Hello, Myst fans!
First off, we’re happy to celebrate nearly 5 years since our remake of Myst was released on PC/Mac. Thank you so much to everyone who has purchased, played, and reviewed Myst over the last five years, and a special thanks to those who played our Rime update to Myst that we shipped in 2025. Your support enables us to keep doing what we do.
Second, we have a very small patch update to share with you all, followed by a Devlog describing what the future holds for this remake of Myst. Scroll down to see the patch notes and the Devlog below.
Global
Major
Minor
Microsoft Store Only
A Devlog About Future Support for Myst (and Riven)
We’re looking into what it would take to update our remakes of Myst and Riven to the latest version of Unreal (5.8).
Currently, Myst and Riven are stuck on Unreal Engine 5.3.2. There’s a good reason for this – mainly being that native ray tracing support in the engine on Windows, Mac, PS5, and Xbox Series platforms overall outside of the use of Lumen is basically “locked” to this version of Unreal.
If we update Myst and Riven to a version above 5.3.2, we would lose native-to-the-engine ray-tracing support in the game without fully converting Myst and Riven to using Lumen, which is not feasible at this time (especially for Myst). Yes, there are other possible solutions like using NVIDIA’s tech to bring in their version of ray-tracing… but we’ve historically experienced incompatibilities with building for multiple platforms when you factor in external tech like this, which creates tech debt and more manual exceptions to our engine’s codebase that become hard to maintain over time. Some folks may also suggest “rolling our own” version of ray tracing in the 5.8 engine outside of Lumen, but frankly, that will take up developer resources we simply do not (and will not) have available to create or maintain, especially as it is not an official effort supported by Epic.
Maybe the lack of ray-tracing in the game in the future doesn’t necessarily break anyone’s heart – but we do have to weigh the costs and benefits to any kind of engine upgrade before we proceed. Some of the benefits at this point to an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.8 would be a much better PSO caching system, which we know has historically been a pain point for some of our users who expect a hitchless experience in Myst and Riven – and many of those PSO micro hitches are unfortunately just not solvable without better engine tech we would need to upgrade to. Additionally, we would see better platform support features roll in, such as better support for the Steam Frame (both for 2D play and VR play) into the game – which at this time, would be a much better experience than the compatibility support we’d be able to offer through our version of Unreal Engine 5.3.2. We would also see better supersampling support become available to help with performance, in addition to other native engine performance gains and improvements that would naturally come with the engine upgrade. That, and as operating systems continue to evolve (especially MacOS, which can have breaking changes to how the OS interacts with our games over time), an engine upgrade almost always immediately addresses those gaps to help maintain compatibility of our game for many years to come. (Pre-emptive clarification in case this comes up from some of y’all inquiring about AI tools in Unreal 5.8: the Myst and Riven remakes were not built using AI tools, and we have no intent to use AI tools in them in the future.)
It is possible that when (or if) we do end up releasing a 5.8 version of Myst and Riven, we will make a “legacy” branch available of the 5.3.2 version of the game for a limited period of time, so folks can still experience ray-tracing. This would be similar to what we did for Myst, which allowed MacOS users on older MacOS versions or hardware to still be able to play the game through a beta branch. It is also possible we will decide NOT to bring this update to platforms where ray-tracing is already supported in the game. The reality is that Myst and Riven currently run and play well on these platforms, and a 5.8 update is currently not mission critical to implement until a compatibility update may force our hand.
In any event… There are plenty of hurdles for us to overcome before we get Myst and Riven running well in Unreal Engine 5.8. We certainly have our work cut out for us in doing so. We cannot give any kind of estimate or timeline as to when this major update will occur, especially as we are now a very small team – other than saying that this will be, at the very least, many months away. What we CAN say though is that, again, your purchase and shared experience of Myst, Riven, and the rest of our catalog is what has supported our team of developers to continue working on our games for both many decades prior, and hopefully many decades to come.
