Our parent site IncGamers has posted an exclusive interview with Travis Baldree, formerly the lead designer on Mythos at Flagship North, now the founder of Runic Games. The interview covers the (sad) final fate of Mythos, their plans for their new property, Travis’ ideas on integrating RMT into a Western MMO-style game, the huge shadow cast by Diablo 3 and WoW in the genre, and more. It’s a good interview with some very direct questions, and well worth a read. A couple of quotes:
How close to release do you think Mythos was? How successful do you think it could have been in today’s market?
We were scheduled to go into Open Beta in October, with commercialisation 2 months after that - we were very, very close. We all believed in what we were doing with Mythos, and think it could have been pretty successful, especially with ongoing development.Did the announcement of Diablo 3, and the huge immediate interest in that sequel, make you feel Mythos was not up to the comparison or do you think the two games serve a different market?
Like everyone else, we watched the Diablo 3 videos avidly on release, and had long and intense discussions about their approach, and what we could learn from them. I think there are many great lessons for us in what they’ve done - but I think we all believe we need to differentiate ourselves from Diablo 3 to succeed. Since Diablo appears to be staying with the classic Battle.Net setup ( I’m sure with some great new features ), we felt that we should focus on our differentiating factors - a more social environment with a large shared space, and a free-to-play business model to lower the barrier to entry. I think we can definitely succeed as long as we make sure to forge our own identity.
