Horned’s dungeon has a new interview up on their website with Max Schaefer.
It goes through a variety of questions about game features and what is to come in the future of the game.
Mythos will finance itself about so-called item-stores. In which prize area will these stores move?
Max Schaefer: You will be able to buy items and services from vendors using the in-game cash currency in each town. They will work very much like the regular vendors, only instead of gold, silver, and copper, they will take the cash currency.
Will there be for fans like me sometime maybe a collector edition? Lineage 2 has demonstrated it here and after 2 years has thrown on the market a collector edition.
Max Schaefer: That’s a little ahead of where we’re thinking right now, but I like the idea. If we are successful in launching Mythos, we’ll do something like that for our fans!
[...]
Thank you Mr. Schaefer for this Interview. I hope Mythos would be a great Game.. No, I know that Mythos would be a great Game. Im a big Fan of this Game. And if, nevertheless, you want to make liable to pay costs one day. I think here the fans pay with pleasure monthly. A survey of us confirms this that the people were ready to pay.
Max Schaefer: There really is no good way to get money from customers, is there? If only we could get a government subsidy and provide the game for free to everyone, then everyone would be happy! Seriously, a huge part of our market is the Asian territories, and they are almost 100% using the item store model. Since our team is as small as our budget, we can only support one financial model at this time, and are going with the item store concept worldwide. We think it provides the most flexibility, and the best option for those who cannot pay any cash to play.
There are more questions on their website, so go check them out!
Today there will be a brief server outage at 4pm PDT (GMT-7) for about 90 minutes. This is to prepare current testers clients for the upcoming Test Center as well as a few small fixes.
The Test Center is not up and running for the current testers, but your client will now give you the option of connecting for when it is up. There are some small bugs in the way and once they’re squashed the Test Center will go up and the overworld will be unleashed! Thank you for your patience, and as always, see you in Uld!
Ten Ton Hammer has a bunch of screenshots and concept art from Mythos up on their website, and while we’ve seen most of them, it’s still a good source for signatures and avatars!
Hey fellow Hellgate Guru and Mythos Guru users. Sol Invictus, the website owner and administrator is currently performing a few changes to the way these sites will function.
What is basically happening, is that the Mythos Guru forums will be merged into the Hellgate Guru forums. This does not mean they will be as one big forum, but rather that Mythos Guru will be a sub forum of Hellgate Guru and it will be a matter of clicking one extra button to get to the familiar Mythos Guru forums.
What this means:
- There will still be two separate front pages for news
- The new posts button will likely show both forums, unless we split it up later
- Likely, the users over at Mythos Guru will be deleted from the user base so as not to have duplicates. Your posts will be transferred over, but you will have to re-register on Hellgate Guru to have an account. This may or may not happen though and we appologise for any issues it causes
- There will be one account used to login to both forums which will mean same avatars, signatures and post counts over both sites
- The forums URL will be linked to Hellgate Guru so to all the Mythos Guru users, bookmark our new forums here once this is done
We will do our best to try to make this process as easy as we can on you guys.
Mythos Conclave had their first round table discussion in IRC today, which was mainly to do with the overworld. While it was mostly fans talking, it’s an interesting read and Mythos Community Manager, Taylor Balbi, was present to add some of his input which can be seen below.
<@TaylorFSS`home> We’re looking at how many we can cram into an overworld, we really won’t know the true number until it reaches you guys. We’re thinking 100+ will be sharing an Overworld. Also, transferring from one overworld instance to the other will require you to be in a safe area.
<%G-15> From what I saw, cities are now part of the Overworlds
<@TaylorFSS`home> Correct G-15
<%G-15> Which means switching will probably be allowed everywhere.
<@TaylorFSS`home> Switching is not allowed everywhere
<@TaylorFSS`home> Forests are helpful hehe
<@TaylorFSS`home> Stack splitting is definitely something we need
<@TaylorFSS`home> ya, a smooth respawn rate would be nice to have
I want roving Giant bosses on the overworld that are random.
