Mythos Does The Lazarus Thing

The greatest tragedy about the closure of Flagship last year - apart from a ton of good people losing their jobs, of course - was not the loss of dreary demon-basher Hellgate: London, but of the promising free-to-play Diablolike Mythos. Ditching the subscription fee was a dangerous experiment for Flagship, but Bill Roper and co never got to see if it worked. However, their sometime publisher Hannbitsoft managed to hang on to the license and tech upon Flagship's demise, and they've just announced development has restarted. From a different studio, inevitably. How do we feel about this?

The funny thing about Mythos is that it was essentially finished, with future plans being more about additional content than sweeping changes. Hannbitsoft, however, seem to have tasked the new studio (two of 'em, in fact - T3 Entertainment and Redbana US) with a fairly significant rethink. "MYTHOS is currently in a good condition where it’s being reconstructed" says the official release. "We are trying to keep the strengths that MYTHOS used to have, and strengthen them even more to make more suited as an online game."

Curiously, that the game is/was free isn't mentioned in the release - could this mean Hannbitsoft intend to move to a traditional, subscription-based business model? Something we never got around to seeing was the micropayment goodies due for Flagship's Mythos - perhaps that's now been abandoned.

And that could work out just fine - it'd be difficult to claim Mythos does anything new, but plenty of people will be happy to pay for it because it's essentially the closest there is to Diablo Online. Albeit with Warcraft-esque graphics - forever a cause of seething fury for A Certain Type Of Gentlemen. I kinda dug it, so it'll be good to see it come back - but it's a terrible shame it now belongs to its funders and not its creators.

More details'n'quotes over at VG47.