Just in time for Mysterium 2025, we bring you our Summer 2025 edition, featuring:
The Cavern Today is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & other services – as well as The Cavern Today’s website.
☛ On March 12 Spyder, the Cyan ‘mole’ who gave the hints for the Riven easter eggs, made an appearance on Cyan’s official Discord server. A few days later, Cyan announced the long-awaited addition of Rime to the Myst remake!
☛ On February 28 the Cavern Communications Network announced the second season of the Water Cooler show, with a follow-up interview with CalumTraveler.
☛ Anthony Kleine posted an interesting two-part article about fixing the loading speed between nodes in Myst IV. There is no support yet for Revelation in ScummVM, but if it will be added, this is a tweak that could definitely be considered.
☛ In episode 121 of the Video Game History Hour podcast, Cyan co-founder Rand Miller took VGHF library director Phil Salvador on an exclusive tour of the Cyan Vault.
For our Holiday 2024 edition, we’re pleased to bring you a milestone – our fiftieth regular episode of The Cavern Today! Join us as we close out 2024 with:
The Cavern Today is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & other services – as well as The Cavern Today’s website.
☛ MOULa got a new update on Tuesday 12 for the Q3 update. You can find more info about all the fixes and goodies in our dedicated post. The new location, the Explorers’ Emporium, will be unveiled on December 5 at 13:00 KIT, in Chiso Preniv.
☛ At the end of October, Cyan announced a big update to the VR remake of Myst. The main highlight is the upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, which solved a number of stability issues on various platforms.
☛ Then, on November 8, Cyan announced a big update to Firmament, with a number of quality-of-life changes for MacOS and Windows. Due to a few remaining PS-specific issues, the ports to PlayStation 4, 5, and PSVR2 have been delayed to the first quarter of 2025.
☛ The Mysterium committee announced the dates for Mysterium 2025: August 1st – 3rd. Masks and COVID vaccines will be strongly encouraged; masks will be available for attendees who did not bring their own. Submissions for this year’s Writing and Artwork table are open and will be accepted through July 15.
☛ In the last couple of months there has been a lot of behind-the-scenes activity on the Open Cave shard, to get it on par and compatible with the latest version of MOULa. The website has also been recently restyled and renovated.
☛ Episode 16 of The Lost Art, by MystiTech Productions, is coming on January 4, 2025 at 14:30 KIT. The premiere live chat will as usual start half an hour before.
☛ On October 11 Necrovarius released part five of the “Myst Explained” video series.
☛ Calum Traveler has been streaming “Blender for Korman for Beginners“, a series showcasing the Guild of Writers’ Age building tool.
The XXV Mysterium was held in Montréal, Canada on July 12–14, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.
Belford wrote a summary in his blog, giving his perspective on the various updates.
Friday started with the Opening Announcements with a few words and reminders from the convention chairs.
☛ In the Cyan ‘State of the Union’ prerecorded panel Rand Miller, Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson gave a few updates on their games. While Riven‘s critical reception has been phenomenal, sales have not been correspondly positive. Riven costed “less than 2%” of a AAA game of comparable quality to make; it was a “monumental effort” and they really want to scale down their workload.
Touching on the design process, they started with drastic redesign ideas, narrowing them them down to only those that directly supported the game experience. They also had to iron bugs and glitches quite close to launch.
For the immediate future, they will be working on porting Firmament and Riven to more platforms, and improving Myst on the Quest 3. After that, Rand confirmed they have started on a new game in the D’niverse; it will be a new storyline and you will not have to be familiar with the Myst series to play it. They expect to have more to say next year.
Also, Rand is retiring: with Riven released, he feels it’s the right time to cut back considerably; he will still be involved with advising on game design and such, but not as often and as much.
☛ In the Myst Reverse Engineer panel, Jeff Barbi showed how to hack the original Myst (thanks to Uli Kusterer’s HyperCard work), and a few interesting results of editing the HyperTalk source code. The original fireplace puzzle accepted two codes, from page 158 but also page 148. The HyperCard stack was password-locked against editing, but this feature can easily be bypassed with modern tools, and Jeff was able to recover the original password.
☛ In the Myst Online Update, a group of fan developers (AgeExplorer, Doobes, DPogue, Harley, Semjay and Yali) gave a few updates on what’s been going on in the Cavern. The writing team is trying a long-term story arc (“Diplomacy”) involving first contact with an unexpectedly inhabited Age. On the open source client front, DPogue has continued to improve the Korman Blender plugin, as well as the MacOS client, which however is not yet ready for testing on the live servers.
As for upcoming Ages, Doobes and AgeExplorer are still working on the Descent: you can now take the elevator down the Shaft and mostly solve the puzzles there, and walk down the spiral staircase that runs the entire length of the Shaft. Doobes is also working on a major Chiso expansion. Tweek is working on a library Age, a garden homage to Myst, a rework of of Fahets, and a new Neighborhood. Semjay is working on completing one of Cyan’s cancelled Ages for Uru, Venalem, and also on the Explorer’s Emporium. Harley is working on expanding Naybree and on an Age called Rei’schu. Yali is working on a private city area and on UI updates for the client.
☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In Uru Live, a devious marker mission ws released (video). For Puzzle Time, Rayne and m13 challenged the participants with a set of devious puzzles. For the Dance Event, Annacat explored the music of the Myst series through dance and creative movement, teaching a simple short choreography.
Saturday started with a few events that were not streamed: the Mysterium Unconference, an unstreamed set of participant-driven discussion sessions; What Would Catherine Build? (Atrus was too busy this year!), where teams were asked to build something that met certain requirements, and delivered clever presentations for why they built like that.
The subsequent three panels were all about Myst IV: Revelation:
☛ In the Designing Worlds panel, Patrick Fortier (Creative Director & Lead Game Designer), Mary DeMarle (Designer & Writer), Sebastien Yelle (Level Designer) and moderator Katie “Khatie” Postma (Community Manager) discussed bringing Myst IV’s world to life, the creative process, technical challenges and innovative design choices.
☛ In the Living Worlds panel, Meinert Hansen (Senior Art Director) and Guy Sprung (Actor for Achenar) shared their experience bringing the worlds and characters of Myst IV to life through visuals, sound, and motion.
☛ In the Retrospection panel, Mary DeMarle, Patrick Fortier, Meinert Hansen, Katie “Kha’tie” Postma, Guy Sprung and Sebastien Yellel shared behind-the-scenes insights, stories and the creative processes that brought the game to launch.
☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In the Guildmaster event, Taerun assigned the participants a variety of unique tasks to complete.
☛ Sunday started with the Myst Documentary panel, where Philip Shane (filmmaker), Katie “Kha’tie” Postma and Joshua Reinstein gave the latest updates and showed some footage of the Riven launch event at Cyan HQ. The documentary is having trouble funding the full production. David Van Taylor was brought in to help with pitching, and Julie McElmurry is helping with production. The working title now is “A World I’d Want To Live In: Myst and the Video-Game Revolution“.
☛ The Closing Ceremonies wrapped up this year’s convention, running the prize drawing, and announced next year’s location: Atlanta, GA!
☛ After the Closing Ceremonies, attendees joined unofficial excursions to see some of Montréal’s many attractions, including the Biodôme and the Jardin Botanique.
Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.
Looking forward to next year!
Cyan announced that the 3D remake of Riven will be released on June 25! The game will simultaneously launch for Windows PC via Steam and GOG, MacOS (Apple Silicon) via Mac App Store, and the VR platforms Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3.
In celebration of the game’s release, players can pre-order Riven on Meta Quest and receive 11% off the 34.99 USD price until launch; Windows and MacOS players will get 10% off at launch, but only for a limited time.
Launch trailers were released for the PC and Meta Quest version. A non-VR demo was released on Steam, for the Next Fest event (June 10–17).
Reviews were posted on TechRaptor, Gematsu, VentureBeat, RoadToVR, AdventureGamers, and many others.
On December 19 Cyan announced that the upcoming realtime 3D remake of Riven can be added to your wishlist on Steam and GOG!
Game Informer published an interview about Riven, which included various screenshot from the game, including a picture of a 3D model of Gehn, done with a much more realistic tech compared to those used for the Myst remake. Two passages stand out (emphasis added):
“This is a dangerous question, but when you heard we were remaking Riven, what kinds of things did you hope we’d do?” he asks me. I think about it for a few seconds. I tell him all the parts of the world I wanted to explore more, as well as the two additional worlds we only glimpsed in the original game. I wince, worrying I’ve just described an impossibly grand vision for the new Riven. But Miller smiles. “So far? Check, check, check, check.”
Suggesting that Tay and/or Age 233 may be explorable, and:
“There are more stories to tell in the D’ni universe that aren’t directly about Atrus’s family. There are other characters out there that [our fans] are familiar with, and it would be a shame if we didn’t leverage those to our benefits.”
Confirming their intention, mentioned at Mysterium 2023, of making more (if smaller) games set in the D’ni universe.
30 years of Myst – and 20 years of Uru! The Cavern Today is proud to present a very special celebratory episode for our Autumn 2023 edition – featuring very special guests Rand & Robyn Miller! For this podcast, we’re pleased to bring you:
The Cavern Today is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & other services – as well as The Cavern Today’s website.
☛ MOULa will be offline Wednesday 8 (today!) at 9:00 KIT for the Q2/Q3 update! The downtime should last about two hours. We will post a changelog with the fixes and goodies soon after that.
☛ To honor Riven’s 26th anniversary, RIUM+ spent roughly 350 hours upgrading his restored Riven Journals, a (spoiler-less) collection of books and puzzles that give more insight into the game’s world. It is recommended to start with the middle journal, then the right one and leave the left one to last. You can read more on RIUM+ blog post.
☛ Rand Miller was a guest at Lucca Comics & Games, an annual comic book and gaming convention in Italy, the second biggest in the world after Comiket. He was invited at four panels, two about Myst specifically, one about his career experience, and a round table discussion about contemporary gaming, where he was joined by Yū Suzuki (designer, producer, programmer, and engineer for Sega for 18 years) and Arnar Hrafn Gylfason (Director of Production for Valorant).
☛ In their Kickstarter update for October 25, Cyan confirmed that all remaining physical rewards for Firmament are expected to ship in early 2024.