<@TaylorFSS`home> in due time Firedog, currently the overworld isn’t big enough to have giants roaming around
Gamer’s Hell has released four video trailers from Flagship on their website two days ago. The first three videos we have already seen, however they are now available for download in their High Definition versions. They talk of Mythos in general and also showcase the classes.
The fourth video is however the one to look at, as it’s a new trailer of the Mythos Overworld. The video previews the area and hints at an upcoming open beta!
IGN’s website, RPG Vault, has started a new section recently titled “Focus” where they invite a few leading industry developers to talk about an issue. While there isn’t anything strictly Hellgate or Mythos related in the article, one of the developers invited is from Flagship Studios.
Today, the “focus” discussion was about RPGs and the genre that certain games belong to, as well as how RPGs have changed over the years. The two industry developers today were Steve Bauman, the associate producer at Gas Powered Games (which incidently is making Demigod which you can read about on DemigodGuru) as well as Max Schaefer, who is the Co-Founder and COO of Flagship Studios.
In 1993, Max Schaefer, brother Erich and friend David Brevik co-founded Condor, which became Blizzard North when acquired in 1996. He served as Vice President of Blizzard North and a Director of Blizzard before the same trio plus Bill Roper and David Williams started Flagship Studios in 2003. Some of his credits include Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Hellgate: London.
The article talks about Max’s previous games like Diablo as well as other games in the genre.
The very first test we did at the beginning of the Diablo project was to make a guy with a mace, a simple dungeon, and a skeleton. We set it up so if you clicked the on skeleton, the guy would walk over and whack him one. It was a “lightning in a bottle’ moment, and there was no question we were on to something big. Instead of instructing my character to hit something, I just did it with my mouse click. Everyone could enjoy this! It’s a theory we’ve continued with our current title, Mythos, an action RPG if there ever was one.
So for me, the term action RPG was invented to refer to those games that concentrate on the visceral, graphic imagery and action of the genre. The emphasis is more on battle than lore. All the trappings can be there - the leveling, the stats, the magic loot, the crafting, the questing… It’s just that there tends to be less emphasis on dialogue, story or role-playing.
[...]
However, take the example of the 500-pound gorilla in the room, World of Warcraft. People generally agree it’s a classic RPG, but in reality, it’s also an action RPG: playing it takes a good amount of dexterity, there’s a decent amount of action, and there’s more an overall context than there is a specific story. But if there’s any title that defines the RPG market, and influences how developers must approach the genre, it’s World of Warcraft.
While many have tried, it’s probably futile to try to be a WoW-killer. Not only did the game have great talent with a virtually unlimited budget and timeline, it has also had many years of well-subsidized development post-launch. No publisher in its right mind would commit the resources necessary to beat it at that game. It’s just way too risky.
Steve’s discussion can be seen on page two and talks about his views of the genre.
The whole discussion is a very interesting read and provides some insight on how the genre has evolved.
Th Mythos website has been updated with a list of major changes that are currently happening to the game.
The main thing that they talk about, is the introduction of a full open world, with instances scattered throughout it. Best way to describe it would probably be something similar to Oblivion, but with randomised dungeons.
This on it’s own also leads to many other changes to things like PVP and quests.
You can read the full list of changes at our forums as well as seeing some screenshots.
Massively.com has a new article up where they detail the crafting system in Mythos.
Crafting itself is simple to pick up — just hit R and spend points in the crafting tree. You’ll see that it is impossible for a single crafter to become an expert in more than one or two skills. The skill trees themselves are oddly split — training in Swords and Axes gives you no abilities to create Spears and Polearms. Master the crafting of chest armors, but that will do you no good when it comes to making shoulders and helms. Focus on becoming the best cobbler in Uld, but don’t expect that skill to carry over into the scribing of Heraldries.
Lagorama, a gaming blog, also has their experience up, however one interesting thing that it reports on is a small teaser from Travis Baldree from the official forums, which is a hint that a more WoW like camera view is to be added into Mythos.
Mythos Guru was founded early in 2007 as the first fansite and forum ever dedicated to Flagship Studios' online game, Mythos. It caters to an international base of players and guilds. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor Hellgate Guru, Mythos Guru shares a proud tradition of sponsoring and organizing community backed projects and events, and a powerful skill calculator. More
