Mythos - Preview
We dropped by developer Flagship Studios' offices last Friday to take a
peek at a curious little project it's been working on called Mythos. What began as a simple test of the underlying technology that Flagship developed for the upcoming Hellgate: London has become a wildly compelling MMO all its own. The best thing about Mythos is that Flagship will be offering it over the Internet almost completely free of charge.
Darling Diablo
Comprised of former employees of the mega-development house Blizzard (instigators of the obscenely popular Diablo, StarCraft and Warcraft
franchises), Flagship has crafted a point-and-click role-playing game
essentially on a lark. Remarkably similar to the classic
dungeon-crawler Diablo (or Diablo 2, to be more current), Mythos has a an art style that hews a little closer to the cartoony World of Warcraft. From a three-quarter perspective viewpoint, you direct your little character around the world of Mythos
by left-clicking on a location on the screen and attack by
right-clicking on enemies. It really couldn't be simpler as far as game
design goes.
As of last Friday, there were only three available character classes to
choose from (though Flagship assures us that there will be many more in
the near future). The Bloodletter is your basic warrior class, except
that they can use the blood of their victims to summon creepy little
fleshlings to aid them in battle. The Engineer specializes in firearms
and uses clockwork drones to assist during combat. The Pyromancer (our
class of choice) controls the element of fire to shoot flames from
their palms or fashion tiny fiery familiars. Each of these classes
could eventually have some kind of pet or helper depending on what kind
of skills you choose when leveling up (in classic Diablo style).
Three races were also made available to us, though no particular
benefits or disadvantages seemed to be associated with each. Humans
fill in for the unadventurous player that would prefer sticking to the
familiar, while horned Satyrs and puny Gremlins (similar to World of Warcraft's
Gnomes) round out the choices. Again, Flagship promises to expand on
the variety, but as the game is still in pre-beta stages at this point,
these limitations seem acceptable.
Small But Mighty
This is especially true considering the growth that Mythos has undergone in the last year and a half or so. As stated before, Mythos grew out of a desire to test some online systems for Hellgate: London,
but grew into a pet project of one of the developers. Now, the crew has
increased to include about nine folks, which is still a very small team
for MMO game development.
This miniscule group of extremely dedicated devs enables the Mythos
team to do things that large-scale development houses can't take risks
on. For example, Flagship is taking a somewhat leisurely approach to
filling out content, choosing to build the game iteratively a little
bit at a time. While the team has big plans for the future, those plans
range from content-ready to mere concept sketches. The bonus to gamers
here is that Flagship is dedicated to incorporating user feedback into
the design of the game, so that as the audience expands and grows over
time, the company can build the game to suit their whims (and the whims
of the incredibly imaginative developers).
The other unique feature that Mythos'
small team approach offers is that the developers don't have to worry
about money. Since the game is basically a heavily supported side
project using minimal staff (almost always the largest cost associated
with any game development cycle), Flagship isn't concerned about how
it's going to make all the money back and so can serve Mythos
up without cost to the users. Flagship is planning on giving players
the opportunity to purchase "funbucks" (possibly a temporary name),
which they could trade for special items and goods in-game. However,
the developers have made it very clear that while they want to offer
the chance for people to buy stuff without any in-game effort, they
will be careful to balance this by enabling people earn these goods
just by playing the game. Whichever asset you've got (either money or
time), you'll be able to turn them into cool stuff in Mythos... at least, that's the goal.
After a couple of hours with Mythos
we can honestly color ourselves entranced by this surprise candidate
for new online obsession. The passion of the few developers that have
adopted the game is incredibly contagious, so it could be that we were
a little swayed by their breathless enthusiasm. Of course, it's far
more likely that we were mesmerized by the classic formula that
devoured hours of our time in previous games like Diablo. It's as potent as it is old.
|
