I bought and played the first one on Mac when it was new, and thought it was quite good for a point-and-click snoozer. We had a minor blizzard in January 1996 and got snowed in for about a week...that week was a blur of Myst, Doom II and weed. Lots and lots of weed. Weed makes Myst better.
That's a shame. I love the Myst series. Myst was one of the reasons I bought a CD-ROM drive and a sound card for my 486-DX back in the day. After reading "The Book of Atrus" it made the Myst games much more enjoyable after learning how linking books worked and the history between Atrus and Gehn. I still have not played Myst 4 and I'm probably not going to be able to play "End of Ages" for a while. My laptop isn’t that great. I'm happy to see they at least finished the series. I'm surprised to see that they are not using actors in "End of Ages". In my opinion, live actors were one of the Myst series trade marks.
Honestly, after playing Myst IV, I can't say I miss it.
Don't get me wrong, I love the series. Read the books, played all the games (URU sucked), but IV finally made me not care anymore. Oh, it was beautiful as always, and the puzzles were as good as ever (though not quite at the level of Riven), but the plot... holy Christ, it's just one new age cliche after another. When I finally reached Serenia and the music kicked in, I exited the game, uninstalled it, and never looked back (though considering how awful the acting is, I'd considered it several times before this).
Now, I know how it ends. Myst IV has an ending that would at least be a good way to finish things (though it really should have ended after Riven). But V is all about rebuilding D'ni, and that just doesn't interest me anymore. The goal has been hovering there for so long that it's no longer meaningful to me. Unless there's a huge plot twist that finishes the series with a bang, I just can't bring myself to care if D'ni will really get built this time for real we mean it honest.