Riven Download

[Rolando Kumar]

RivenThe Sequel to Myst is a puzzle adventure video game, the second in the Myst series of games. Developed by Cyan Worlds, it was initially published by Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Broderbund. Riven was distributed on five compact discs and released for Mac and Windows personal computers on October 31, 1997, in North America; it was later released on a single DVD-ROM in 1998.[7] Riven was also ported to several other platforms. The story of Riven is set after the events of Myst. Having been rescued from the efforts of his sons, Atrus enlists the help of the player character to free his wife from his power-hungry father, Gehn. Riven takes place almost entirely on the Age of Riven, a world slowly falling apart due to Gehn's destructive rule.

Development of Riven began soon after Myst became a success, and spanned more than three years. In an effort to create a visual style distinct from that of Myst, director Robyn Miller and his brother, producer Rand Miller recruited former Aladdin production designer Richard Vander Wende as a co-director. Broderbund employed a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to publicize the game's release.

Riven was praised by reviewers, with the magazine Salon proclaiming that the game approaches the level of art. Critics positively noted the puzzles and immersive experience of the gameplay, though publications such as Edge felt that the nature of point-and-click gameplay limited the title heavily. The best-selling game of 1997, Riven sold 1.5 million copies in one year. After the game's release, Robyn Miller left Cyan to form his own development studio, ending the professional partnership of the two brothers. Rand stayed at Cyan and continued to work on Myst-related products including The Myst Reader and the real-time rendered game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. The next entry in the Myst series, Myst III: Exile, was developed by Presto Studios and published by Ubisoft. A remake of the game, recreating the world in fully explorable 3D and supporting both normal and virtual reality, was released in June 2024.

Like its predecessor, Riven is a point and click adventure game played from a first-person perspective. The player explores immersive environments depicted through a large series of computer generated stills using mouse clicks for movement or to manipulate objects within reach.[8] By operating mechanical contraptions and deciphering codes and symbols discovered in the surroundings, the vaguely explained goal can eventually be reached.[9]

To navigate the world, the player clicks in the direction they want to walk or turn. The cursor changes in appearance, depending on its position on the screen and what it is hovering over, to show what effect clicking will have.[8] For instance, if the player positions the cursor hand near the side of the screen, it may show a pointing finger, indicating that clicking will turn the view in that direction.[8] The cursor changes in context to show when players can drag or toggle switches, or when certain items can be picked up and carried.[10] Such items can then be examined at any time,[10][11] and either reveal clues to puzzles or provide information on the game's setting and story. Like Myst, Riven has an optional method of navigation known as Zip Mode, which allows players to skip to areas already explored, but may cause them to miss important clues.[8]

Riven has more complex and numerous puzzles than its forerunner and is set in a larger virtual world for players to explore.[12] Whereas in Myst the objective of the game is to travel to different Ages to solve puzzles before returning to a "hub Age", Riven's gameplay takes place on the five islands of the Age of Riven. Much of it consists of solving puzzles to access new areas of the islands, though players are also able to explore without fulfilling objectives.[11] The volcanic landscape depicted, with its steep cliffs and crater lakes, is bestrewn with mechanical, Victorian-style artifacts such as elevators, pipes, levers and roller coaster-like transports.[11][12] To solve the game, players must consider the purpose and physical principles of these artifacts as well as their role in the fictional culture.[12]

Riven's story continues where Myst and its companion novel, The Book of Atrus, left off. Atrus knows the ancient art of creating "linking books", specially written books that serve as portals to other worlds known as "Ages".[13] Atrus needs the player's help to free his wife, Catherine, who is held hostage in her home Age of Riven, which is slowly collapsing. Her captor is Gehn, Atrus' manipulative father and self-declared ruler of Riven. Thirty years earlier, Atrus and Catherine trapped Gehn on Riven by removing all of the linking books that led out of the Age. The final book they escaped from Riven with, leading to the Age of Myst, fell into the Star Fissure, a rift leading out of the damaged Age of Riven into a mysterious, space-like void. The linking book was not destroyed but was instead found by the player, leading to the events of Myst. Catherine was later tricked into returning to Riven by her sons, Sirrus and Achenar, whereupon she was taken hostage by Gehn.[13]

