A couple of years ago, you could have sold a Mythos beta key on eBay for a hundred bucks, easy. Now that it’s finally out – in Europe, anyway – the reaction is a little more muted. What’s happened to the Diablo 2-inspired action MMO in the intervening time?
Hellgate: London devs Flagship Studios, so the story goes, had used Mythos as sort of a proof of concept for some of the tech they were using in their main game. Turned out the devs liked Mythos so much that they decided to build it out into a follow-up title. It featured bizarre races, inspired character classes and talent trees and some of the most involved crafting you could ever find.
Then disaster felled Flagship Studios and all the assets were claimed by HanbitSoft, and now Hellgate: London lives on in an Asia-only incarnation, while Mythos has been extensively re-worked and released as a free-to-play game in Europe, though there’s no barrier to non-Euros playing (as far as I can tell). Redbana is licensed to release Mythos in North America based on the European release, but there’s been precious little news of any progress there in quite a long time.
I have just played Mythos a very short time, but it’s still very much the same game. There is a new, very comprehensive tutorial, though the quest text has the characteristic unusual phrasing often found when translating from Asian languages. Publishers Frogster have set up servers for not only English, French and German, but Polish and Turkish as well.
Mythos’ original developers moved on to found Runic Games and develop the action RPG Torchlight, which shares a lot of the same concepts as Mythos, though in a single player package and without the extensive overworld.
Mythos is still the fast paced hacky/slashy/dungeon crawly game it was two years ago, but Torchlight may be spoiling its chance to make any sort of significant splash here in North America.