It’s been a few weeks since I posted the previous installments of my Mythos adventures – apologies for that – the last few weeks it seems that every time I’ve sat down to do this report, there’s something else fun to write about.

I was going to title this post Mythos 6 – 10, but I got a bit carried away and leveled up to twelve. It’s not hard, Mythos is one of the games where I can easily get to the end of a quest and tell myself I have time for one more.

Speaking of leveling. At this stage it remains reasonably consistent. My experience seems to be that it takes two or three dungeons to crack each level. Part of this is because the mobs you encounter appear to be locked to your around your level if you are in an appropriate level dungeon. Generally there are also one or two outdoor areas that you have to travel to to reach the dungeon.

Each dungeon is set to a level range which you see when you are in the world travel view. I actually haven’t tried a dungeon who’s level range I have exceeded yet, but I suspect the maximum level of the critters would be the maximum level of the dungeon.

I noticed that at around the level seven and up dungeons a few things started changing. First, there were more tough mobs in the dungeons. These weren’t the bosses that had to be defeated for the quests, but were random orange, blue, or named mobs. They were also quite a lot tougher to take down.

At around level eight or nine, these ‘elite’ mobs were also starting to appear more often in the outdoor lead-up areas. My Gadgeteer didn’t have too many problems with these guys, she’s getting pretty good at kiting. It’s the other ranged mobs that she has a problem with. Fortunately I haven’t run into any ranged elites yet. I suspect I will at some point soon.

Unfortunately, these elites don’t always drop the loot according to their difficulty, which can vary quite dramatically. I’ve had a number of fights that were long and drawn out and quite difficult, where only a couple of pieces of vendor trash were dropped. A little disappointing after the effort.

The second thing that I’m now seeing is master chests. There are chests dotted all over the place in Mythos. Some of them are locked and need a small key to get into, but most are ordinary chests that don’t need a key.

The master chests sit at the bottom of dungeons and drop some really nice loot. They also need a master key to be opened. The master key will drop off a mob somewhere in the dungeon.

I found out the hard way, that you need to clear all the levels of the dungeon. I didn’t for one quest because it was getting late and I wanted to finish. I got to the bottom level, killed the boss, and then came upon the master chest, and no key. I didn’t end up going back to look for it, but I kicked myself anyway.

The last thing I noticed was that the drop rate of green, blue, and purple items has increased. That’s only to be expected though I wouldn’t have thought to see any blue or purple items at this stage of the game. Not a problem though. I’ve now got a lot of blue armor equipped.

As is normal with these things, the rarer drops tend to be for other classes. That’s not so bad since they sell to the vendor for a lot more than the white items. That alone has boosted my wealth, I’m up to around 70 silver now. It’d be a lot more, but I bought a couple of blue items which at the time wiped me out.

I only have one beef with the way items work for the Gadgeteer. I’ve come across a few dexterity weapons that have much better stats than my existing weapons. (Gadgeteers focus on the dexterity attribute, Bloodletters on strength, and Pyromancers on wisdom.) I picked up a very nice and deadly bow, and a couple of single wield pistols that combined would be better than my trusty rifle. However, for some reason, the Gadgeteers offensive spells – including Piercing Barrage and Napalm – only work for rifles.

The word on the forums is that there are other classes in the wings that bows and pistols are meant for. That certainly gels with the information Max Schaefer provided in his interview – new classes are on their way. The problem is that it does seem to unduly limit the Gadgeteer. It would be nice not to be confined to a single weapon type and have range of weapons to choose from, as the Bloodletters and Pyromancers do.

Aside from that single issue, the beta still seems to be shining. I haven’t really found any more bugs. The only occasions have been where a mobs AI seems to have gotten its knickers in a twist and the mob has continually advanced and retreated on my position until I got its attention or killed it. Oh, and there was one time when I killed one of these confused elites and it dropped its loot in a place I could not access. Some nice gear dropped too. Doh!

I’ve also finally moved on from the starting zone, Stonehill. There were a ton of quests there, and I picked up at least a couple dozen maps as well. I reckon I could have stayed there for another four or five levels, but I was getting itchy feet. So I hopped on the transport and ended up in a new town, looking at three NPCs with yellow question marks.

And that’s where I am now. I’m probably going to pull back a little on my Mythos game time for a bit, but that’s not due to any fault in Mythos. I’ve got a few things I’d like to do in other games over the next couple of months. I’m definitely going to step back into Mythos, it’s a really great game, and one I’ve been having a lot of fun in.

Mythos Preview: Six to Twelve

I spent a good chunk of today experimenting with Mythos.

One of the goals of today’s play was try out the different classes and modes. So I put Durkin on the backburner and created a Pyromancer.

The Pyromancer is essentially a fire mage. However, there are a lot of different builds available. You can choose these builds by using your skill points to buy different skill sets. Usually there are several skills associated with a primary skill.

