Heyas!
It's been a very long time since I posted anything on these forums, though I do lurk once in a while. I was pretty tempted to add my contributions as Blades was being burned in effigy when Mnet finally replaced PMnet (man, what took so long!) but found I couldn't find the right words to properly eulogize and reflect on the past community participation of the guy without sounding like a spittle-sputtering, red-faced, vein-bulging madman. So I just skipped it.
Anyway, hi everyone!
Good to see the gang hasn't lost any of it's old vigor.
Ooga & Ren, I want to wish you guys the best of luck with this project! Knowing how talented ooga alone is, I'm sure it will be phenomenal. I only hope that it doesn't slowly get killed off by the vaporware beast that has claimed the very best, so often.
I haven't read carefully enough to know the current status of things, but here's some friendly advice: Don't name it Myth 4. Retract that you ever even thought about doing so. And not because of any legal ramifications; you'd probably have to take out full page ads and have featured reviews in "Computer Gamer" before word somehow got back to T2.
Put it this way, if the entire TFL/M2 dev team reunited, got a 30 million dollar budget, and made a Myth 4 that was beyond perfect in every conceivable manner, at least 50% of the Myth community would rip it apart, spit on it and stamp their feet about how it could have been done right if only they were in charge. The other half of the community would rise in passionate, perhaps obsessive, defense, and well, you know the rest.
You
know I'm right too. So why subject yourself to this or worse when there's so many other things you can call it? More to the point, why subject your beloved project to this kind of controversy and abuse? There're other ways to create hype.
You know, for a year now I've let sit a modified version of Mazz 6. It has the key ingredient which has made each successive Mazz better than the last, and that's the permutations of how and when the waves of monsters attack. I think few people realize it's the pacing of Mazz that makes it fun, and the new version I have is pretty amazing. It doesn't break the 400 unit rule, of course, but you'd bet it does if you played it.
It also has a few dozen other nice touches like expanded levelling, new attacks, balance tweaks and bug fixes. Overall, it's way better than Mazz 6. But I'll never release it, even if I were playing steadily again. Mazz 6 and a half? How lame does that sound? Mazz 7? The expectations would be way too high. It'd need things like new units, a new map, new music, new engine features, etc... and I don't have the time, energy or inclination to attempt to round up a team to do those kinds of things again. Still, the Mazz series is way too dear and personal to me to ever do anything half-assed with it. I'd just hate to disappoint the majority of Mazz fans.
The point is, without every advantage at your disposal (and in your case, this would involve a liscense and at least a million dollars) you only set up a scenerio where people will be disappointed with the end result, even if it's very good. You only need read how heated the reactions of normally cool and wise folks like Vinyl and PPE to know that the expectations behind a Myth 4 on a new engine are so sacred that you should have performed some sort of shamanistic rituals before even broaching the subject.
That said, good luck once again! Blowing people away when they're not expecting it is how you get a following. I'll be checking in once in a while to see how the progress is going.
