tain.totalcodex.net

I am wondering why myth 2 hasn't been re-released?

I started this discussion on a the MWC forums, but I find there is just a lot of rumor and speculation. I'm looking to get to the root of the matter, and hoping some people on these boards may have some insights.

please only intelligent, well thought out, and specific replies (preferably from people "in the know"). I'm trying to come up with a plan of action, not lament how such a solid game has slipped through the cracks.

I highly suggest reading the following 2 forum threads first, as I think it will answer many of your questions and get you a better understanding of the challenges working with Take2:

http://tain.totalcodex.net/forum/viewto ... f=2&t=5136

http://tain.totalcodex.net/forum/viewto ... f=2&t=5389

ok thanks very much godzfire

ok i did not realize this sort of topic had been discussed so recently.

do topics like this come up every half year or more? if so then this probably isn't worth continuing - that would mean a lot of other people in a lot better positions than me have tried in the past and all have failed.

and is the common pattern that take2 will stonewall any attempt at even mere communication about myth? if so, trying to contact individuals within the company via private channels may have some potential.

Putting together a couple nice proposals that require little to no investment on their part with pretty serious potential upsides wouldn't be hard, but it would require that they are willing to at least read them and give feedback. And it would help to get some understanding of their thinking in general before making such (a) proposal(s).

Another route is if anyone has any sort of relationship with jason jones or alex seropian (or any high level bungie employee from that era) from way back, to try to contact them and ask for advice. I know that sounds sort of dumb and isn't likely to yield anything, but if the actual owners will not even discuss Myth maybe the former ones will, and could have some insights on how to revive the game?

anyway, this is all very upsetting to me. I guess, by process of elimination, we can conclude they recognize the series has value, but are content to sit on it indefinitely in case a serious buyer comes along at some point, even if history has shown it isn't likely to happen soon if ever?

Contacting individuals via private channels does seem like a better chance at working out. Maybe Take2 sees value in myth after years of random mythers trying to buy it.

But yes every now and then some random myther shows up with so much ambition, while thinking they have what it takes to get myth revived somehow. Each one ends up the same... nothing ends up happening and sometimes that random myther no longer makes an appearance in the community. This is not to say you should give up before you try, but just keep in mind others have tried and failed. With the passing years Take2 likely changes and it could be possible you come in contact with someone there that will take you seriously.

Also perhaps they have a huge price tag on Myth as a way to be sure they get something out of it in case however buys it were able to make a good profit. Imagine how you would feel if you sold some old thing to someone only to find out they were able to sell it for several times more than what you originally sold it for. This could also explain why they rather sit on it rather than sell it cheap... why sell something that will end up being competition if you can't make a decent amount out of it first.

I had a suspicion you wanted to do something like this (revive myth that is). When you first showed up asking for contact info for Wight Slayer and calling him influential while not going into any sort of detail as to why you wanted to contact him, I figured it was related to what you propose in reviving myth.

i contacted wight slayer because i wanted to get his scripts for making new features for tournaments in TW.

I've been trying to familiarize myself with the situation but before i started asking questions i suspected there would be some major hurdles, else it would have been done already.

as to your third paragraph, i see your point, but there are ways to get around this as well, but it would require the current owner to see things long term in a project that may not start to pay off for awhile.

rather unfortunate situation with myth right now, the owner will only take a large amount of cash up front, or they are content to just sit on it.

for what it's worth i'll suggest to you all a couple approaches that may not have been tried yet in my next post.

well here is the best course of action that i can come up with but i am an outsider without any detailed knowledge of any of the three players involved and it would require that take2 be willing to give a little and then wait to see what comes of it (in fact all parties will have to give a little). so in other words it will probably still fail, but given what little i have learned about take 2, short of offering them a quarter mil for the game, this may be the only thing that will work:

1) get PM to make a version of the game where they cut out the single player and get the ok for that to be distributed with the understanding that t2 can cancel this at any time and disable those copies (under normal circumstances with a modern game this is easy to do). project magma can cut out the SP and marius will host the games, torrents will distribute the game... all you need is their "ok." unfortunately marius.net owning and running the servers complicates things from t2's perspective, for several reasons, but from the perspective of a gamer, this alone would probably be enough tor revive m2 (to make it worth playing again you don't actually need that many more people).

