Interview by: Andrew Webster

Mythos is a game that has seen some troubles. Originally the product of Flagship Studios -- the same team behind the ill-fated Hellgate: London -- the game was left in limbo after the company closed its doors. The majority of the original development staff moved on to Runic Games, where they created the excellent Torchlight. (Our Indie Game of the Year.)

Now, with Torchlight already satiating the appetites of action-RPG fans and Diablo III on the horizon, Mythos has been resurrected. We sat down with Eric Liu, global manager for Redbana US, the team bringing the game to North America, about the challenges in picking up where someone else left off and what fans can expect from the new Mythos.

Obviously Mythos has had a troubled development history. What is it that made you decide that this is a game worth releasing?

Mythos’ troubled history had more to do with outside circumstances than the quality of the game. It’s a fantastic game that was initially designed by an incredibly talented team. Since Mythos garnered so many fans during its first beta, we jumped at the opportunity to assume development. We felt that it would be a terrible loss to let it become vaporware.

What will separate Mythos from other action RPGs like Diablo and Torchlight?

Unlike other action RPGs, we’re focusing on Mythos as a massively multiplayer game where while you are adventuring, you'll get to meet other random players along the way. At the same time, dungeon crawling either alone or in a group is a very big part of the game, but we feel strongly that this genre can benefit from a more massive element. We’re also working on some unique classes and races that will make the gameplay very interesting and different than others in the genre.

Keeping to that point, in an early developer diary, it was said that Mythos was "being reconstructed to become more suitable as an online game." Can you elaborate on what that means?

Certainly. As you might know, Mythos was originally created as a test-bed for Hellgate: London’s multiplayer gameplay. This also meant the game lacked qualities of actually being a full-fledged game with lore and a back story for the races in the game. One of the goals moving forward is to make the game more interesting by having unique quests that really solidifies the story background.

It was also said that you were "trying to keep the strengths that the game used to have, and make them even stronger, while eliminating its weaknesses." Can you elaborate on what the strengths and weaknesses of Mythos were when you started working on the title?

When we first started working on Mythos its strength was, of course, its fantastic and addicting dungeon-crawling gameplay experience and online server capabilities. As I mentioned above, its main weakness mainly boiled down to game lore and additional environmental polish to building out a complete experience. We’re not really removing much of the game content, just optimizing the UI and some of the underlying code to facilitate the free to play model.

During its time with the previous developers, Mythos already went through a closed beta period. How has this helped with the current development?

It has helped immensely; with a game like this, the most important input we get is from players. Thus beta testing is extremely important to us. There’s nothing like actually being in the game, interacting with testers and talking directly with them about what they do and don’t like about the game. We’re able to take that feedback from the original beta and make Mythos even better. Once we have our own closed beta with the new additions to the game, we are very curious what the existing Mythos fans will say. That feedback will be compiled to further make the game ready for commercialization.