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A new studio called Runic Games has arisen from the ashes of Flagship Studios’ demise. I managed to get a hold of Travis Baldree, founder and president of Runic Games and formerly the creator of Mythos, to ask him a few things about his new studio and the plans he has in store for it.
Check it out here.
While not strictly related to Blizzard, we’ve been following the progress of the former Flagship Studios’ developers, so this is relevant.
GameCyte has a new interview up with two of them who have started a new studio, Runic Games, who are Max Schaeferand Travis Baldree. The interview delves deep into why the company moved, why they think FSS failed like it did. It specifically mentions the current state of FSS right now as well. Specifically Max makes an emphasis on the fact that for all intents and purposes Flagship Studios is closed down, and Bill is just there to finish off the closure.
Max then goes on to talk about his brother and his involvement with the team. It then goes on to talk about if FSS had any chance of staying open. They then talk of the sorts of games they want to make with the new studios.
Next they talk about the game’s (Mythos) differentiation with Diablo 3 and Sacred 2, as well as the whole colour issue in Diablo 3. Lastly they mention that Namco at the moment is just handling the box sales of Hellgate London, but there is no current knowledge of what they plan to do with the game later.
WarCry network has posted up a new interview with Runic Games founder, Travis Baldree. He talks of the new studio, talks a little bit about Diablo 3 which may be their direct competition later, the sorts of games they want to make as well as what payment systems they are thinking of doing.
TenTonHammer has an interview up that they conducted with Travis Baldree and Max Schaefer, which looked at things like game features as well as the question of open beta.
Q: Talk about ingots some. How will you introduce items that are good enough that players want to buy them while still making sure that players who do not spend money can get the best items in the game? Can you give us an example of an item that we might purchase with ingots?
A: Every day we come up with new things that players could purchase. Our rule of thumb is that it should be cool, but it shouldn’t be necessary. And we won’t just sell the cool items. The sort of things we’ll sell are potions that give a boost to experience, or a shared account stash, or cosmetic items that make you look cooler than anyone else. Down the road, we’ll add guild houses, hopefully player housing, but that’s the direction we’re taking. We don’t think that buying the coolest items is fun for anyone. We want you to have to earn your loot, whether you’re paying or not.
Q: What is the plan to deal with gold spammers and other griefers?
A: We’ll try to design systems such that gold isn’t the be-all, end-all that it is in some games so there’s less incentive to farm. There will always be griefers, but we’ve tried to design our game play such that there’s just not that much griefing that you can do. Plus, we have ignore lists so you can immediately tune out the obnoxious, and good CSR tools so we can police complaints.
Q: When is Open Beta?
A: Open Beta will begin very soon. We won’t set a date because our criterion is not “when” but “what.” When we’re satisfied we’re ready, we’ll open it up. I can say that we’re looking to do that very soon.
Q: When will Mythos launch?
A: Again, it’s more of a “what” than a “when,” but it will be this year for sure. It won’t be too long before we’re able to give better and more accurate answers, but it sort of depends on how the Open Beta progresses. We have an aggressive schedule of additions and improvements we’d like to have in place.
Head over to their site to see the rest of the questions and answers.
Enjoy 
Online Welten, a German gaming website, has posted up an interview they conducted with Travis Baldree who is one of the main guys behind Mythos. The interview has been kindly translated by Online Welten into english, so head over to their site to read the whole thing. Here is a snippet from it:
OnlineWelten: Everbody who sees Mythos the first time, starts yelling “Diablo”. But how close to Diablo is Mythos really?
Travis Baldree: The core gameplay and feel is very, very similar to Diablo - but the structure of the world, and the instanced gameplay are much more akin to Guild Wars. In the end, with the random map system and the focus on speed, packs of monsters, and constant expansion of content, it’s starting to become its own beast.
OnlineWelten: Escpecially in Germany they are many sceptics concerning ingame-content bought by reallife money. How would you argue against those people? Better said: How would you convince them to pay?
Travis Baldree: We’re trying to refrain from just selling `powerful items` ingame - instead we’re charging for features like pets, respecs, cosmetic items, fireworks, and bonus items that might increase your luck or a similar attribute. We still want you playing the game. And with a dual currency system, players can legitimately trade for anything - even purchased items or services - without ever spending any real money.
OnlineWelten: If you have to describe Mythos in just three words…
Travis Baldree: …Fast, Free, and Fun!
Enjoy
Curse.com has posted up a new video preview of zone 3, and while we have similar videos already, they also provided us with a Q&A session with Travis Baldree.
The Q&A goes through some interesting questions including talk of PVP, Zone Sizes as well as story lines.
Quests and lore. Right now you do not feel too involved in the storyline and the lore aspects of the world. This could be improved upon greatly with more interesting and unique quests. Perhaps class specific quests and/or epic quests. Also, adding more lore and storyline development (i.e epic quest) would make the players feel part of the world a lot more. Is there any such plans for the future?
Definitely, and we’re acutely aware here of the lack of story in the game. We’re looking at doing some simple ( but hopefully stylish ) mini-cinematics to set the stage for the world, and our third Zone is more ‘lore-centric’ than previous zones, telling the story of what happened to the Dwarven race. We’ve also started adding books to the game with snippets of story. We sort of went about development backwards given our initial purpose as a network test. In the beginning, having the mechanics in place was the most important thing. Now that we’ve got the game up and running and enjoyable, we’re beginning a big effort to inject more story and lore into the game. We are also looking at new quest types to break up the flow of the game more.
There are many interesting questions to read, so head over to Curse and check them out.
Enjoy
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