Beta Impressions: Mythos

Choice of classes is similarly uncomplicated. The three available are Bloodletter, Pyromancer, and Gadgeteer. While at first glance this is your standard warrior/mage/rogue trinity back from Diablo, each class has three talent trees which allow for deep customisation. The Bloodletter, for example, can raise minions from the corpses of vanquished enemies, specialise in bleed effects to bolster himself and debilitate foe, or focus on straightforward face smashing. Similarly, the Pyromancer can summon fire-based pets, focus on spell-based damage, or enhance their melee attacks with fire. Lastly, the Gadgeteer has access to either specialisations that improve their ranged combat with bows or guns, deploying traps and gadget-themed pets, or use a variety of grenades and other goodies.

Character creation also allows the player to select one of several gameplay modes. These include Elite Mode, where the player will face more and tougher enemies, as well as seeing vendors offer less coin for loot the player sells; Hardcore Mode, which prevents the character from being resurrected, and thus translates to ‘Permadeath’; and Shadowlands Only mode, which is the games open PvP mode. These are all on/off toggles, so it is perfectly possible for the hardened veteran to activate all three and take their chances in the most adverse gaming environment available in Mythos.

All in all, the character creation process also allows the tweaking of the character’s appearance, from facial features and hair, to the appearance of a Satyr’s horns, to shades and a cigar for Gremlins. All pretty standard stuff. The character creation interface does its job well. Within minutes, you can have a character ready to enter the world of Mythos.

Once in the game proper, I was greeted by the newbie zone, a quiet, secluded locale dominated by the Greenreach Priory which gives the zone it’s name. The newbie experience was completed with the mandatory NPC with a golden “!” above his head.

It was at this point that my earlier comment about round wheels came back to bite me in the face. Yes, this isn’t the first game to directly adopt the World of Warcraft standard. At the same time, Flagship Studios is composed of a number of ex-Blizzard folks, who worked on the original Diablo, who left Blizzard to do their own thing. While the Golden Exclamation Mark may have become standard, using it is still borrowing from what someone else has done before. If anything, I fault Flagship for not going the extra mile to differentiate themselves from Blizzard, considering the number of ex-Blizzard folks there. Any icon would have done the job for me. A shield with a couple of crossed swords, to denote the heroic and combat-oriented nature of the quest to be undertaken, for example. But again, a minor issue. It works.

With a click of my mouse my adventurer stepped up to the NPC and initiated the questgiving process. After explaining that a bunch of undead had risen from the grave and helped themselves to the priory’s supply of booze, the NPC requested that I enter the priory and put an end to the gatecrashing by finding a particular ‘Hollow One’ enemy and killing it. His little speech was appended by a showcase of all the goodies I would be able to choose from upon completion of the task. Again, it’s been done, in exactly this same way. Again, it works. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that a pattern was forming very quickly.

Despite my misgivings, I boldly entered the priory.

At this point, my tale does that weird, fanciful thing known to some as ‘messing around with the space/time continuum’. In my attempt to glean as much information as humanly possible before forming an opinion, I went back and created one of each class of character, to see how they compared to each other and how gameplay may differ with each. So I had the chance to go through Greenreach Priory three times. The first, I went through a set of maybe half a dozen rooms connected by corridors. The second time through, thanks to the random content generator, the Priory was about twice that size, with proportionately more monsters and drops of loot with green and blue names. The third time through, the Priory was barely more than two adjoining rooms, with my target being approximately half a screen away from the entrance to the instance. Which reminds me, I haven’t mentioned that zones in Mythos are instanced in a way similar to Guild Wars. Which is also a game developed by ex-blizzard folks.

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