2) now t2 uses the slowly growing player base to sell more copies of the single player, sell advertisments on m.net, sell DLC (would need some way to eliminate user created content on F&L though), and ultimately gauge interest in a new myth game. this could take years if it worked at all, especially without promoting it, but here is the carrot for t2

3) then explain to t2 that if they could just find a way to update the graphics, not cutting edge graphics, but just bring them more up to modern times that alone would be enough to re-release the full game at full price (the whole industry has devolved into doing this anyway). if they did this competently, the game would be a blockbuster IMO. but for the time being, for the purposes of reviving the game, the lack of graphics could be considered a strength because even the most dated machines can run the game.

4) even if they don't end up going past step 1, the exposure over time will still end up increasing the value of the franchise and increasing the offers they get for the rights. this alone should be enough to motivate them to not let the series die, especially if preventing that is (almost) as simple as writting the words "ok" on a piece of paper.

now i have a couple questions, why exactly did myth 3 fail so badly? i never bought the game after reading user reviews, but what was myth 3 beyond a graphics update that messed it up so bad? one of my trains of thought is that improving the graphics would be simple compared to making a whole new game engineor adding genuinely new features, and thus worthwhile to take2. but if that is what myth 3 was and it failed, then maybe that is a lot harder than I guessed it would be.

also, is it possible that SEGA/CA could be paying take2 to not develop, sell, or talk about the game? in one of those threads linked, a poster mentioned some legal barriers preventing take2 from even discussing the game. would that make any sense, or would a company just do better to buy the series if they wanted to eliminate potential competition?

Myth3 felt too different. While the units were 3D, they were low on polygons so very blocky looking. Everything in Myth3 seems darker in lighting and color. The storyline wasn't liked very well either. It had a number of bugs some of which were fixed in following updates but even now some people can't run it. You might be able to find some threads related to why some people didn't like Myth 3 in here and in the Marius forums.

dmcheatw wrote:well here is the best course of action that i can come up with but i am an outsider without any detailed knowledge of any of the three players involved and it would require that take2 be willing to give a little and then wait to see what comes of it (in fact all parties will have to give a little). so in other words it will probably still fail, but given what little i have learned about take 2, short of offering them a quarter mil for the game, this may be the only thing that will work:

1) get PM to make a version of the game where they cut out the single player and get the ok for that to be distributed with the understanding that t2 can cancel this at any time and disable those copies (under normal circumstances with a modern game this is easy to do). project magma can cut out the SP and marius will host the games, torrents will distribute the game... all you need is their "ok." unfortunately marius.net owning and running the servers complicates things from t2's perspective, for several reasons, but from the perspective of a gamer, this alone would probably be enough tor revive m2 (to make it worth playing again you don't actually need that many more people).

2) now t2 uses the slowly growing player base to sell more copies of the single player, sell advertisments on m.net, sell DLC (would need some way to eliminate user created content on F&L though), and ultimately gauge interest in a new myth game. this could take years if it worked at all, especially without promoting it, but here is the carrot for t2

3) then explain to t2 that if they could just find a way to update the graphics, not cutting edge graphics, but just bring them more up to modern times that alone would be enough to re-release the full game at full price (the whole industry has devolved into doing this anyway). if they did this competently, the game would be a blockbuster IMO. but for the time being, for the purposes of reviving the game, the lack of graphics could be considered a strength because even the most dated machines can run the game.

4) even if they don't end up going past step 1, the exposure over time will still end up increasing the value of the franchise and increasing the offers they get for the rights. this alone should be enough to motivate them to not let the series die, especially if preventing that is (almost) as simple as writting the words "ok" on a piece of paper.

The problem with this is still letting Take2 keep the rights of the series. We've had over 9 years of proof that they don't know how to manage it or even care for it's lively-hood.

