tain.totalcodex.net

Finally...

After 10 years, I was able to acquire a copy of Myth 3 and play it. Took me a couple months to get through it, but such is life.



This late in the game (so to speak), I see things quite a bit differently than I would have in 2002. Especially with the advances in technology, which render (no pun intended) many of Myth 3's "breakthroughs" quite moot, leaving it to sink-or-swim on playability, alone.

And in that, it fails miserably.

It certainly has a lot of very nice touches, like the absolutely exquisite lighting, some interesting use of textures, a fair storyline (when placed in context with the rest of the Bungie/Myth universe), and a handful of really cool/immersive maps.

But overall, I think this incarnation of Myth is a dead fish. From the stale gameplay, to the wild departures from TFL/Myth 2 gaming mechanics/physics, to the horrifically bad sound design (really, it's tragic), to the poorly conceived explosions/paralysis...and the list goes on.

Back to the sound design: One of Bungie's major strengths was superior sound design. From Marathon to Myth, the choices were nothing short of world class. And, sound design is very, very important, much more than a lot of people realize.

Myth 3's sound design is shockingly bad, from the amateur in-game stuff ("Game On," etc.) to explosions lacking depth and realism, to "Sound Effects CD" ambients, to the gratuitous use of echo and reverb (as if that's a good thing), to the mind-numbingly awful Dwarf voice-overs (and others)...so very bad.

Overall, it's easy to see why Myth 3 never went anywhere, and why there are so few 3rd-party maps available. A shame, because the template for a cool gaming experience is definitely there.

After a little research, I see that Myth 3 was troubled from the day it was released. Apparently it wasn't even *finished* upon public distribution, which would certainly account for its deep flaws. Not sure how all that happened, but it really hurt the product.

And, life goes on...

And this is why I get upset when people are more harsh on M3 when they don't know the complete story behind it, because when you do, you realize just how GOOD it is given what it had to work with.

Basically, Take2 (the company that bought Myth from Bungie) hired MumboJumbo to create M3. MJ was partly comprised of talented veteran Myth creators who cared for the game like Santa's Head, Fisj, Iggy Popped, and who were helped unofficially by more Mythers like El Bastard. They had great aspirations for M3, which you can see in the original creation documents that they team put together (they are somewhere on these forums in their own thread created by me).

Unfortunately, Take2 didn't care about the series, and just wanted to make a buck off it, so the team were given the task of creating and releasing the game in time for Christmas, which essentially gave them like half the time it would take for a normal game to be developed. Take into account they were given very limited resources (I believe I heard they had a total of 3 Macs to test on), and you can see why the game has an unpolished feel to it.

Even worse, as soon as the game went gold, Take2 fired the entire MumboJumbo team, and threatened them by saying if they publicly commented on what happened, Take2 would make sure they never worked in the gaming industry again. Fearing for their job security, most didn't say anything. Not helping the matter was that none of the tools MJ worked with to create the game were released publicly (like Bungie had done with Fear & Loathing), severely limiting the amount of community content from the get-go.

What you see as the 'latest' release right now isn't even the version MJ put out. After they were all fired, a group of Myth creators including some from the original team, got together and voluntarily fixed as many bugs and issues with the game they could; in their spare time and their own dime (they were called MythDev).

So taking all that into account and then judging Myth 3, I personally see it in a different light. A game that had great potential, but was struck down by a greedy and heartless company only wanting to make a buck off the series with no love for it's legacy or the community that supported it.

As Paul Harvey used to say, "And now you know.........the rest, of the story......."

Yow. Thanks for that. A lot of things make *so* much more sense. Glad to have the clarity, minus the kind of "parsing" you'll find from press releases, and such.

Trust me, I am all too familiar with the paradigm you mention. There have been many worthy projects that have made it all the way to production, only to be "felled" by a bean-counter, or someone with executive power who doesn't understand what they're doing (to put it diplomatically).

It's a tough thing to navigate. In my world, however, it's impossible to go back and fix *anything* once the product leaves the stall. Once it's out there in the world, it's over. So, you can only hope to maintain control til the end.

Sad that Myth 3 was less than it could have been, especially with the excellent team initially involved.

