The Hellgate: London dev, Flagship Studios, hopes that their new free-to-play MMO Mythos will ”take down some” and ”put a dent” in other rival MMO’s when it launches.
Studio co-founder Max Schaefer admits that a flaw with Hellgate would be ”trying to do too many things for too many people,” something they’re keen to avoid repeating with Mythos.
”We wanted a cutting edge graphics engine, we wanted multiple business models with subscriptions and free play, and single-player, we wanted to combine third-person play with first-person play, we wanted to do random 3D levels, and when you’re starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much,” said Schaefer on Hellgate, in an interview with Eurogamer.
”We ended up rushing it to market and not keeping it in the oven long enough, just out of necessity.”
With Mythos they plan to focus on core features and not make a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ mistake again. The MMO will be free-to-play but in-game items will actually be paid for by gamers.
”We’re under no illusions. WOW had ten times the staff we did, took three times as long, had twenty times the budget - and those are pretty talented, hard-working guys as well, so to think that we could go straight head to head is probably unrealistic,” he said.
”However, what we can do is target it better and we can find out what the core gaming experience that people want is and really try to hit that. I think that the free model and the item sales model give us the potential to capture a lot more of an audience than if we had gone with a boxed product and subscription model.”
”Can we take down the big boys? I think we can take down some of them. And I’d like to put a dent in the others.”
Click here to read the full interview between Max Schaefer and Eurogamer.
