If you got this version of Riven after finishing RealMyst you will be disappointed..

[faunsix]

Having just completed Myst (RealMyst) for the first time and really looking forward to continuing the story as I was completing Rime, I am kind of heartbroken to discover that the video quality of this version of Riven makes it almost unplayable, and there are zero graphics options available to improve the experience. Also, the transitions between each 'slide' are the same as they were on the original Myst, (like clicking 'next' on a digital photo album), so much of the feeling of immersion in the game is lost. I will wait for the 'RealRiven' equivalent of 'RealMyst' to come out before I continue with the story.

[Ghidrah1]

Have to disagree with the unplayable part. If you never played original Myst or the anniversary editions you had no choice in the matter and you were stunned by the graphic
and control upgrades. I believe I had similar feelings about HL1 after playing HL2 1st.
Don't get me wrong I prefer free movement over point and click, but you can set zip mode in Riven and move pretty fast.
I wholeheartedly say give it a whirl, there're killer puzzles in Riven and much visual diversity

[desertjedi]

I guess I feel very lucky in this regard. I've been messing with Cyan titles (Myst, Riven, realMyst, Uru etc.) my whole "life", so to speak. The only one I ever finished was realMyst. Recently, I wanted to get back into Myst gaming and realized the best entry for me was Riven - a game with which I had very little success and made VERY little progress. But even after appreciating hyper-realistic graphics in games. I was simply mesmerized by Riven's atmosphere, music, look and feel. There is simply no game in its genre that even comes close (IMHO). For me, it's much more enjoyable than Myst. Now that I'm back in Cyan-mode, I even look forward to trying Myst III Exile again even though it's point and click. One of my prize possessions is the original boxed CD set of Riven.

[Starvingartizt]

Originally posted by desertjedi:

I guess I feel very lucky in this regard. I've been messing with Cyan titles (Myst, Riven, realMyst, Uru etc.) my whole "life", so to speak. The only one I ever finished was realMyst. Recently, I wanted to get back into Myst gaming and realized the best entry for me was Riven - a game with which I had very little success and made VERY little progress. But even after appreciating hyper-realistic graphics in games. I was simply mesmerized by Riven's atmosphere, music, look and feel. There is simply no game in its genre that even comes close (IMHO). For me, it's much more enjoyable than Myst. Now that I'm back in Cyan-mode, I even look forward to trying Myst III Exile again even though it's point and click. One of my prize possessions is the original boxed CD set of Riven.

One of my fave ps1 games lol

[duncancreamer]

I was disappointed that this seems to just bee slides. The original I played way back was like a little Quicktime VR-Bubble. It was like what you get in google street view. You could look all around you. It was fake, with no parallax or anything, but this slide view is lame. Is there a way to activate the original look?

[Noitalever]

Originally posted by duncancreamer:

I was disappointed that this seems to just bee slides. The original I played way back was like a little Quicktime VR-Bubble. It was like what you get in google street view. You could look all around you. It was fake, with no parallax or anything, but this slide view is lame. Is there a way to activate the original look?

I think you might be thinking of Myst III Exile or Myst IV Revelation. Riven you could never look all around you.

[Hanuman]

Myst was such a huge and unexpected success, that they went all out for Riven (and had the budget to do so), the graphics, for its time were amazing. I remember playing this for the first time when it came out, and it gave me the same feeling then, that my Oculus gives me now. It felt like this world partially belonged to me, I could spend as much or as little time in it as I wanted and explore everything, go anywhere. It was the first game that gave me a sense of being in a place I wasn't. Very few games do that, and amazingly enough, Riven still does to this day. That's pretty amazing.

[DemonWolfSprite]

I wouldnt say its "unplayable" dont forget this is a game from the 90s - back then this was "groundbreaking" graphics. this was always a point and click game - it was only after myst 3 that you could "look around" (until the remakes of myst eg: realmyst which i played just before this, and the new myst 2021 remake which im yet to play - hopefully if they remade myst this past year they may remake riven next and myst 3 and so on

[Frungi]

Originally posted by duncancreamer:

I was disappointed that this seems to just bee slides. The original I played way back was like a little Quicktime VR-Bubble. It was like what you get in google street view. You could look all around you. It was fake, with no parallax or anything, but this slide view is lame. Is there a way to activate the original look?

Like someone else said, you're thinking of a different game—I believe the first game that had this kind of interface was The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, which came out the year after Riven, and three years before the same studio built Myst III: Exile using that tech.

I might actually prefer to play a 360° panoramic remake over a full-3D remake, now that you mention it. Though you'd have to build the latter anyway in order to render the former.

[duncancreamer]

It was actually Myst III Exile. And I haven't gotten there yet in my re-playing the series.