For instance the Flamecaster page for the Pyromancer has a skill you can learn called Flaming Dart. This allows the Pyro to fire a flaming dart that passes through multiple enemies doing damage to them all. Flaming dart has six levels that increase damage each time the skill is raised.

Two tiers down, there is another skill called Dancing Flames. This causes the darts to ricochet of walls and other obstructions. The player can invest eight points in this to increase its effect. The final tier skill related to Flaming Dart is Burning Fragments. This causes the darts to split into secondary projectiles to do yet more damage. Six points can be invested here.

The concept of Tiers deserves some explanation. Each skill is assigned to a tier. The first tier in our previous example has the Flaming Dart and Flaming First skills. Tier two has Flame Serpents, Restorative Flames, and Ignite. Tier three has more skills and so forth, all the way to Tier six. In order to get the second tier skills, the player must invest some skill points to unlocking it. Three skill points are necessary for tier two, all the way up to a total of 30 skill points to unlock tier six.

I got the Pyromancer up to level six before I called it a day on that class. I did die a couple of times, lucky I wasn’t hardcore. For the most part, taking down ordinary monsters was pretty easy. Two or three shots dispatched them handily. It was with the bosses I had more trouble. This class seems to be fairly squishy, though I’m certain I wasn’t playing it fully right.

In anycase my day wasn’t done. I wanted a bit more of a challenge. So I created an elite Bloodletter. I called him Darkin and he was a Gremlin too. Oh the Pyro, I can’t remember her name offhand, but she was a Satyr.

Elite mode, as it sounds, is somewhat harder. Darkin had a tougher time dispatching mobs than did Durkin. The damage the mobs did was increased, and they were tougher. The only other thing I noticed was that the loot drops were improved. I received more greens and blue items. I also received a yellow item on the next character, a named spear. This, I believe was a set item. Pity I couldn’t use it.

The Bosses were much harder. I was able to take down all but one, the end boss in the white caves. Durkin had no problems whatsoever, Darkin lost health rapidly and died trying to escape. Also happy I was not in hardcore mode.

Speaking of which. I mentioned in the Mythos Preview: One to Five report that players were able to respec their skill points at a special NPC. This is only applicable to normal mode characters and not elite or hardcore characters.

There’s a long running debate on the beta forums on the whole respec is good/evil theme. One group of players wants the ability to respec, the other doesn’t.

My final task for the day was to make a Gadgeteer. This time I chose to make a Human character, and once again chose the Elite mode. The Gadgeteer relies on ranged weapons much like a hunter, but they are also able to use grenades and other gizmos. My perception after playing it was that the Gadgeteer is tougher than the Pyro but not as tough as the Bloodletter. Makes sense doesn’t it?

So far this is my favorite class. There’s a lot of kiting involved, especially in the case of the bosses. In one dungeon I had to take on three nasty spider queen sisters. There was no way to stand still since they poisoned and burned me down really quickly. The only way to deal with them solo was to kite them back to the entrance room and lead them around the room stopping occasionally to shoot back.

These were the hardest I encountered, and I was able to take them on successfully.

In light of this, I figured I might look again at the Pyromancer. I believe my problem there was in kiting the mobs and bosses. With a bit more practice and a different allocation of skill points (I was still figuring things out at that point) the Pyro might be a fun class to play.

I’m not so sure about the Bloodletter. Since he has to get up close and personal, there’s no way to kite unless he uses a ranged weapon or a minion. Darkin would never have stood a chance against the Spider Queen Sisters.

For those of you interested in finding out more about the skills. A very helpful fellow named Matt Hall has set up a website to allow players to experiment with their skill builds. The site is called Mythos Calc and is worth a look, if just to check out the skills in the game.

Stay tuned for more on the Mythos beta.

Mythos Beta – Day Two

A couple of days ago I posted that I had recently heard some good things about Mythos. One of those things was that Flagship Studios had allocated some beta invites to existing beta testers to give out to their friends. At the end of the article, I asked that if anyone could spare a beta invite to send it my way.

Lo and behold, the next morning there was an email in my inbox from non other than Max Schaefer, the Executive Producer of Mythos with an offer of an invite.

Needless to say I gratefully accepted the offer, and was forwarded the invite. Thanks Max, I really appreciate it.

Tonight I created an account, downloaded the client, and logged in.

This preview is a very early first impressions of my first five levels in the game. Later on, I’ll expand upon that with a look at the other classes, and with some of the higher level areas and bosses.

First Steps

Mythos presented a very quick download of only around 330MB. The install was completely painless as we’ve come to expect in this day and age. Once the game was installed, I logged in on my beta account and the game started patching.

Even the patch was nice and quick. As it started I realised that I was decaffeinated and went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Shortly after I got back to my desk, the patch finished and the game restarted. For the record, I’m on ADSL2+ and get a maximum download speed of around 7 megabits/s.

