So this past weekend I downloaded Mythos for the end of their closed beta. Open beta starts tomorrow April 12th. Mythos is a cross between Torchlight, Hellgate London, and Diablo. Its cartoonish like Torchlight, though not as much. You grab quests in each city and they have it divided into many many towns which are linked by swirly gates. Each town has 1 or more exits to other towns and contains a swirly instance gate which contain entrances to 8-12 dungeon zones. Each dungeon is 1 to 4 levels.
The residents of the towns give you quests and will send you into one of those dungeons to collect items or kill a boss. When you are done, you then have to exit and return to the NPC quest giver. The MMO Vindictus is the other extreme where you return to the same town for your first 44+ levels and enter instances from 5 different locations. But in Mythos each zone only lasts for 3 or 4 levels. This creates lots of useless running. They could really condense this quite a bit and make the players happier.
There are sockets in items, which you get jewels just like Torchlight, naming even seems the same. You need to identify everything that drops. If only I had a dog to run and sell stuff for me. 🙂
Mythos is in Beta – they are about to go open beta – I realize this… And I only leveled to 20. Now the good and the bad.
The bad:
Problem 1: Logging into the game made me feel like I wasn’t approved for beta. It gives an error when you try to log on and it appears to happen to every new person to the companies group of games. The solution provided on the tech forums is you need to change your password of your account and wait 5-20 minutes for it to update then it will allow you to log on. I would have tried beta last week if I would have known…but I figured I was getting an error because I didn’t get an official beta invite (the email looked like I was invited though and I was!)
Problem 2: The font they use is too big for their UI, so some of the text throughout the game is cut off.
Problem 3: There is no place to report bugs. Their forums has a Constructive Feedback section which to me means tell us your opinion on what you like and dislike. There is no in-game reporting that I could find.
Problem 4: The grammar on the English translations is not very good. I saw this in many of the NPC conversations and skill descriptions. Also there were many inconsistencies with formatting and names of things. Some names were wrong….
Problem 5: The auction house doesn’t work. You can post but no one can buy things. It says there was an error and will email your money back later. I didn’t receive any mail. The gamble vendor – has all plain weapons – nothing is enchanted like you think it is.
Problem 6: I played a Gadgeteer which uses traps and bombs and guns – but in the game there are pistols, bows, riffles, and crossbows – only rifles are used in the skill tress, making the other weapons basically useless. My son went with a poison grenade skill line that made it seem like I was shooting a pellet gun with me using the marksman tree. I see many people going with 2 or 3 skill lines only and the rest will be avoided.
Now onto the good:
The have a nice way to keep the hackers away – you have your normal password and then you need to pick a 6 digit code. From then on when you log on, you have to enter this code on the onscreen keypad with your mouse, but the numbers are never in the same place. Nice simple way to avoid keylogger hacker from getting into an account.
The areas were fun, very very familiar UI for Hellgate and Diablo players with the red and blue balls. I did tend to run out of mana fast and it recharged a bit slow for my taste. Killing bosses was a test of your ability to run around them in circles and pause to shoot which was a bit boring.
They have a nice permanent item that lets you leave the instance when you are done so you don’t have to use the recall items. They have a mail system but you don’t need to find a mailbox to send or receive. You gain titles from achievements and can slot those achievements into level slots – 1, 10, 20 etc – which give you small bonuses to stats or damage or luck.
Overall, I’m afraid this will just be a game that people will play for a few weeks and move on. I found Torchlight more fun (And Torchlight II is coming with multiplayer) and I liked Hellgate while it lasted. When Diablo III comes out, I am thinking this game will be left in the dust. After coming out of Rift Beta and release, this game is not ready for open beta tomorrow. This is the European version, the US version has been having trouble getting things going and hasn’t really had much news since January.
Note to Developers: Do not go into beta without a way for your testers to easily report bugs to you – That’s a no-brainer….but obviously it happens! In-Game reporting – Click, type details, send.