At release time it was so dysfunctional that out of Windows 95/98/98SE/NT/Win2k/WinXP it mostly only booted on one or two of them. They put down it as being compatible with Windows 95 on the box despite its never being able to run on it. Out of S3, ATI, nVidia, Voodoo and Matrox chipsets, I think it only really was only compatible with one of them and crashed with the rest, usually at startup. Due to the lack of testing nobody noticed that Norton Antivirus flagged it as containing a virus. And anybody could crash anybody else on "Gamespy" the multiplayer, and quite often did.

I think after-release patches were done unpaid by the MJ team.

Interesting.

I seem to remember trying to run the demo twice on a Mac, back in 2003 or so. Crashed both times, immediately. Never tried again, til earlier this year.

What you see as the 'latest' release right now isn't even the version MJ put out. After they were all fired, a group of Myth creators including some from the original team, got together and voluntarily fixed as many bugs and issues with the game they could; in their spare time and their own dime (they were called MythDev).

Myth Friends,

impasse :

who is real member of Tain forum or a spam bot (robot)?

logically, I know many here, but such ...

Jcp.

That is a good question.

I would say you can tell robots because their posts make no sense, but I guess that could describe a lot of us real people too.

Usually spambots/robots will mention something in a topic, but the rest of their comments are not about Myth.

noomi wrote:What you see as the 'latest' release right now isn't even the version MJ put out. After they were all fired, a group of Myth creators including some from the original team, got together and voluntarily fixed as many bugs and issues with the game they could; in their spare time and their own dime (they were called MythDev).

Noomi,

You are human or a spam bot (robot)? .... sorry by in question. (neutral).

Julio

juliocpaes wrote:who is real member of Tain forum or a spam bot (robot)?

Yes, I am a robot. Why do you ask?

GodzFire wrote: Take2 would make sure they never worked in the gaming industry again. Fearing for their job security, most didn't say anything.

Woah woah woah. First off, never worked in the industry.. this isn't hollywood. Game developers can start their own stuff easy so that threat isn't as severe.

Next, painting Take2 as some sort of evil tyrant? I was there when m3 was going around and I can assure it it wasn't any more dramatic then the budget Take2 had for M3 was so small MJ simply ran out of money and when they confronted Take2 asking for more, T2 just said no, gave everyone their last paychecks and took the game and sold it.

Not exactly. TakeTwo still planned on releasing the unfinished game so they threatened developers not to talk before the game was released about the fact that the development company had already shut down.

Game developers can of course always start their own companies, but with the rise of phone/tablet games and app stores it's a lot easier to break into the game market today than it was in 2001. If a large game development/distribution company threatened to blacklist you it was more serious back then - at least if you had aspirations of working in the game industry as anything other than a mom & pop game developer.

Olong2 wrote:

juliocpaes wrote:who is real member of Tain forum or a spam bot (robot)?

Yes, I am a robot. Why do you ask?

"noomi » 01 Out 2012 02:51

just to be sure, I'm very curious .

Julio

you also have to remember that for many of the people working on Myth 3 - this was their first paying gig. A threat of being blacklisted would take more weight with someone new to the industry than someone who had been around the block a while. If I recall correctly, a/the lead programmer (Andrew Meggs?) was somewhat vocal about the demise at the time, but he had more experience than most. Who was at blame? I'm sure you can point fingers at Take2 and MumboJumbo. Take2 for having an insane schedule and tight budget, MumboJumbo for agreeing to the schedule. From what I could tell (I visited the MumboJumbo office during the summer) everyone was working hard and doing what they could to make the best game they could.

Many of the team did find jobs with other companies - Santa's Head went to Insomniac Games after Myth III - and is still there, for example.

Conner wrote:you also have to remember that for many of the people working on Myth 3 - this was their first paying gig. A threat of being blacklisted would take more weight with someone new to the industry than someone who had been around the block a while. If I recall correctly, a/the lead programmer (Andrew Meggs?) was somewhat vocal about the demise at the time, but he had more experience than most. Who was at blame? I'm sure you can point fingers at Take2 and MumboJumbo. Take2 for having an insane schedule and tight budget, MumboJumbo for agreeing to the schedule. From what I could tell (I visited the MumboJumbo office during the summer) everyone was working hard and doing what they could to make the best game they could.

Many of the team did find jobs with other companies - Santa's Head went to Insomniac Games after Myth III - and is still there, for example.

Visited the office once? ever see a kid running around? was probably me