Intrepid Homoludens
06-07-2005, 04:14 PM
:) Looks promising. Whatever compromises made that may be a bit of a loss to longtime fans (and conversative gamers) look to be made up for by total freedom of exploration and flexibility for everyone.
"It'll be interesting," says Miller, "But when you see it in motion, that's where people will start to drop their preconceptions."
http://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/article/620/620685/440myst5b_1117600562.jpg
Despite the move to a full-3D world, it was clear from our demo that End of Ages won't suffer from the same third-person control problems that plagued Uru. For anyone who's played a first-person shooter, the controls work exactly the same, using the mouse and keyboard to look around and move.
But since Myst isn't a twitchy action game, it allowed the developers to implement a second control scheme that should be quite familiar to longtime Myst players: point-and-click. Simply click on an area and your character will walk there, eliminating some of the confusing transitions that occasionally hampered previous Myst titles, without sacrificing the familiar control scheme. "Whether it's 3D or not, they don't care," says Miller, referring to the traditional adventure audience. "They want to play with one button of the mouse, so we accommodated that. So now, even my mom can play a real-time 3D game."
http://media.ign.com/thumb/112/1126801/myst-v-end-of-ages-20050518014703231_thumb.jpg http://media.ign.com/thumb/112/1126807/myst-v-end-of-ages-20050518014716887_thumb.jpg
To make the characters feel alive and believable, Cyan used special motion capture equipment designed to capture facial expressions. "We felt if we hand-animated bones in the face, we were going to lose a little something," says Miller.
In fact, although the shift to 3D meant that Miller no longer had to perform double duty as the actor portraying Atrus (something he was quite happy to give up), he did the motion capture for the character of Esher himself. Indeed, zooming up on the character of Esher, you can see that his animations are detailed a lot more than what you'd expect in a typical 3D-game, giving us hope that this new 3D approach might not be a bad idea after all.
full preview (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/myst-v-end-of-ages/620685p1.html)
"It'll be interesting," says Miller, "But when you see it in motion, that's where people will start to drop their preconceptions."
http://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/article/620/620685/440myst5b_1117600562.jpg
Despite the move to a full-3D world, it was clear from our demo that End of Ages won't suffer from the same third-person control problems that plagued Uru. For anyone who's played a first-person shooter, the controls work exactly the same, using the mouse and keyboard to look around and move.
But since Myst isn't a twitchy action game, it allowed the developers to implement a second control scheme that should be quite familiar to longtime Myst players: point-and-click. Simply click on an area and your character will walk there, eliminating some of the confusing transitions that occasionally hampered previous Myst titles, without sacrificing the familiar control scheme. "Whether it's 3D or not, they don't care," says Miller, referring to the traditional adventure audience. "They want to play with one button of the mouse, so we accommodated that. So now, even my mom can play a real-time 3D game."
http://media.ign.com/thumb/112/1126801/myst-v-end-of-ages-20050518014703231_thumb.jpg http://media.ign.com/thumb/112/1126807/myst-v-end-of-ages-20050518014716887_thumb.jpg
To make the characters feel alive and believable, Cyan used special motion capture equipment designed to capture facial expressions. "We felt if we hand-animated bones in the face, we were going to lose a little something," says Miller.
In fact, although the shift to 3D meant that Miller no longer had to perform double duty as the actor portraying Atrus (something he was quite happy to give up), he did the motion capture for the character of Esher himself. Indeed, zooming up on the character of Esher, you can see that his animations are detailed a lot more than what you'd expect in a typical 3D-game, giving us hope that this new 3D approach might not be a bad idea after all.
full preview (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/myst-v-end-of-ages/620685p1.html)