Proposal to end all modification of myth

[ChrisP]

I think ChrisP was using that as an example not that he was implying to make such drastic changes to Myth gameplay. He just meant that in comparison, it doesn't seem reasonable for people to be so against the Myth updates when they don't do great changes like in WoW.

Close, Pyro. I wasn't implying big changes should have been made to the core gameplay, just that it wasn't worth paying attention to all the complaints about real or imagined changes.

Iron, you're right, the closed nature of Myth makes it a totally different animal. Were it free to distribute, on the other hand, you'd absolutely need to dress up Myth with loads of "New and Improved" stickers to attract substantial new players. I still have such wishful daydreams...

Baak, if anything, I grossly underestimated. All told, it's probably closer to 150 million a month and 200 million isn't out of the question. I briefly tried googling some real numbers but didn't come up with much. One site guesses that Blizzard spends 120 million a year just on supporting WoW (and to think, Project Magma and Mariusnet get nothing!). Forbes.com says that in 2007, Vivendi, after aquiring Blizzard and WoW, made 1.2 billion in net profits. In 2007 WoW only had around 8 million subscribers. Currently it has 11.5 million.

So yeah, imagine if the right 10 people in the Myth community got their shit together, each ponied up $1000, or whatever, to acquire some rights, and made just .1% of the kind of profits WoW brings in. Divided evenly, each of those 10 people would be earning around $120,000 a year.

[Baak]

Wow (no pun intended) -- after I thought about the fact that they had 11+ million subscribers per month it all started making sense.

That's insane! WTH are we doing not in that business?!?

[Killswitch]

The problem is Myth isn't addictive enough. Think about it: WoW (and most Blizzard games for that matter) has succeeded in not only getting gamers interested but also hooking them and taking over their lives. Just when you're about to finish one quest, 3 more pop up. And all that time helps build characters and makes them unique (clothing, spells, attributes, etc).

Now if you want to make Myth like crack, er, WoW you'd need to add elements that get the user genuinely involved. A leaderboard with stats isn't enough. I think being able to totally customize their armies (stats, spells, armor types) might be a start. Anyone who's played Halo 3 online has seen other players with awesome armor/helmets and asked themselves "How can I get that goodness on me?" Maybe access to powerful (yet expensive) units at higher "levels".

Long story short: some 'perk' is needed so players have a reason to keep playing. Myth doesn't have that so it will never get as popular (in its current form).

[lank]

i recently came across what i think could be the ultimate platform for a myth-like game. it's a few years old and is called "mount & blade".

it's essentially a sandbox game where the object is to build an army and gain as high a rank as you can in a world of six warring states (loosely based on medieval regions such as western europe, scandinavia, mongolia and such) by playing politics, gaining favour with lords and kings, hiring and training men, winning battles and hopefully gaining the right to own land and all that entails. this all takes place on a large world map where you can move freely and chase down enemies (or be chased down), enter towns, villages and castles, lay or join a siege (with siege engines), etc..

combat, however, takes you down to a more or less myth scale map where you fight in either first or third person as the character you role-play, and the melee system in this game is second to none that i know of, also with excellent handling of cavalry. in many of its principles this combat "arena" is not far removed from myth. unfortunately the AI for large battles (which can have a fair few units active at once) basically consists of charging mobs crashing into one another with not much in the way of tactics, formations or manoeuvring. the landscape is 3d, so height advantage could play a part in artillery power, but sadly doesn't matter much as it is.

i'd love to see a game which was a clever marriage of M&B's living world and logistics management with myth's tactical squad-based combat system with the flexibility to script plot developments and NPC behaviour at the strategic/logistic level and descend into myth-style combat when appropriate. i guess the holy grail for that to really work properly, though, is good AI at the combat level, to provide worthy challenges for single players.

do i even need to mention the many levels of multiplayer potential such a system could provide, though?

[Death's Avatar]

Heh, I love M&B.

[Renwood TWA]

I protest!!!! WoW is an evil life stealing friend comsuming flaming pile of garbage.

But then again i dont like RPG's of ANY kind.

Lots of my most beloved Myth freinds that i met back in TFL days became friends in RL beacuse we live in the same city.

Then Evercrack stole them away, and after that WoW.

I will forever hate these types of mmorpgs games for that.

Some of the highest selling beer in america CERNTAINLY ISNT the best tasting or highest quality, but it sure sells a lot.

