Myst and Riven: The World of the D'ni by Mark J.P. Wolf

Author:Mark J.P. Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub

Some of the roads curve 90 degrees and some are S-shaped curves, but these have been simplified in the diagram, as have the roller-coaster hills added to the maze in realMYST and the overpasses (which do not appear in realMYST). The maze is similar in form to the maze of walkways in the Channelwood Age, as both are experienced in the first-person mode as though one were inside them. On paper, one solves a maze with the entire maze in view, and false paths and dead ends often must be long and involved in complex networks so that the correct path is difficult to find. In a first-person maze, by contrast, dead ends are less obvious, so they need not be as long. In addition, the turning and backtracking done by an individual inside a maze makes disorientation and unintentional backtracking much more likely. Thus even a simple maze design, if you cannot see the entire maze at once, can prove to be difficult and take a while to solve. From the start to end, the Selenitic Age’s underground maze has nine points where the solver must choose between multiple pathways: seven with two paths, and two with three paths. A player who randomly chooses which path to take, then, has a 1 in 1,152 chance of choosing the entire correct path. Various sounds occur when the player arrives at a node (or when the red button is pressed) and these are intended as clues as to which way to turn, matching the sounds associated with directions in the Mechanical Age’s fortress rotation simulator, the only time clues from one Age are used in a puzzle in another Age. According to Richard Watson, this crossover was due to programming difficulties:

Actually the sounds were added to the fortress very near the end of the project so that you could tell if you’d stopped the fortress at the direction you wanted without walking all the way out of the building. Originally, it was much more important to get good with the simulator before trying to rotate the actual fortress.

In the Mac version, the simulator and the actual fortress worked identically and predictably. So you could practice with the simulator to learn the timing of the actual fortress and hit the direction you wanted almost every single time.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), the PC version that Brøderbund was working on was much less reliable. You could do the exact same actions on the fortress and sometimes it would rotate one position, sometimes two, sometimes three. It was far too frustrating to try to do it by timing. So the sounds from the Selenitic maze were added so you could tell which direction the fortress stopped at and try again if it wasn’t the direction you wanted.

(This is the reason that the Mac v1.0 fortress has the problem you mentioned earlier. One little typo when adding these sounds to the fortress at the last minute …)[26]

Although players could use the fortress rotation

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