![]() ![]() ![]() It also gives us some amount of motivation for the future that we’ve got both paths open now. Not having to worry about ‘Oh, this might conflict with this and I’ve got a continuity error with this and wait, is this canon or not canon?’ Those things that are both really intriguing and fun because they make the world seem real, but they also can bog you down if you’re not prepared to fully embrace them. There is something motivating about that. It’s just nice to start with a blank sheet of paper. It felt like rather than staying at home, which was comfortable, I needed something fresh and new. I just need to go somewhere else, it’s a good way to clear your head and to motivate yourself and to refresh yourself. It’s like, I love my home, my home is very comfortable, I know everything about my home, I’m very familiar with it and it’s a wonderful place to be. It’s not that I don’t love all the lore and history and backstory of Myst, and all the things it’s become. OPM: Was it hard to start afresh with Obduction? We want it to seem like a real place, so many times we compromised a bit in some of the puzzles or some of the story, because that’s in some ways how life is and we wanted to build them up in equal amount. Our thing is to balance those equally – so the story and the environment mean a lot to us, and those have to support the puzzles and the puzzles have to support those. We try to balance these crazy legs of the story and the environment and the puzzles, the friction. We struggled with Obduction’s scope, the same thing. We were definitely pushing things with the size of the game, squeezing it onto CDs at the time. You could keep going a little bit further, but you risked corruption and scratches on the edge of the disc if you went out too far. Riven was so big – it was interesting, I never knew this at the time until we started hitting limits – that CDs, they started writing in the middle and they wrote outward toward the outer edges of the disc with your data and there was no set amount. We lost that a little with the scope of Riven. But I love games and the psychology of games, and Myst – the way it compartmentalised those ages, where once you’ve finished it, you knew that everything you needed was in that age, and when you were done with it and back on Myst island you were looking for something new. ![]() RM: Don’t get me wrong, with Riven we were able to do some amazing things. Is that kind of the core tenet upon which you then wanted to build further games? It was like the entire world was connected and everything could affect something else. OPM: Myst’s sequel, Riven, felt like you’d blown this project into something far grander. I have recollections of needing to come up with how that twist would be realised, and how it would be so interesting and ironic and fun if the very first task you did was tied to the very last twist as well. And it wasn’t until later on in the design process as we were fleshing things out that we decided to put a little twist in there. That was the original concept: one of them will be right and one of them will be wrong. ![]() Our idea was that you were going to have to make a judgement about these brothers as you went through the game. We designed it and had a good idea of what it would be, but the early design documents didn’t speak of the twist at the end. RM: We found it funny as well, and our process for doing the game was iterative to a certain extent. Was that always something that you planned as a quirky joke? OPM: One of our favourite things about Myst was that if you knew what you were doing you could complete it in a matter of seconds. You could go to any worlds in any order, so we were very happy with that design. Oddly enough it was some of the constraints of the console that led us to build Myst the way it was, with different worlds that would be small enough that they could be loaded and broken up. But by the time Myst came along we still hadn’t perfected what we did. We had done a lot of this and we were evolving the way we built worlds – we started with children’s worlds and were getting gradually more and more sophisticated. It works well, and some of it is just, well, frankly by luck. RM: Myst is one of those projects that in my mind, even if we had more knowledge, if we had those same constraints, I think we would have built the same thing. OPM: Do you ever look back at Myst and think there are things you would like to change? ![]()
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