New Mythos Review – 4/28/08

I see that my post about my Mythos review that’s around nine months old is still getting quite a few views. Taking that into account, I’m going to write up another little review and talk about how the game has changed since then.

Combat: Combat in the game is still as fast-paced as it ever has been, which is one of the things that many people enjoy it for and the main reason it is touted as a Diablo 2 clone. It’s always fun to be able to plow down 30-50 mobs at the same time, however it suffers from the fact that there is generally one skill used depending on the class you pick. Occasionally builds are created that utilize multiple skills (gadgets for gadgeteer for instance) but by and large it’s one skill you’re using the vast majority of the time (piercing barrage.) This is something that generally grows old after a while, even with the crazy amount of mobs you face. In fact, most classes are built around the idea that you gather up as many mobs as you can behind you, turn around, and blow them all away. It’s actually pretty inefficient if you kill mobs as you see them, which is a bit unusual I think, but that’s the way the system is built. Obviously it’s not something that’s going to break the game as I’m still playing it.

Crafting: Crafting is rather chaotic and unstructured right now. You can craft items that you will actually wear, but with the high chance of breaking (if you want them to be as good as possible) coupled with the fact that finding all of the materials to create it is a big hassle generally is putting people off crafting. I think this will be remedied a bit with the marketplace they are working on currently, but right now it’s not really something that is living up to its potential. Also, crafting anything but the top tier is an outright waste of time.

Gear: Gear is a major problem with the game right now, for several reasons. First and foremost, they didn’t create a scale of gear from levels 1-50. To illustrate my point the top requirement for gear is basically 140’ish (strength, dexterity, wisdom) and my dexterity at level 48 is 210. To me, this means that gear requirements should be capping out at about 200, or 215, but the foresight didn’t really seem to be there when they first created this system. This is understandable really, since they were just getting the game out the door when the gear system was set up and it hasn’t been changed really since. Obviously, it’s still in beta and they are going to perform at least one character wipe before now and release so this could change, but right now, a level 25 character can basically have as good of gear as a level 50.

Not only is the gear itself a problem, but the obtaining of gear is another problem entirely. The way the majority of higher level players obtain their gear is through random quests. These quests are generated with 3 potential rewards (which scale from basically from garbage to really good gear.) If you don’t like the choices you are presented with, you can simply abandon the quest and retake it with three new rewards. If you do this 20-30 times, you are generally going to find really good items one of those tries. This is the way that I have obtained 9 of my 13 pieces of gear that I use, and the other four pieces I have not found upgrades for in over 12 levels. I don’t have the max amount of luck on my character, which is 200 (luck increases the modifier on the item when it drops from uncommon to rare to unique, etc.,) however it is at 175. Even with my rather high luck, I still find tons and tons of items that I have absolutely no use that I leave on the ground. I understand that if they drastically increase the amount of really good gear that can drop, the player base would be flooded with items and their value would drop to almost nothing, but this isn’t really an issue anyways because there is virtually no trade economy to speak of. You basically have to give your gear away if you don’t need it because the currency has almost no value right now and the odds of finding another player with an equivalent piece of gear that you want is slim at best.

Quests: Quests are pretty much terrible right now to be perfectly honest. The writing for some of the quests is pretty entertaining and worth reading, but almost all of the quests are the typical “kill 10 foozles/find 10 foozle hides.” I understand that this is part of the problem when you are dealing with a game in which the vast majority of the maps are randomly generated, but there has to be some way of spicing things up a bit. There are only 2-3 uniques in each zone really, so the possibility for quests there are pretty minimal. It goes without saying that quests cap out at about 25 because the three zones are built to sustain 10 levels of play, so getting from 25-50 is done either through running epic maps which you buy or find, running random quests, or running two maps that scale from 20-50 (one for solo play, the other for a group.)

PvP: PvP was just added to Mythos in the form of Shadowlands, and I must say that it didn’t really work out the way it was intended. The system is set up so that all of the towns are shared among players and every map has the chance that another player can enter it (and fight each other.) When a player is killed, they will drop a piece of gear. If you kill a player who is significantly lower in level than you, you get a karma rating which means that there is a chance that you will drop more than one piece of gear.

The problems with the system are many:

• It can be extremely difficult to determine what level a player is with a quick glance. By the time you figure out whether you should kill them or not, they could have killed you already. That said, you don’t want to kill just anyone because it could cause you to drop even more gear the next time you die.
• Players are generally running around with garbage for gear for fear of losing equipment that has taken an immense amount of time to acquire. What fun is PvP if you can’t truly put yourself to the test and see whether you were the better player? Constantly wondering whether you would have won a fight with better gear can be frustrating.
• There are literally no safe areas in the Shadowlands (an exact replica of the normal world) so unless you head out to the gate where you enter/leave the Shadowlands when you need to take a break or go afk or whatever, you are constantly in jeopardy of being killed and looted.

*TAKES DEEP BREATH* I realize that sounded pretty harsh, but understand that I still do enjoy this game and am spending about 4-6 hours with it a week, there are just some issues that (at least past level 30) are really sticking out at me. Most of the problems stated here aren’t affecting the core of the game, they are just opportunities that aren’t being taken advantage of. Many of these issues will likely be either improved or fixed altogether before its release. Up until level 30, the game is very enjoyable. There is just enough variety between the classes that you can try them all and enjoy each one. A word to the wise, however: If you start in hardcore mode, make sure you read up on the build you want to try, as you won’t be able to respec at all. If you want to start on normal, you will level a bit slower (less mobs = less xp) but you will have a bit more money to throw around for potions and such and you will be able to try out as many builds as you want (though you can’t change your skill point allocations.) If you’re going for uber pwnage, you’ll probably want to go with a gadgeteer (piercing barrage) but there are powerful builds with all classes. If anyone has any questions they would like me to answer, feel free to ask away. Hopefully soon I’ll post some suggestions for these issues that I have, but this is enough for now.

~Kanthalos

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