Flagship Studios released Zone 3 for the closed beta of
style="font-style: italic;">Mythos,
it's new action-based massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG) on March
26. The new content also came with some significant new features and an
overhaul of the user interface (UI). If you have read
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/28866">Mythos Beta
Journal #1 and
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/29157">Mythos Beta
Journal #2, you'll notice some differences here.
border="1">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/29579" title="Firefight">
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 200px; height: 160px;" alt=""
src="/image/view/29579/preview">
style="font-style: italic;">The new
style="font-style: italic;">Mythos content
includes three different crafting styles.
Here Comes Crafting
These days, any MMOG worth its salt has some form of crafting. And with
crafting comes some form of harvesting. The latest
style="font-style: italic;">Mythos
release contained all this crafting goodness and was so different that
Flagship Studios made beta testers uninstall the previous version and
just download a new installer. I was able to pick up my first crafting
quests in the major city of Zone 1, Stonehill. I found that I could now
harvest crafting resources in the wilderness, and the monsters I fought
occasionally dropped crafting recipes.
Crafting in Mythos
is based on three styles: Terran, Sylvan, and Ethereal. Each of the
styles can make different gear. Terran crafting is the heavy
blacksmithing, allowing the creation of bladed weapons and heavy armor.
Sylvan crafting is for staves, bows, and shields. Ethereal crafting
covers rings, pendants, and light armor. Each crafting style has the option of learning elemental enhancements (fire, ice,
lightning, and poison). Enhancing a weapon adds elemental damage.
Enhancing armor adds a resistance. Crafting wild cards include
heraldries that can adorn other crafted items, potions, and grenades.
The Flagship Studios design team says players will not be able to buy
above tier 2 potions at vendors at launch. So crafters will be able to
make potions for tiers 3-5 and sell them in an auction-style market
system that is not yet in the game.
Placing a point in a
crafting tree (say,) rings allows you to create level one versions of
that item. Each additional point raises the level of the items you can
make. You can place points into the style (Terran. Sylvan, or Ethereal)
to open up new tiers of crafting, like Swords and Axes II. The crafting
design looks pretty intricate, but I haven't done any actual crafting
yet.
New Race & New
Racial Traits
Zone
3 also came with a new race, the Cyclops, and an introduction to racial
traits. The Cyclops is a large, beefy creature with a single eye. They
come with skin colors ranging from blue to pink to peach. The hair
color options included neon green and blue. Cyclops also sport several
different styles of horns that can be fine tuned with the Accessories
option at character creation.
The racial traits, which are
likely subject to change, provide a damage bonus versus a certain type
of enemy (e.g. beasts or undead) and a small natural resistance to an
element. These traits make the races slightly different without making
one race especially desirable for a particular class. It seems Flagship
Studios is committed to the notion that you should pick your race based
on cosmetic appeal. The traits as they stand certainly support that
stance, as they do not make you care which race you pick. The traits
are just slight bonuses that you'll enjoy on that character.
border="1">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/29578" title="Firefight">
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 200px; height: 160px;" alt=""
src="/image/view/29578/preview">
style="font-style: italic;">The Sylvan crafting
style is the way to go if you want to make shields.
Changes to Attributes and
Class Skill Trees
Another
change worth mentioning is the addition to bonuses derived from placing
points into your class skill tree. As I mentioned in Mythos Beta
Journal #1, each class has a skill tree with 3 tabs. You can place
skill points into individual skills or the tree as a whole, which
unlocks new tiers of skills. At that time, any point placed in the tree
counted for all three tabs but did nothing else. It seems Flagship
Studios has listened to player feedback on the beta forums and
incorporated attribute bonuses for spending those points. They did so
in an unconventional way, though.
Unlike Titan Quest,
which used points spent in a skill tree to further delineate a caster
from a melee fighter, Mythos
works in the opposite direction. The attribute bonuses for spending
points in your class skill tree mostly boost attributes that you don't
put points into at level up. For instance, the Bloodletter gets the
biggest boost to wisdom. The aim is clearly to allow you to maximize
the 5 points you get to spend at level up on strength, dexterity, and
vitality. Their may be a few flaws with this current system, though, as
many beta players are able to describe build scenarios where the
bonuses benefit a single class build very well and others almost not at
all. I won't be surprised to see this change a little before launch.
Speaking
of getting bonuses to wisdom, players will now enjoy a slight increase
to spell damage for each point spent in wisdom. Obviously, this makes
min/max caster builds more powerful, but it could also make that wisdom
bonus a Bloodletter gets for spending points in the class skill tree
more useful.
Keep
reading. Up next, I'll discuss the mail system, changes to the way
inventory works, and the new-look UI.
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Mythos Game Page.
