Cyan Development Director Hannah Gamiel detailed the studio’s hand tracking update for Myst on Quest.
The new update makes the entirety of Myst playable with just open air hand tracking on Quest headsets. Cyan decided on a few gestures for supporting movement around the island with both teleport and smooth locomotion via hand tracking. You just point where you want to go.
The update also adds in-game screenshots to take notes, and while there’s no gesture to take those screenshots with hand tracking “we do hope to bring that to Myst soon,” Gamiel said.
“We dialed in most, if not all of the gestures to be very comfortable to use for extended periods of time,” Gamiel told UploadVR. “And I’m talking about like at least an hour or two of playtime, because people like get lost in Myst.”
Gamiel joined our virtual studio to talk about the update and you can check it out in the 10-minute video embedded below. We discussed the challenges of hand tracking on current VR hardware, the forthcoming Myst DLC course coming to Walkabout Mini Golf, Myst’s legacy across generations and what’s next for Cyan.
“We are hoping to do a director’s commentary update where we bring in some of the original developers on Myst,” Gamiel said. “You can experience that as you play Myst as well. And additionally, something that’s been highly requested for a long time from people with this new version of Myst has been ‘where’s node mode. I want to play Myst as if it was like the classic edition where I point and click to exactly the node I want to go to.’ We’re hoping to include that as well in a future update, so this is by no means the end of updates for Myst.”
