reflections on finishing Myst 3

[zwol]

Yeah, yeah, I know, this game has been out for how many years now?

Oblique spoilers follow...

The final puzzle was cute, but a bit annoying, particularly when a glitch meant that I entered one of the sub-patterns correctly and it didn't work.

The endgame annoyed me. Sure, Saavedro has no reason to do anyone associated with Atrus a kindness, and besides he's completely batshit insane, but ... why am I forced to kick the man in the face one more time after all he's been through? Relatedly, he can see me standing there, why does he not chase me when he sees me going up the stairs instead of turning the switch as requested?

More generally, it would have been really nice to be able to talk to him. I realize that doing this right is an AI-complete problem (there's a fun little post-Singularity ethical nightmare: deliberately implementing an insane AI with the memory of having been screwed over, his entire world destroyed, and then stuck for 20 years in a giant puzzle - just to make a game that much more realistic...)

Nitpick: why was there a linking book to Atrus' new home Age in the endgame? If I understood correctly, that Age was written long after the puzzle worlds. It would have been more sensible for the book to have taken me to Myst, from which it is apparently possible to signal Atrus. (And it would have been a nice nod back at the first game.)

Comments

[queenpam.livejournal.com]

*poke* you should be working on your project, no?
Saavedro found the linking book to Atrus' home when Atrus left it in J'nanin. As for the rest...yeah, it really would have been nice to be able to negotiate with Saavedro. I don't understand why he doesn't follow you either. Overall, yeah, the game could have been done better in certain ways, but I really liked it anyway.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I have been working on my project all afternoon! I'm allowed to take half an hour and finish a game! :-)

It can't be the linking book Saavedro used to get to Atrus's house at the beginning of the game, it was in the area Saavedro couldn't get to (outside the inner barrier) ... so it has to have been placed by Atrus 'way back when, and yet it goes to an age that he hadn't written yet! ... It's just a game, I should probably just relax.

I did enjoy it overall, I just really thought that was an awful thing to have to do to Saavedro at the end. (Apparently it could be even worse, one is allowed to leave the poor guy trapped between the barriers. I couldn't bring myself to try it even to see what happened. ... I didn't let him kill me either, though.)

[queenpam.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure he couldn't get outside the inner barrier, after all he said he changed the three symbols (which seems like *huge* amount of work, given that he had to change them all in the J'nanin device, in the worlds themselves (those floating rocks?!), and in the viewer in Narayan) so he had to know them. I think he just didn't know the last symbol. (Not that he couldn't have guessed it in 20 years, but I guess he was sort of delusional for some of that time, at least, and then really busy changing the symbols ;))

Yeah, I felt bad about trapping the guy like that, after everything else. Really what I would have wanted to do is say "No, give me the book first, then I'll let you out. It's not like I have any reason not to, otherwise I'm stuck here with you or you follow me out, no? Also, I'm not a horrible person like that." I did end up trying all the endings out of curiosity. Atrus gets all upset when you get one of the bad endings in which you don't die, too.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Your theory is plausible. He might not have known Atrus' cute little sentences, but a dictionary attack on the three-symbol machine would only take ... hmm ... (8 × 4)⁴ = 1,048,576 trials per symbol. He totally had enough time for that.

It occurs to me that, even if he had managed to crack both halves of the puzzle, he wouldn't have been able to get out! Someone has to be on the inside to pull the handle. Of course, hard on the heels of this notion is the thought that surely in all those worlds he could have found tools with which to cut down that spikey grating (the one he hands the book through after you trap him).

I played the ending in which he throws the book off the edge of the platform, so I did see one of the Atrus-gets-all-upset scenes. I kinda wanted to rant at him then.