Mythos

[Thecla]

I have been checking my email roughly 12,566 times per day in anticipation of an invite which has not yet come. I can understand NDAs and all that jazz, but I would really like an update.

As far as I can tell, they added people to the alpha pretty much in the order they received their e-mail addresses --- at least I happened to see the Mythos alpha-announcement right after it was made and got an invite a couple of weeks ago. (Maybe there was a special -- and well-deserved -- exception for a certain "Jarthelurker" whom I've spotted in Mythos, even at bad hours in Sweden, or maybe not, I don't know.;))

I believe they're planning to add a lot more people, so hopefully something will come soon for you too. Just check your spam carefully! They've also just lifted the NDA, so there should be a lot more info about Mythos avalable soon. It is a surprisingly good little game, with a lot of the flavor of the original Diablo, if not quite as gothic an atmosphere. I don't think it will set the gaming world on fire, but anyone who enjoyed Diablo will surely enjoy Mythos.

The alpha so far has had options of gremlin/elf races (human is the third choice, not selectable yet), and pyromancer (a fire-based mage) or bloodletter (a melee/rifle based class), with the usual 4 stats. I've mostly tried bow-using bloodletters (though the first time through I tried a bow-using pyromancer).

There are still wild swings in melee/spell balance and monster difficulty, so hopefully they'll arrive at a good end-result. One nice aspect of the game is that you can buy maps from a cartographer NPC to different dungeon locations, including epic maps designed for different character lvls, so this allows you to switch difficulty levels on the fly, as it were.

They are still calibrating difficulty levels -- in the test a week ago, the high lvl epic dungeons (apparently intended for 5-player parties) were easily soloable by lower lvl characters; but the good side was that soloing some of those epic dungeons with my bloodletter archer felt quite a bit like doing hell/hell in Diablo with a low-30's rogue. They have since made them more difficult, but hopefully it will be possible to select challenging and interesting dungeons in the final version.

The non-melee part of the bloodletter skills has -- in addition to rifle skills -- a nice bloodminion tree. Killing a monster has a certain chance, depending on the spell lvl (10% at lvl 5 ) of raising a bloodminion (up to 3 total) which then goes and attacks stuff. The top of the bloodminion tree is an "explode bloodminion" skill, which explodes your minion causing significant damage to any nearby monsters. I liked this skill.