The team here at Cyan is excited to announce that we’re launching the modern remakes of our award-winning puzzle adventure games Myst and Riven on PS5 and PlayStation VR2 May 19.
Myst and Riven (the sequel to Myst) were originally released on PC and the original PlayStation in the ‘90s and quickly became cultural phenomena. In fact, the release of the original Myst in 1993 had an approximately 10-year-long run of being the best-selling PC game in the world. To celebrate how popular both games were on the original PlayStation back in the day, the classic versions of Myst and Riven from the original PlayStation were re-released digitally last year, thanks to efforts between both Cyan and Sony Interactive Entertainment, and continue to be available to purchase and play in most regions worldwide.
I’m excited to have this opportunity to share more about how we made sure that our remakes of Myst and Riven could take advantage of both PS5 and PS5 Pro features to bring folks the best experience based on the way they prefer to play.
Flatscreen and PS VR2 play
Both Myst and Riven will support both flatscreen (2D) and PS VR2 at launch. This was the toughest part of development for us – making sure the experience of players using either playstyle would shine. We brought over some lessons we learned from a release of a previous title of ours on PS5, Firmament (which also supported both 2D and VR), to help improve each playstyle – both in interactions, graphical fidelity, base render resolution, performance, and more. In turn, some of the lessons we learned from these new releases have also already been brought back into Firmament. We’re excited to see how players react to being able to experience Myst and Riven with their preferred play method.
Ray-traced reflections and Performance mode
Myst and Riven will also support ray tracing through the display of ray-traced reflections (limited to flatscreen mode only). We’ve made sure that this support is included in our games on both the PS5 and PS5 Pro. While ray-traced reflections are enabled, frame rate is limited to 30 FPS to account for a smoother play experience while more time is spent on the render thread.
While ray-traced reflections are disabled (with screen-space reflections being used instead), each game’s frame rate is increased to 60 FPS. Players have a choice in enabling ray-traced reflections by disabling the Performance Mode checkbox in the Display settings menu in each game, which will also subtly change the base render resolution of the game to accommodate for leveraging graphics vs. leveraging performance.
PS5 Pro Enhanced features
We’re also happy to state that Myst and Riven are both officially PS5 Pro Enhanced titles. This means a couple of things in our case – the first of which is an increase in graphical fidelity in each game’s flatscreen mode on PS5 Pro, including better view distance, foliage, textures, post-processing, and shading. Second, players in VR on PS5 Pro in both games will have better base render resolution when playing each game – and in Riven’s flatscreen mode, leaving the Performance Mode checkbox enabled will grant better base render resolution.
The games are taking advantage of tweaked implementations of Unreal Engine’s TSR, which allows us to use upscaling on both PS5 Pro and base PS5 in return for better graphics options.
Power Saver Mode support
Myst and Riven will also join the list of PS5 games with Power Saver support. Power Saver mode is a relatively new feature for PS5 that enables games to scale back performance to save on energy consumption (and therefore save on energy costs for many players). Both Myst and Riven support this new feature by decreasing each game’s base render resolution and forcing a fixed frame rate of 30 FPS.
Delve into Myst and Riven
The Cyan team worked hard to make sure that these from-the-ground-up remakes of Myst and Riven take advantage of plenty of PS5 features, especially for PS5 Pro. Whether you’re playing from the comfort of your couch with a DualSense wireless controller in flatscreen mode, or enjoying our games up-close and personal in PS VR 2, we think you’ll be in for quite a treat. We appreciate everyone’s support of our studio and hope to keep making great games for another 40 years!
Myst and Riven on PS5 are available to wishlist beginning today, May 5, and will be available to purchase and play for $34.99 USD each on May 19.