GameZig

A week ago I got that special email from the makers of Mythos inviting me to join their closed beta playground. Initially I had to create an account with the usual stuff; user ID, password, email, and etc. No problems on that end registration was simple and didn’t require any credit card information. Next came the download which was a surprisingly smaller than I expected 500mb (I was expecting something like 1 gig or more), but I have to remind myself this is still the beta and there’s plenty of room for expansion. After the download came the installation and about four total, end-user agreements that I had to agree to before I could actually install the game. Finally I installed the game and started it up.

There’s a long loading process for the first time you actually run the game. After the initial loading the game jumped right to the log on screen. I typed in my user info, and the gates of Mythos were opened for my playing pleasure. Like most MMORPG’s you create your character, which in Mythos there are four races: Gremlin, Cyclops, Satyr, and Human. There are also three classes to choose from: Bloodletter, Pyromancer, and Gadgeteer. We all know that every MMORPG has similar types of characters and classes, i.e. Bloodletters are your tanks (the guys who are big and can take a lot of damage). Your Pyromancers who are the mages or spell casters of the game. And then my personal favorite the Gadgeteers or your archer/rifler type of character class.

So how do these characters stand out you ask? Let’s just take a minute and discuss the art style and the type of image that is being portrayed within this game. The first race that jumps out is the Gremlin who has this fat cigar jutting out of his mouth, which instantly made me laugh with amazement, because it looks so cool. Now this Gremlin character instantly gave me the impression that this game is going to be one bad ass game to play. All of the characters have their own personal quirks that make them stand out as well as their own race advantages and disadvantages. Which I won’t go into detail about since its a little boring to read about character stats on a game you can’t even play. From the start the artwork portrays to you the feeling that this game is going to rock your socks off.

Okay, I made a human gadgeteer for my first character. In the beginning you are put right in the middle of a dark cave with one door to the north. So I click around a bit trying to figure out how the control skeem works and once I seem to get the hang of it I click on the door…BAM!!! Four skeleton soldiers come charging straight at me and I start shooting my gun at them and the bones start to fly. This is intense is all I have to say. I make my way through this small tunnel with a few more skeleton kills and come by another door. I open it up and once again I’m being attacked by a few skeleton soldiers and two skeleton archers in the distance. Lucky enough its not to difficult to kill all of them. I walk down this cave corridor and when I get close to another door two zombies emerge from the ground and start to slowly charge me. I blow their heads off (we all know that’s the only way you can kill a zombie) quickly open the door and there is another empty room with a little gateway for me to go through. I click on the gateway and a short loading screen pops up.

When I come back I’m in a little village standing next to a catholic type church, and a man is standing there with a question mark over his head. I click on him and he thanks me for cleaning out all of the demons in the building and pays me a few copper coins and rewards me with a piece of armor and some experience. Instantly I level up to the 2nd level with a bright flash and a little arrow at the bottom that begs me to click on it. So I click on it and a simple graphic menu opens giving me the option to increase my four basic stats: strength, dexterity, wisdom, and vitality. As a gadgeteer I want to make sure that my dexterity is very high so I put four points on it and one on vitality. There is also another upgrade section that opens below this window with a bunch of pictures and two separate skill points. I’m a little confused so I move my cursor over one of the images and a text bubble pops up with info on what this upgrade skill and that upgrade skill do for my character. Since I’m a gadgeteer I increase the efficiency of my rifle with the two points out of six making my rifle shots more powerful. Next he tells me I need to travel to a larger town up the road and so begins my online adventure.

I’ve learned that when traveling from place to place, the game generates a random mini area between those two areas in the game. This little random area is populated with monsters, treasure chests, and plants that you can harvest crafting materials from. These areas are full of baddies and lush bright landscape. Sorry, no doom and gloom here until you reach a cave or haunted house. When you play this game you do get the feeling of Diablo dejavu. Its a load of fun to play and the world is constantly growing day by day, as more areas are added to your world map. Another great thing about the game is that you can find some really cool weapons and armor just by adventuring. In fact I haven’t once bought a piece of equipment from a merchant yet, simply because the stuff I find is more powerful and better than what the in-game merchants offer.

It looks like this game is coming together very nicely and will provide hours of enjoyable play-time for everyone. More kinks and bugs are being found daily and everyone who is playing seems to really get a kick out of it. It seems like this game is going to draw a big crowd of fans and newbies alike. This game has a load of potential and should be up and running for everyone very soon. For now try to have patience for the release and pick up your old Diablo games and hack away some baddies.

By: Jared Kimball

Jared is a freelance writer and artist in his spare time. Feel free to visit is website: http://www.jaredkimball.com and check out some of his free artwork and put in a request.