The masses WILL NEVER choose to glom onto the highest quality content or gameplay. See myth 2's sales figures vs starcrafts back when they came out. myth was a better RTS/TCG in every respect and it even looked better graphically. but myth is hard to master and learn, its pretty complex even now, and back then it was the breakthrough RTS.

Even with the Bungie funded ad campains and entire fan base all trying to get their buddies to play it, still didnt make its sales anywhere near starcraft's.

The masses will ALLWAYS accept mediocrity over high art.
A great artist told me that years ago.

a nicer way of saying it is that myth was allways a "niche" RTS game, and thus wont ever have the millions of fans that blizzard games do.

I mean if all RTS players are perfectly happy to just create a bunch of units buy gathing wood and then just sending out huge blobs of armies vs other huge blobs of amies, AND NEVER BE BOTHERED THAT THERE ARENT ANY FORMATIONS, then this means they arent myth's Demographic

Kinda like how a civil war rts game will NEVER sell as many copies as starcraft. the demographic just isnt large enough.

[Death's Avatar]

I don't know if I would say the masses NEVER choose the higher quality, just that the one the masses choose isnt necessarily the higher quality one.

Also, don't get me wrong, I love myth dearly, but I don't know if I am willing to say myth is "higher quality" than Starcraft or Wow. I think thy are different games that attempt t do different things, and I think they all do it pretty well.

[vinylrake]

The problem in discussing whether there is any relation between what the masses choose and what is 'higher quality' is the subjective definitions and interpretations different people have about what quality is.

In games for example, a game can have incrediblly high quality graphics and movie smooth physics but still play horribly, or be boring or frustrating. Is that a high quality game? The inverse is just as true of course.

In general, given a number of choices to choose from I think "the masses" usually choose at least 'average' quality - but generally not the highest quality.

Subjectively, I generally don't see a high correlation between 'quality' and acceptance by the masses. Pop anything (movies, music, fashion, etc) for example is rarely the 'highest quality' yet is what is accepted by the greatest number of people.

[Graydon]

You guys are nerds. WTF are you still debating this stuff for... You've been bantering around and rephrasing the same stuff for over a week now. What's the point?

[vinylrake]

You guys are nerds. WTF are you still debating this stuff for... You've been bantering around and rephrasing the same stuff for over a week now. What's the point?

Well that depends.... what do you mean by 'point'?

[iron]

You guys are nerds. WTF are you still debating this stuff for... You've been bantering around and rephrasing the same stuff for over a week now. What's the point?

Memo to Gray: This is a forum. For, like, discussing & debating stuff.

That is all.

[Renwood TWA]

~8^)

[William Wallet]

I played Mount and Blade heaps until I had to ditch my new video card. Computer doesn't have a power supply that can handle it.

Fantastic game; the latest version, anyway. Cid used to complain that it didn't have enough depth, but now it's pretty fun. Especially with the armies from different factions 'n' stuff. Man, I've fucked so many Nord soldiers with my knight, it's not funny.

[Orlando the Axe]

I'm pretty sure that Tai Kung ended up being right about 1.6 trow pathfinding being altered. Correct me if I am wrong Iron.

I agree with Iron regarding the PR wars, there were very few competitive tournament players involved with 1.4 (I know because I was one of the few!) and that hurt the patch's credibility. I believe there were also fairly significant pathfinding changes in that version (which I believe was unmentioned in the documentation and eventually changed back to 1.3 behavior) and various gameplay changes/bugfixes have been added along the way (melle targeting, walk bug, magic dirt which was fixed then unfixed due to unforeseen issues, healing bug, etc.). Those things may seem minor from a developer's standpoint but they are huge (massive!) in the tourney community where knowing the quirks can be the competitive advantage that gives you the game. If there were some well known and respected tournament players backing those changes the PR battle would have been significantly different as it became damage control reasonably quickly. There were plenty of bogus complaints (such as duds) and using Magma as a scapegoat for losses but there were some legitimate gameplay changes that understandably came as a bit of a surprise to people who had been very competitively playing the same build (bugs and all) for years. It wasn't until later when players like ducky, qwerty, tai kung, shaister, and acheron spent a large chunk of their time and helped test and vouch for the patches that the patches were really accepted by this large segment of the myth community (these people were in the trenches of the PR war).

To sum it up, some but not most of the bitching was justified and nearly all of it could have been avoided if things were handled differently. Just my two cents and advice for anyone undertaking similar projects in the future.

[GodzFire]

Mount and Blade

Why does this turn me on?