Also, here's another important fact. When Bungie sold Take2 the rights to Myth and Oni in 2000, each series was purchased at an assessed value of $1.5 million, (this is a known fact, as it was disclosed on a Take 2 quarterly statement sheet). Sure it's been 11 years since then, and Take2 itself hasn't done anything with the series since 2002, they are in the incorrect mindset that it still has a high cash value.

wow 1.5 million, that isn't too bad actually. i was thinking it could be a lot more expensive than that.

if i had enough money to buy that and to cover overhead for graphics updates and other modernizations in the net code plus initial advertising and hosting the servers I'd move on it instantly given what i know about the state of RTT games.

that sounds like a lot of expenses but i actually think the biggest hurdle is designing and developing the engine and implementing all the features and then bug testing, all of which is already done. the game has more features than games of today do and it is wayyyy more bug free than games released today tend to be.

dmcheatw wrote:2) now t2 uses the slowly growing player base to sell more copies of the single player, sell advertisments on m.net, sell DLC (would need some way to eliminate user created content on F&L though).

Defeats the point of myth for me. Modability should be one of its selling points

Not allowing user created content seems to be the trend in the games industry now.
Publishers know that if you can play awesome free mods, then you will take much longer to get bored with the game you paid $50 for and then you wont pay for their expansion packs and other DLC. This is a sad reality that the games industry has turned into this. Just like with the Battlefield series creators building its games so it is impossible for people OUTSIDE the development enviroment of the studio to compile things into the game.

Thats right, anything that uses the frostbite engine in any of its forms currently and in the future will be UNmodable. How did this happen you ask? You can trace it back to the development of Bad Company 1, a CONSOLE only game. Thank you consoles, for helping to ruin one of the best video game franchises ever!

I blame these trends on the ONLINE console gaming generation, who are all too happy to shell out $ for whatever crap the developer was working on as DLC or an expansion pack DURING the development of the MAIN product! Why is this BS? Well before, when a studio was making a game, they used every person they had to work on the MAIN TITLE. Later AFTER the game was released then they would create an expansion pack of new content they were not able to work on because they were busy putting that effort into the main title. So its BS because what the games industry is doing now is this, they are working on the main titles and the expansion packs or DLC at the same time they are creating the main title. This means they are not putting this effort into the main product and NOT including content they created during development of the main title and short changing the end users. This might seem like semantics, and it is really, but I know a horrible way of doing things when I see it.

This trending that takes away freedom from users to add content to games and to take away dedicated servers forcing people to play on "Company" servers. This is another thing that the online console generation has no idea is a very bad idea for the games industry as a whole.

Being able to create your own server, and adjust the settings to whatever playing style you want on your server is intrinsic to the value and longevity of a game. Publishers dont want you to be happy and not bored with a game for years though, so they can sell you more crap that they did not include when you bought the main game from them in the first place.

Imagine playing Myth online, where the only games hosted are AUTOHOSTS, with game type settings and map rotations and time limits set by the games developers ONLY! (Really take a min to think about this) Wow, that would pretty much be a super lame myth experience that we all would have given up on like 10 YEARS AGO! This is the trending garbage that the games industry is hearding us all twards, and consoles are the shepards. Sure games of the future will be really pretty, but they will never be the same freedom rich gaming enviroments that they used to be. Money is the root of all evil after all.

Defacto wrote:Not allowing user created content seems to be the trend in the games industry now.
Publishers know that if you can play awesome free mods, then you will take much longer to get bored with the game you paid $50 for and then you wont pay for their expansion packs and other DLC. This is a sad reality that the games industry has turned into this.

No only stupid console games have these restrictions. The only company I know that has blocked all or most 3rd party material for computer games is World of Warcraft, but those games don't really need it because their fanbases will sit through anything so being bored isn't really a problem for them.

As for computer games, there will always be hackers or coders who will crack games to allow 3rd party, so charging will actually lose them profit, and Myth is just an old game and I doubt theres any way to block any user made materials because almost every myther now has something that wasn't made by bungie or take2. Also the dev tools have been released and we've made several of our own so its just impossible to ban it when we've had the source for so long.

Don't blame consoles, blame publishers.

It would have happened if consoles had never caught on. It's just another way like the horribly DRM PC games get these days, for publishers to maximize profit. In fact, with games like Crysis, which cost a ton to make, and don't sell nearly enough to offset the cost of making it, I would think if consoles never caught on, we would have seen it on PC sooner rather than later.