Images provided with courtesy of Mythos.com

With the atom bomb that Mythic Entertainment dropped yesterday about the massive cuts for Warhammer Online it’s leaving many WAR fans in an emotional fog and just as many WAR haters saying, “I told you so”. It is a lot to take in for sure, I still can’t quite wrap my mind around whether or not this is going to be a good or bad thing. With only two cities instead of six, will the RVR aspects of the game, the stuff that the game was totally designed around work at all the same? Will players that aren’t a member of Chaos or the Empire feel the same connection to the game without a home of their own to defend? Will there be unbalance to the game with the loss of four key classes? So many questions left unanswered.

With the feeling of disappointment setting in so hard, I’m left to wonder if hyping a game as much as WAR or AoC was hyped and then let all the fans down close to game day is a good idea for MMO developers.  It’s the same story as has happened so many times before.  Then you look at other companies, the way they seem to be tight lipped about what they have on the burner, leaving fans to ponder what game they are even making.  Is that the way to go?  Will fans be disappointed more by loss of content like AoC or WAR or will they be more disappointed with finding out that Blizzard’s new next-gen MMO isn’t what they were hoping for?

Or how about Bioware?  There is a ton of speculation and so many directions they could go in with their Austin, Texas based MMO development.  The most popular, long standing theory is a Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic MMORPG.  That theory had some fuel added to it recently when Lucasarts acquired some newly registered trademark names like Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Wars Legends, The Old Republic and Star Wars Sagas.  While those alone are not concrete proof, the names combined with the secrecy at BioWare and the description of the trademarks are adding some serious fuel to the fire. 

The patents reads: “Entertainment services provided on-line by means of global and local area networks, namely, providing interactive computer game software, interactive video game software and interactive computer games and interactive video games, all on-line by means of global and local area networks … “.  That could mean a bunch of different things, but it definitely lends to the MMO theory in a big way.

Which way is better?  Who’s to say?  Either way you go you’re going to leave someone bitter that it didn’t go their way, but I’m leaning toward the latter of the two options.  I think it’s better not to say what you are working on until it’s nearing completion for several reasons.

First, you don’t have to worry about telling fans what you are planning on including in the game until you are damn sure it’s going to make it in.  That’s not even an issue if you keep it secret.  Second, letting fans guess and fuel their own theories you get a good guage on possible future projects.  When people start screaming for a KOTOR MMORPG, you can be pretty sure you’re going to have a good subscriber base if you ever decide to make one, if that’s not what you are already working on.

Next, if you listen to all said theories, you can get ideas for features that your fans want to see and test to see if they would work before giving fans a clue whether or not that the feature was even considered.  In short, you basically get a lot more creative freedom without facing pressures and risking as much disappointment to your hardcore fan base.  There probably is no perfect formula and there certainly isn’t a perfect MMO out there yet or in development that will launch problem free.  But I think it makes a lot more business sense to not make promises you aren’t sure you can keep.  Then you won’t be in the position Mark Jacobs was yesterday, doing damage control for a big announcement when you could instead be announcing open beta for a game no one knew was coming.  For games like Warhammer or Star Wars, you don’t need to spend years building up a fan base community, those game titles inherently come with a huge fan base - better to keep it under wraps until your are ready for beta - my 2 cents.

In a recent letter for the game director, Gaute Godager announces what Funcom has been up to behind the scenes working on Age of Conan.  It’s a rather lengthy letter but I’ll some up the key points and what I took out of it.  Before I begin, I should say that the biggest reason I left the game in the first place is that it didn’t run very well on my older system - the stuff I played was fun enough especially the single player content but overall it just felt like I was paying to play in a beta game, it didn’t feel finished.

Gaute mentions that the entire development team is being kept on the AoC live team for the foreseeable future to continue working on adding content and fixing bugs with bug fixes being there primary goal.  He goes on to talk about a slew of content they’ll be adding to include new quests, new areas and a horde of PVP fixes and content patches.  Bugs are bad, but if they aren’t necessarily game breaking for the masses I wouldn’t focus so much on them though, just my 2 cents.

Instead of focusing on the bugs, like putting clothes on some naked NPC or whatever other bugs they have implemented, they should really push hard on getting content into the game that should have already been there.  Stop wasting time with stuff that can wait!  I left partly because of bugs to be sure but higher level players who get up there and start finding less and less things to do are going to be leaving in droves.  Finish the PVP implementation, fix the female avatar damage problems and for goodness sake get the end game player city siege stuff hashed out.  That’s what everyone is really playing for anyway!  Fix the little annoyances later when you have the big problems done.

My point exactly is that he claims they are putting some attention to game performance for players, like myself who have older systems.  Gaute says we should see some fixes for that in the coming weeks and months ahead.  Basically, that translates to guys with older systems don’t bother trying to play for a few months at least, that’s what I read out of that anyway.  This is cutting out a huge potential stream of subscribers and should be fixed long before the little graphic glitches here and there.

I just feel that Funcom is focusing not necessarily on the wrong things to fix, they have that down well enough but they are focusing on to much stuff to fix all at once.  This is the same analogy as trying to push an elephant through a key hole!  Focus your resources on the big stuff first, the things that are breaking the game for the biggest amount of people, then work your way down to the smaller things to polish the game.