Mythos

Om Fox last night, we got to see the judges fawn over teen belter David Archuletta and damn indie-rocker David Cook with faint praise. Really. If David C. were a girl, Paula would have told him he looked lovely. However, DialIdol.com predicts that opinions of the judges aside, David C. has won this by a landslide, based on busy signals of people trying to call in. My own thoughts? David A. has real talent, but I still thought his songs were boring. If he weren’t singing them on American Idol, I wouldn’t give them a moment of time. David C.’s songs didn’t reach out and grab me either, but if I were flipping through radio stations and he was singing, I’d probably leave it tuned there. I thought he should have rocked out a lot more. ...

I feel a little like a relic at this moment. Everyone is talking about Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Liche King, and I realized… I have no interest in any of them. I have a coworker in the AoC closed beta, but going around in gangs randomly ganking people wasn’t that fun in EQ2’s Nagafen from either end – seemed really pointless to me, though I did enjoy the feeling of danger and risk it brought to the game. ...

There’s a fine line between ‘research’ and ‘ah, what the heck. game on!’. I crossed that line several times yesterday. Wanting to check out any recent Mythos changes (and there are some coming soon), I logged on, intending just to run around. But I wasn’t the same person that was just casually playing and had been stalled at level 20 for the past few weeks. I have Kanthalos at MMOre Insight to blame for this. I’d originally built my Bloodletter up the Crimson Hand (pet) line and hadn’t really branched out from that. This turned out to be an ever less of a good idea, since I spent ever more of my time keeping my pets alive and resummoning them. Eventually I would just wade into melee myself and just ignore the pets. When Mythos added skill respecs, I respecced to Martialist, the weapon spec. That’s when my hybrid spec really started to hurt, since I couldn’t wear the best armor or wield the best weapons. ...

Okay, thanks for the info about Mythos’ Active Camera mode. This lets you get a little lower down, and lets you use the WASD keys to move around. Q and E to turn. INS to fix the camera (I remapped this to F since I have no friends… on Mythos :). Turn on this mode by going to the GAME tab in options and checking Active Camera Mode and UN-checking Pitch Lock. ...

I wrote an overview of Mythos crafting this morning, you can read it if you like, but that’s not what I’m pleading to Flagship about. Please, PLEASE… let us play in the third person from-behind view like WoW and EQ2… Your game is so gorgeous from down here. I don’t love Diablo so much that I’ll be unhappy if you toss the overhead view for third person over the shoulder. And get rid of point-and-click in favor of WASD. Actually, I love the game – but please consider lifting camera, movement and targeting controls from WoW or EQ2, either one, I don’t care which. ...

Nostalgia the Guild took most of my time this last weekend. It’s supposed to just be a very casual, once-a-week grouping experience through EverQuest’s old world, and it shouldn’t really require as much work as I’ve put into it. However, I don’t see how it could have taken any less, either. If you have a static group, how do you keep everything arranged? Maybe I just want everything planned out. ...

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too – my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning. ...

Mythos will be hitting open beta “real soon now”, so if you haven’t already, you’ll have your chance to get into some free-to-play, Diablo-inspired, action-MMO-RPG fun within weeks. When you get there, though, there’s one thing you really, really have to know when you begin to build your character. Mythos hates hybrids. It’s sad! The nasty part is, you might not be aware that you ARE building a hybrid. I’ll explain. ...

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages – how high is too high?”. ...

Mythos, still in closed beta, has completely relaunched. No more beta codes to give out (sorry), but if you have been a beta tester, you will have to uninstall your current client and download the new one. I did this this morning; things look shinier. Expect a new look at Mythos soon. Bristlebane’s Day (apparently) goes live today. The revelers are in North Qeynos at the Claymore, and West Freeport outside the Executioner’s Pit. I have no idea if there are quests associated with them; I couldn’t get a word out of them on the Test server. ...