At one point in the canyon a recorded message directs the player to a house with a white picket fence. At the beginning of the game the player can only move forward through a canyon. Obduction has an example of how that idea has to change in realtime 3D. That example precisely illustrates how, by having control of the view we could move the player forward in subtle ways. Further, if the player clicked on the dagger the player’s point of view changed to a view of the gate from a much lower perspective – a view that seemed to suggest that they might be able to crawl under the gate. We placed a dagger in the ground under the gate to draw the player’s attention to that lower area. It wasn’t immediately evident, but the player could slide under the gate. Early in Riven there was a gate that was locked. I think we’ve learned as we’ve transitioned to realtime 3D that the path guidance that we might have previously achieved on a “per frame” basis, we now have to do on a different scale. Rand Miller: The nature of exploration/adventure games is that you want the player to feel like they have complete freedom, but at the same time provide some kind of path guidance that insures that the player gets the story/information they need. How have things changed between those games and now? This isn’t Cyan’s first realtime 3D game both Uru and Myst 5 were 3D, but I would describe those as occurring in the earlier days of 3D when it was at least a little daring to make a 3D puzzle adventure game. How do you deal with that? Does it affect the basic design of the puzzles in some way, or is the difference more down to the way specific details are authored?
When building things to be explored in full 3D, it’s a much less-concrete discipline because you don’t exactly know where the player is coming from. The advantage of something like Myst is that you can curate each individual image very closely - you know exactly where the player is standing and what she’s looking at, and if you want to make some important clue more obvious, it’s clear how to do that. I’m interested in how this affected puzzle design. There are some obvious benefits, like the fact that you can walk around the world of Obduction in full realtime 3D, whereas the original Myst was a series of 2D images. Today’s consoles are insane supercomputers compared to the machines people played Myst on, back in the day. Jonathan Blow: One very obvious trend, looking at the series of games from Myst through Obduction, has been the advancement of technology.
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