Massively^™

Mythos might have released as it is today -- a fairly small, but fun, MMO in the mold of Diablo 2, by the original creators of that legendary game. Overhead gameplay, point and click, talent trees, but more free form -- no plot aside from that given by the quests. You played Mythos a dungeon at a time. Mythos is almost entirely instanced. You'll hardly ever see another player outside of a city -- very rarely at one of the hubs in the countryside.

They're changing all that. The countryside will no longer be randomized; it will become a static world as in World of Warcraft or EverQuest. In old Mythos, you got a quest for a dungeon, and that dungeon would suddenly appear on your map. You'd walk to it and have it entirely to yourself, finish the quest, and the dungeon would disappear. Now, that dungeon will remain a fixed part of the world. The random dungeons that you could previously buy maps for, will now be accessed through special runestones that will teleport you and your party straight to it.


Flagship Studios hopes to have from 150 to 200 players in their hand-crafted overworld at once. Just because the world is larger, though, doesn't mean you'll have to run everywhere. There will be Anchorshrines scattered about that will let you instantly teleport to any other Anchorshrine you have discovered.

Until now, Mythos was an MMO, but without much M(assively) in it. Now it has a world to go along with its core dungeon crawler. Even dungeon crawling might be losing some of its focus, as the game turns toward quests which may never see the inside of a dungeon. It's odd for a game to change so drastically this close to its open beta. Is the move from an instanced dungeon crawler to a more open model a good one for Mythos? It's a risk. If you're in the closed beta, how do you feel about this change? It's certain that this is bringing it ever closer to World of Warcraft-land, a game with which it shares its colorful, cartoony visual style.