Yesterday I got an email in my inbox that I wasn't expecting. It was from Flagship Studios, who you may know as the developers of the recently released Hellgate: London. What you may not know, is that while developing Hellgate: London they were also working on an action RPG designed to test certain parts of the engine. That RPG is called Mythos, and the email I received was an invite to the beta.

Now, before I get into my first impressions of the game, let's all get on the same page here. Flagship Studios was founded by ex-Blizzard (or Activision-Blizzard as they are now known) employees that developed Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft. Many were hoping for Hellgate: London to satisfy all our Diablo 3 cravings, but in the end it ended up falling short. Since logging into Mythos for the first time tonight, I have been reassured of Flagship's abilities.

After a smooth login process and a patch download, I was prompted with the character creation screen. There are the typical options here: race, class, skin color, hair style, hair color, and so on. One thing that threw me off was the lack of classes and races. The races include Humans, Satyrs, and Gremlins, and the classes include Bloodletter, Pyromancer, and Gadgeteer. I realize this is the beta, however I am unsure on whether or not they intend to add other races and classes. I couldn't really be to bothered with that during this point in time as I was starting to get antsy. I chose to play as a Gremlin Bloodletter, picked a name, and soon spawned in the noob area.

Once in game, I found some familiar controls. Click on the ground to where you want to go, click on a monster to attack said monster, right click to use special abilities, etc. It was basically Diablo's control scheme, and I felt right at home. After the newbie quest is over you are transported to a base city, Stonehill. It is here I made first contact with other players (did I mention this is online?). It's your typical MMO city here, people running all over doing quests and trading with merchants. My first real quest involved hunting wolves and collecting items. It was pretty standard at this point, but I was having fun.

It really became clear to me then how much in common it had with Diablo, and even World Of Warcraft. Actually, now that I really think about it, if you were to combine the quest and online aspects of WoW with Diablo, you would get Mythos. This is not a bad thing, these are two award winning games and two of my personal favorites. I've provided a few screenshots so you can really see the similarities to Diablo and WoW. Take note of the quest icons, the interface, the inventory...even the graphical style and perspective.



I had a lot of fun playing tonight, and while I'm still a noob, I will keep playing and giving you my thoughts. Be sure to check back later for more updates!

Oh, and one last note here. Yes, that is a cigar and sunglasses. Awesome.