs of money with it before the big companies will even touch the genre. But small companies have long development times.

Second, full motion puzzle games have to be fully tested and retested before you can put them out. There is no point in creating a super complicated puzzle for a gate, when a glitchy short wall can be jumped over. Myst and it's genre were really just complicated text-adventures with amazing graphics.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

I like text adventures. *hugs DEC station*

[stophittinyrslf.livejournal.com]

ha, and here i was, scrolling through replies and thinking 'enh, see, this is why i like text-based games.'

in all seriousness, both for singleplayer and multiplayer games, i've experienced better (and more) puzzle oriented games in the text-based realm. part of what causes this, i think, is that with graphics constantly improving, a huge portion of the effort put into any current non-text game is directed into the visualization of it. there's a feeling among current gamers, it seems to me, that if a game isn't pretty, whatever else it has to offer gameplaywise is trivial. so all of the incredible brainpower that COULD be going into making interesting, innovating, immersive games is instead going into makin' stuff purty. not that i don't LIKE pretty games; i just think that too much emphasis is being put on graphics at the current point in time.

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Have the puzzle gamers all migrated to life simulations?

No; it's just that they've developed such a high tolerance to ibuprofen that it no longer helps them, so they've had to ramp back on their playing time.

[mindways]

I can't speak to why they're not being *made*, but I can say why I haven't been interested in *playing* the few that have been done.

<rant>
"3D" is always touted as if, when it's done properly, it's the end-all and be-all of interfaces. It's not. It's the end-all and be-all of graphics, at least with modern tech, but there's a difference between "this world is pretty" and "this interface is good". For most sorts of games, I find the necessities of navigating around in a 3D world - at least, as the interfaces currently tend to be defined - to be annoying and distracting.

When I'm in the mood to play a puzzle game, get immersed in a storyline and look at pretty scenery, I don't want to have to worry about the minutae of moving around - having to rotate a little more to get through that doorway, accidentally hanging up on a small protrusion that I can only see if I back up or look down, and falling off of edges because monitors may convey vision but don't convey any kinesthetic sense. The fun-to-work ratio just isn't high enough.

(I *especially* don't want to deal with puzzles that require exacting mastery of movement in said world, whether it be in the form of jumping, precise-path-walking, or whatnot.)

There's also the dark nasty side to greater freedom in puzzle-games: The more you *can* explore and examine, the more you *must* explore and examine, to make sure you didn't miss something (unless you're good enough to just crack everything right off the bat). I enjoy exploration a lot, but in a "this world is neat, what's here?" kind of way, not a "I will spend 29 hours exhaustively examining the surface of every rock" or a "I love pixel-hunts" kind of way.

One of the reasons that Myst was so amazing was because of what it *omitted* - as much extraneous stuff as possible that would distract you from immersion and the mindset of the game. It really tried to keep the player focused on "what am I doing?" rather than "how am I doing it?".
</rant>

The problem may be partly that games these days aren't taken seriously if they're not 3D...and I'm not sure that 3D for puzzle-games is actually an advantage. It probably could be, but will take some sort of breakthrough that makes it less annoying.

OK, back to work for me.