Riven (2024)

Man, this is wild. I had the full original boxed game of this like... 25 years ago? I doubt i'd remember much. This looks great.

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Myst and Riven were scorned by hardcore gamers back in the day. They were the games that non-gamers played. It’s weird seeing all these young gaming ‘journalists’ missing that and instead talking about these games as though they were classics.
 
Finally booted this up.

Its got some weirdness with the LoD's, where sometimes distant geometry will look worse if you look right at it. But, better if its in your peripheral. And you can watch it happen as you turn. Also, the white caps and sparkle in the water, look better if you are moving. If you stop moving, the effect is dulled. Weird.

Textures detail on rock faces look noticeably more detailed when running 4K downscaled to 1440p, rather than native 1440p. It seems like its actually a much higher quality asset. Its more detail benefit than I would usually expect from downsampling.
Because of this, I recommend using DSR to run your monitor at a higher res, and then use DLSS to keep the performance more/less the same as native.

There are a couple of spots right away, which inexplicably tank performance. But otherwise, runs solid, and looks beautiful and nostalgic.
 
Hershy said:
Myst and Riven were scorned by hardcore gamers back in the day. They were the games that non-gamers played. It’s weird seeing all these young gaming ‘journalists’ missing that and instead talking about these games as though they were classics.
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I played them. Right along with Wing Commander, Doom, Wolf3d, Descent, Tribes, Quake, and many other FPS, puzzle, and RTS games and their sequels. Myst and Riven certainly had basically nothing in the way of handholding; IIRC, Myst shipped with a journal book for you to take notes in. The puzzles ranged from the blindingly obvious to incredibly obtuse and a couple that fall into 'why the hell did they do that' realm (the interminable clicking in the cave railway puzzle for example).

Myst sold over 6 million copies in its original form (500k in '94, over a million by March of '95); Riven over 8 million (1.5 million in its first year). For the 90's, in PC gaming, those are outstanding sales numbers. Huh, while pulling those numbers, turns out Myst was the best selling game of the 90's only finally overtaken by The Sims in 2002. So, by 'hardcore' you really mean 'elitist snob' who is upset that other people buy games that they don't like.

If my dad had a computer with a capable GPU, I'd buy this for him, he was quite sad to discover that the old Riven executable has the 16-bit dependencies that are missing from NTVDM in 64-bit Windows. Guess I can point him at the 'remaster' on Steam.
 
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chameleoneel said:
I recommend using DSR to run your monitor at a higher res, and then use DLSS to keep the performance more/less the same as native.
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Is DLAA an option?

For DSR though there is DLDSR these days to get that visual jump without the performance hit.
 
Hershy said:
Myst and Riven were scorned by hardcore gamers back in the day. They were the games that non-gamers played. It’s weird seeing all these young gaming ‘journalists’ missing that and instead talking about these games as though they were classics.
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Seem a bit revisionist history (at least Myst), who was an hardcore pc gamers January 1, 1996 ? Casual gaming on a pc was not that big to create much division and there were no many people on the Internet to talk about that stuff. Quake was yet to be released, maybe in place where fast Internet started and some very niche culture of people in a very specific age group. They were game that gamers and non-gamer played thus the big success (I doubt they scorned game they never played, they were no youtube video to laugh at them)

Even by 2002, hardcore gamer was more of a thing, and the most hardcore gamers I can think of, did play The Sims, maybe they will tell you was a bad game or not a good one, etc... their actual action of playing it proof otherwise, it was not the biggest sellers ever for no reason.


I am sure hardcore cinephile scorned a lot of classic movies when they released, including the first Shawshank, Star Wars or Forest Gump, they are still classic.
 
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LodeRunner said:
So, by 'hardcore' you really mean 'elitist snob' who is upset that other people buy games that they don't like.
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Nope.

I was merely pointing out that back in the 90s there was one group who played all sorts of games… first person shooters, rpgs, action games, strategy games… and then there was another well-defined group who made it known that they were ‘above ‘ gaming and only played chess games and flight simulators.

