One of the things I covered closely when I was with Kotaku last year was the closure of Flagship Studios amid the crash-and-burn of Hellgate: London. It's difficult to see a long-running project with such high audience expectations fall on its face -- and it was made a little more difficult if you remember, by an uncommonly intimate look at how the team was struggling thanks to some honest thoughts from an employee.
That's why it was fun for me to talk recently with Runic Games' Max Schaefer, who's back in the fight at his new studio formed with the Mythos team (so visible were Hellgate's problems that it's easy to forget Flagship had another promising project in the pipeline that got crushed in the collapse).
Schaefer talks about what went wrong at Flagship, of course -- "trying to do too much, in every respect" -- but he also told me all about how he's taking a lot of those lessons to "try it again and do it better now" with Runic's new project, the Diablo-like MMO Torchlight (Schaefer's also one of the original co-creators of Diablo). Check out the stories!
Anyway, seeing a dedicated team come out of a bad situation with more wisdom and a second chance is always a nice story -- especially amid this awfully dismal weather we've been having here in New York lately.
Speaking of the end of a badly-executed MMO, this reminds me of something awesome my colleague Chris Remo did for us somewhat recently in writing up a firsthand account of the last days of Tabula Rasa. Love it -- do read it if you missed it!
7 comments:
I wondered what happened to Mythos. Oh well, I can transfer my interest to Torchlight. I hope they're all able to nail this "gamer's game" though. Though the whole Hellgate thing wasn't entirely their fault, they had to shoulder the responsibility for it. It's nice to see that they're able to continue on though.
Congrats on the 2001 followers as well, make note of the one who is the 2009th! =-o
~sLs~
I was very sad when Mythos was shut down, but like SLS I can simply transfer my devotion to Torchlight (it's research time!). I'll definitely check out those articles when I'm not at work.
That new thing looks very much like FATE which was fine for what it was, I guess, but it was just a rogue-like grind-fest. Diablo didn't have much going for it in the way of story, but it at least had boss battles. If I recall correctly, FATE didn't even really have those, just the occasionally tougher-than-average-monsters.
If you guys want an easy and quick reference about Runic Games at Torchlight, Runic Games Fansite has a FAQ up: http://www.runicgamesfansite.com/torchlight-faq/
The Developers also stop by our forums, so feel free to come around and ask questions yourself.
Hi Leigh,
Is it possible to underline links you put in posts, sometimes they are fiendishly difficult to differentiate from surrounding text colors (at least for me, b/c my color vision is sucktastic).
:D
Paul -- do you read SVGL in an RSS or something? the links are currently pale pink beside black text!
Unclicked links are a dark purple. Only clicked links show up in pink.
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