My thoughts on Myth 3, Take 2, and the Myth Series

[GodzFire]

I'll just say in advance that, although I will bring up some good points here, this is still going to be a rant, so fair warning.

If Take 2 hadn't f*cked MumboJumbo over so bad, and M3 had a chance to thrive like M2 did with the developer tools, updates, and it's own online server, I know people would be singing a different tune of it today, and the popularity of Myth and the size of it’s community would be a lot bigger.

MumboJumbo was commissioned to create the next installment of Myth, they weren't a fan made group, they were an official business, with the resources that Bungie had. Bungie didn't have a choice to make a M3, when get got bought out, they did whatever Micro$oft told them to do. Micro$oft wanted Halo, they didn't care about anything else.

Take 2, and I will stay this until the day I die, Take 2 from day ONE did not give a sh*t about the Myth series. They were like a loanshark, when they helped out Bungie financially due to the M2 installer bug (thank you Windows). They care only to know when someone actually tries to do something with Myth, and then it becomes "important" to them.

It gets me so upset. If Bungie had kept ownership of Myth, they could have easily open-sourced it like they did Marathon or, when they split from M$, could have worked on it again. Finally, it would have been a LOT easier to talk to the people at Bungie about buying the franchise since they actually cared about the community and the people it consisted of.

I'm sorry, I might be preaching or reaching, but this never would have happened if it wasn't for Windows and that god-damn uninstaller bug, which started all the events in motion.

But that's over and done with, and I probably should stop talking about it because it all does it make me angry. Despite the admirable attempts to keep it alive, Myth is just gonna keep slowing dying into obscurity because the company that owns it refuses to do anything with it, or even acknowledge Myth's existence.

[Pyro]

Meh. Wasn't Bungie working on Halo before they were bought? I recall someone saying something like that. It was going to be like an RTT as well. Which means if Bungie was never bought, there might have never been a Myth 3 at all. If Take Two left MumboJumbo alone instead of firing them, I doubt it would have made M3 that different. Less issues? Sure... but way better? Nah.

[Jon God]

Meh. Wasn't Bungie working on Halo before they were bought? I recall someone saying something like that. It was going to be like an RTT as well. Which means if Bungie was never bought, there might have never been a Myth 3 at all. If Take Two left MumboJumbo alone instead of firing them, I doubt it would have made M3 that different. Less issues? Sure... but way better? Nah.

Halo was a pet project that had been being worked on for years and years, as Jason Jones said in commentary, in reference to all the phases of Halo, and what was cut "It was either rush it, and get what we could in the game or never release it"

I don't think Halo was their main focus, though it certainly turned out to be.

Another interesting fact, Halo started out as a mod for Myth, but continued to change, from a RTT, to a third person shooter, then finally to a first person shooter.

Who knows if bungie would have made a Myth 3, or just open sourced it, a la Marathon.

However, Oni would have been a much better game. . .

[vinylrake]

Bungie was working on Halo before they were bought, in fact that was the single, most important - no strike that, it was THE SOLE REASON that MS bought Bungie. A console is nothing without a killer game EXCLUSIVE TO THE CONSOLE's PLATFORM that will make people want to buy the console, and MS had nothing lined up that was going to wow people and make them buy xBoxes instead of PlayStations or Nintendo consoles. In Bungie's in-development project (later named Halo) MS saw that killer game.

While Halo would have taken lots of resources and made the likelihood of a mega M3 produced by Bungie less likely, they produced TFL with a handful of people, and SB with a core of a couple dozen people, so it wouldn't have been completely out of the question - especially if they handed it off to a smaller group withini Bungie - like the group that created Oni. Even if it hadn't had the hype and resources of Halo, a Bungie sponsored and managed Myth III would have been better that what we have. No slight to the developers of M3 - Bungie would have at least given the developers the time and resources to FINISH the job and time to test it and tweak it to get things just right.

While on the topic of blaming people for things gone wrong, we can all blame MS for halo being a console only game. Up until the time Bungie was bought out and even for a short time afterwards Bungie was basically promising that the-as-yet-unamed-Halo would be a Mac/PC/Console game... then after being bought it was going to be a console game FIRST with Mac/PC development promised 'later'... then of course we all know where that went.

Also, while you are right that the uninstall windows bug was the cause of the financial hit that caused Bungie to seek out a distribution partner with deep pockets, it wasn't Microsoft's 'fault' that Bungie sold the Myth franchise to Take2. At the time MS was looking into buying Bungie, Take2 owned 20% of Bungie. Microsoft wasn't interested in buying 80% of Bungie, and Bungie obviously WANTED to get bought out by MS - BUNGIE sold Myth down the toilet so they could shack up with MS. As great as Myth is as a game, and as talented as the Bungie developers were, from the Myth community standpoint Bungie sold out to MS.

On the theme of what could have been, I sometimes imagine how different Halo would have been had it been a console game - imagine Halo with a Fear/Loathing style editor with good model importing/exporting, 16 player multiplayer games - and of course a good Myth style mod.

[Graydon]

I've always wanted to play 'Halo' as a berserk in the world of Myth. That'd be so badass.