I can’t count the number of people I met in the early 90s who would readily admit they owned chess games and MS Flight Simulator, but also believed that gaming was for children. And they’d say it right to your face.

The fact is, you have it totally backwards.

It wasn’t the hardcore gamers who were the snobs. It was the Myst crowd, the Chess crowd, the flight simulator crowd. They were the assholes. They were the ones who looked down on people who were gaming as a hobby. We, the pioneers of this hobby, took so much abuse in the 80s and 90s.

Gaming has only become cool recently. There was a time when we were called unsocialized geeks. I lived through that, man.
 
Hershy said:
Nope.

I was merely pointing out that back in the 90s there was one group who played all sorts of games… first person shooters, rpgs, action games, strategy games… and then there was another well-defined group who made it known that they were ‘above ‘ gaming and only played chess games and flight simulators.

I can’t count the number of people I met in the early 90s who would readily admit they owned chess games and MS Flight Simulator, but also believed that gaming was for children. And they’d say it right to your face.

The fact is, you have it totally backwards.

It wasn’t the hardcore gamers who were the snobs. It was the Myst crowd, the Chess crowd, the flight simulator crowd. They were the assholes. They were the ones who looked down on people who were gaming as a hobby. We, the pioneers of this hobby, took so much abuse in the 80s and 90s.

Gaming has only become cool recently. There was a time when we were called unsocialized geeks. I lived through that, man.
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I never met any of these kinds of people growing up as a gamer in the '90s.
 
Hershy said:
Gaming has only become cool recently.
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Not sure about cool..... no one would find an adult that play video game has an hobby cool versus someone that restore old muscle car, travel the world, play in a band, work with the woods, hunting trips.... not sure if there still to this day more of an uncool hobby than play game, it just became neutral and acceptable at small dose, almost reaching Chess and a flight simulator level of acceptability, gamers will tend to rapidly point out they do all of those other things or they play a quick round after an hardday work when the children are sleeping.

An pro-athlete that play a lot of video game during the season is still judged differently than, say, play golf. It has yet to reach all of the society how socials the younger gamers turned gaming in.

For being in what was a small group of people with computers at home in the late 80s-early 90s and played game, I do remember ever encountered any abuse from it, maybe because kids never did to play video game and you needed to be older, but older brothers and his friend I do not think so, is this based in real life experience ? Or media depiction ? Who would know you played computer game in your living room to start with ?

Hershy said:
It wasn’t the hardcore gamers who were the snobs.
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The hardcore gamers you describe were obviously and proudly snobbish about the Myst video game, they both were. One group was probably lying and did in reality play Myst and the Sierra like game before that, keyboard and the point&click versions.
 
criccio said:
Is DLAA an option?

For DSR though there is DLDSR these days to get that visual jump without the performance hit.
Click to expand...
DLAA does not seem to be an option.

Regarding regular DSR and DLDSR, I can't say I have noticed a performance difference. And your GPU certainly still has to render more.

The trick is to downscale and run DLSS at the same time. That makes the render load essentially native res, But you are super sampling the DLSS upscale.
 
Hershy said:
Nope.

I was merely pointing out that back in the 90s there was one group who played all sorts of games… first person shooters, rpgs, action games, strategy games… and then there was another well-defined group who made it known that they were ‘above ‘ gaming and only played chess games and flight simulators.

I can’t count the number of people I met in the early 90s who would readily admit they owned chess games and MS Flight Simulator, but also believed that gaming was for children. And they’d say it right to your face.

The fact is, you have it totally backwards.

It wasn’t the hardcore gamers who were the snobs. It was the Myst crowd, the Chess crowd, the flight simulator crowd. They were the assholes. They were the ones who looked down on people who were gaming as a hobby. We, the pioneers of this hobby, took so much abuse in the 80s and 90s.

Gaming has only become cool recently. There was a time when we were called unsocialized geeks. I lived through that, man.
Click to expand...
I think you should gather by list of games played that I did to; except apparently I wasn't surrounded by assholes as you were.
 
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