Cyan began work on Riven in 1993, after Myst's release. Before development began, when the name of the game was undecided, the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller said they wanted a "natural flow" from the first game to the sequel.[15] As Myst proved to be a popular and commercial success, the two developers were able to expand their four-person team to a much larger crew of designers, artists, programmers, and sound designers.[6] Development spanned more than four years, and was a much larger undertaking than for the first game;[6] Riven had a budget of between US$5 and $10 million, more than ten times the cost of developing Myst.[16]

The design for Riven stemmed from a desire to create something different and more dynamic than the romantic style of Myst. At an early point, the game's world was to be called Equiquay.[17] The first stage of development was to create the puzzles, in an attempt to integrate them as smoothly as possible into the areas in the game. The Millers met their co-designer, Richard Vander Wende, at a demonstration of Myst for the Digital World Expo in Los Angeles.[6] Vander Wende had previously worked for ILM,[6] and at Disney as a designer for the animated feature Aladdin.[12] As the third member of Riven's conceptual team, Vander Wende ended up contributing what Robyn Miller described as an "edgier" and complementary vision, that made the game dramatically different from its predecessor.[6]

As in Myst, the topography of the islands was originally created as grayscale images, where brightness corresponded to elevation.[6][12] In Softimage, these maps were turned into the terrain models seen in the game.[12][18] The large island objects were broken apart to facilitate efficient rendering, which required them to be created using polygonal geometry.[18] All other objects were modeled using B-splines and NURBS.[18]

Many of the textures were accumulated during a three-day trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The artists took hundreds of photos of wood, adobe, sand, stucco and other materials, which were treated in Photoshop before being mapped onto the 3D geometry.[6][18] Whereas many computer-generated environments of the time ended up looking smooth, like plastic,[6] the Millers and Vander Wende developed a more gritty and weathered design, with corroded and aged elements, to imply reality.[6][12] The artists considered how objects would look and function if they were real, where and how they would be worn, and created corresponding details.[18] While bump maps were occasionally used to simulate geometry, even small details such as screws were often individually modeled.[18]

Rendering was executed in Mental Ray, using numerous custom-made shaders to produce lifelike lighting, water and landscapes.[18] Wireframes also served as a guide to model the backgrounds.[19] In total Riven has over three hours of video[12] and almost five thousand images;[6] rendering was a major bottleneck in production despite the use of 18 dedicated workstations.[18] Some scenes consisted of tens of thousands of individual models and textures and more than a hundred virtual light sources. Loading a single island model could take two hours.[18] Runtime animation effects were created by Mark DeForest, to add flying insects and simple water ripples.[18]

Riven combined the pre-rendered backgrounds with live action footage, in order to increase the player's immersion level.[6][11] Riven was the first game in which any of its designers had directed live actors, and Vander Wende was apprehensive about their use.[6] Rand Miller had to reprise his role of Atrus from Myst, even though he hated acting.[12] All the actors were filmed with a blue screen as a backdrop, which was removed in post-production by chroma key, so that the actors would blend into the virtual environment.[12] Real world stairs, doorways and studio lights had to be meticulously positioned on the live stage to match their CG equivalents. Some sequences were seamlessly cut together with morphing, to allow for partial variations due to the nonlinearity of the gameplay.[18]

Robyn Miller composed Riven's music, which was later packaged and released by Virgin Records as Riven: The Soundtrack. Miller designed the liner notes and packaging, which included English translations of the language found in the game.[20] Whereas the music to Myst was, at first, only available by mail-order from Cyan, Virgin Records had bought the rights to release it initially, prompting Miller to make sure that it could stand alone in CD form.[21] The compact disc was released on February 24, 1998, with 54 minutes of music.[22]

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