Once I was back in I checked the option screen. I usually have to do this for every new game I buy because the default resolution is set to 1024×768, and my monitor is 1920×1200. Mythos had detected that and had correctly set the screen resolution. Nice.

Character Creation

Since it was the first time in, I was immediately taken to the character creation screen. There I was greeted by a surly looking blue haired gremlin sucking on a Clint Eastwood Western style cigar. It’s great to see a sense of humour and the willingness to go against the winds of political correctness.

Character Creation was the same as you’d find in pretty much any game of this genre. You get three species; Human, Gremlin, and Satyr, with male and female options for each. There are three class options to select from; Bloodletter, primarily melee; Pyromancer; and Gadgeteer, sort of like a hunter crossed with engineer/tinkerer.

You get a range of the standard character options; face, hairstyle, skin colour, and the like to customise your character. Initially I felt that the number of options was very limited, perhaps too much so, but it’s not really a problem since you are always looking at it from a top down perspective.

Finally, there are two options to select from. Elite and Hardcore. Elite ups the difficulty setting, and I think increases the experience gain. Hardcore, a Diablo 2 favourite, gives you the option to play with permadeath. Since this was my first time creating a character, I left these unchecked.

I ended up creating a Gremlin Bloodletter called Durkin.

One To Five

Durkin started in front of an abbey with a NPC standing next to him. These days the Exclamation and Question marks are the universal quest indicators, and this guy had an Exclamation. After clicking on him, he tells me that I have a destiny. Cool. I reckon that’s just flattery to get me to help him.

Seems the dead have risen and are causing a ruckus. They’ve must have been thirsty because the first thing they did was get on the turps. Brother Anselean just had no idea how to deal with drunken undead so he asked me. Into the vestry I go.

After routing those wacky undead, I returned to Brother Anselean to receive my reward. Apart from some armor I also received enough XP to level up. Levelling up will also be familiar to those who have played enough RPGs or MMORPGS. There are attributes to raise, and skill points to assign. Without the manual it’s tricky to know what each skill does, but fortunately there is an NPC available to refund those points for a price.

From that point I was directed to the nearest town, which is also referred to as a safe point. It’s from here that I found merchants, quest givers, and the all important stash where I keep my stuff. Inventory space, as usual is at a premium, and unfortunately uses the same system that is common in Diablo like games. That is, different items have different sizes and shapes, meaning that reshuffling is one of the necessary skills to have.

Mythos also has an achievement system similar to Lord of the Rings Online. When you finish certain tasks, or kill enough monsters, you get a trait that you can load into a slot to increase your attributes. However, this system is not as complex or involved as LotROs,.

Quest givers will ask you to go to certain locations. You can only go to a location, like a set of caves or a farm if it’s inscribed on your map. At this early stage at least, the quest givers will inscribe the locations they ask you to visit. I’m not sure about later. You can also buy maps from a cartographer, or get them as drops of the mobs you kill.

Maps come in two kinds. Normal (for want of a better word) or Elite. The locations on a normal map are suitable for a single player to adventure in. Elite maps recommend a party of five. And maps also indicate the level of the player they are suitable for. No worrying about if an area is too big for you.

I finished up my session tonight about three quarters of the way to level six.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in the game are great. The graphics have a very cartoony feel, almost Japanese RPG style as you can see in the screenshots. They’re crisp and clean, and importantly very responsive.

The game also sounds good. I have to admit, I’m not much of one for game sound and music, so a lot of it escapes my attention. The music and sound in Mythos is just right. I didn’t feel overwhelmed with a need to turn the volume down. Even though I had to when a friend called while I was playing.

Gameplay

The gameplay is pure Diablo 2. If you’ve played Diablo 2 you’ll know what I mean. You move around by pointing and clicking the mouse, and when you come across a monster clicking on it attacks it. It’s a very simple mechanic, and it works.

Quest givers provide quests in town. When you leave town, you are able to select any inscribed location on your map to travel to. These areas are instanced to you, in much the same way as Hellgate: London (also by Flagship) and Guild Wars.

Loot also behaves the same way. There’s the standard white drops which have no special stats. Then there are the green and blue drops of which I have already received. Some of this is unidentified and a charm is needed to make an identification.

What About The Bugs?

It is a beta after all, right?

From the what I saw of the state of the game I reckon it must be about ready for release. I didn’t come across any major issues. There were no crashes, nasty graphics issues, or gameplay issues. All the quests worked (which I’d expect for all the newbie quests). I didn’t encounter any major lag issues, however some other testers did mention lag.

The only issues I encountered were a few moment of stuttering graphics in the character create screen, and in the newbie area.

However, it’s still early days yet. I only played for an hour and a half after all, and haven’t cracked level six yet.

Make sure you check back later for more.

Mythos Preview: One to Five