Mythos Beta Impressions
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Once in the game proper, I was greeted by the newbie zone, a quiet, secluded locale dominated by the Greenreach Priory which gives the zone it's name. The newbie experience was completed with the mandatory NPC with a golden (!) above his head.
It was at this point that my earlier comment about round wheels came back to bite me in the face. Yes, this isn't the first game to directly adopt the World of Warcraft standard. At the same time, Flagship Studios is composed of a number of ex-Blizzard folks, who worked on the original Diablo, who left Blizzard to do their own thing. While the Golden Exclamation Mark may have become standard, using it is still borrowing from what someone else has done before. If anything, I fault Flagship for not going the extra mile to differentiate themselves from Blizzard, considering the number of ex-Blizzard folks there. Any icon would have done the job for me. A shield with a couple of crossed swords, to denote the heroic and combat-oriented nature of the quest to be undertaken, for example. But again, a minor issue. It works.
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Crafting in Mythos is an interesting proposition. It has its own experience bar, which fills up as you create items. Materials for crafting can be obtained as drops from monsters, as loot from chests, mining nodes, bushes, etc, or by destroying loot items, with better loot turning into better crafting materials. There are even a series of crafting quests, which is always welcome in my book. The crafting process also features the possibility to gamble a little with the creation of items, having some leeway to try to increase the item's base stats, number of slots, etc, at the risk of increasing the chances of failing the combine. It is a gamble, however, a failed attempt consumes all materials and leaves the crafter with zero to show for their efforts. While this might sound like heresy in the current generation of MMO's, I'm sure there are many people out there who grew up on old Everquest crafting who remember when this was the agonising norm. Like the skill trees for each class, crafting is divided into three specialisations, each of which cotains a number of categories ranging from swords to axes to guns to shields to various types of armour.
