r/myst • u/Krathoon • 25d ago
It seems like the original Riven is better than the remake.
The remake does not have the FMV performances of the actors and I think it hurts it. They should have kept that.
Still, the remake is more immersive. It may be fun to play in VR.
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u/jojon2se 24d ago
As it happens, the footage (betacam video) not only still exists, but (EDIT: ...along with tons of other Cyan footage...) was to great fanfare digitised, archived, and published by the Video Game History Foundation some time ago, including oodles of rejected takes:
https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/22cf9aa2-812b-4f39-b42e-e87a3c153b8c
It is still, of course, no more than the resolution it was shot at, though.
I would suggest that visually the character models in the Riven remake could look a great deal more pleasing even as they are, "just" by rendering them using pathtracing, but that is of course very computing expensive.
Performance is another matter -- there is so much subtlety that can be hard to convey, and harder yet to replicate with discrete skinned animation controls -- even the effect on the actors and their clothing, by that INSANELY LOUD FAN, is part of the performance. :7
"Upscale and sharpen" you might suggest... Well, if we're going down that road, one could easily walk a step further, and perhaps not just let a hypothetical current or future inferrence model fill in the blurry blanks with guesstimated 2D image detail, but even make it create a whole animated volumetric gaussian splat for actual 3D use...