Myth II: Soulblighter

Myth II: Soulblighter is a real-time tactics game; unlike real-time strategy games, the player does not have to engage in resource micromanagement or economic macromanagement, does not have to construct a base or buildings, and does not have to gradually build up their army by acquiring resources and researching new technologies. Instead, each level begins with the player's army already assembled and ready for combat.[3] During the game, the player controls forces of various sizes made up of a number of different units, each possessing their own strengths and weaknesses. In single-player mode, only Light units are playable, but in online multiplayer mode, the player can control both Light and Dark units.[4]

Screenshot of gameplay in Soulblighter, showing the selection of a single unit. The player has selected a bowman named Hadrian (the unit surrounded by a yellow rectangle). The image also shows unselected warriors, who are currently attacking enemy units. At the top of the screen is the Status Bar. The mini-map of the battlefield is just below on the right. At the bottom of the screen is the Control Bar.

Basic gameplay involves the player selecting and commanding units. To select an individual unit, the player clicks on that unit.[5] Once selected, the unit is surrounded by a yellow rectangle, beside which is a health meter, which diminishes as the unit takes damage.[6] Units capable of utilising magic also have a mana meter in addition to their health meter. As they use magic, this meter diminishes, and then slowly regenerates over time.[7] Units do not regenerate health, however, and there is no way to construct new units (although in some single-player missions, reinforcements are automatically received at predetermined points). To select all nearby units of a given type, the player double-clicks on any individual unit of that type. To select multiple units of different types, the player can either "shift click" (hold down the shift key and click on each individual unit) or use "band-selection" (click and hold the mouse button on a piece of ground, then drag the cursor across the screen. This causes a yellow box to appear, which grows and shrinks as it follows the cursor's movement. When the player releases the button, any units within the box are selected). The player can instantly select all units on screen, irrespective of type, by pressing the enter key.[8] The player can also assign manually selected unit groupings to a specific key on the keyboard, and when that key is pressed, it instantly selects the desired group of units.[9]

Once one or more units have been selected, the player can click on the ground to make them walk to the selected spot, or click on an enemy to make them attack. Units with projectile weapons, such as archers and dwarves can also be ordered to attack a specific spot on the ground, rather than an enemy.[10] It is also important that the player have their units facing in the right direction. This is accomplished by pressing the left or the right arrow key or moving the mouse to rotate the direction of the units as they move to the selected location.[11] Facing the correct direction is especially important when using formations, of which there are nine available. After selecting a group of units, the player must press the corresponding formation button on the keyboard, and then click on the ground where they want the units to form.[12] The player can also order all selected units to scatter and to retreat.[11] All formations, as well as commands such as stopping, guarding, scattering, retreating, and reversing direction, are also available via a single click in the Control Bar at the bottom of the screen.[13]

When a single unit is selected, information about that unit appears in the "Status Bar" at the top of the HUD; the unit's name, a brief biography, how many kills he has, how many battles he has survived, and (if he is capable of carrying items) his inventory. When multiple units are selected, the names, types, and quantity of units will appear, but there will be no biography or information on their kills or previous battles.[14] The HUD also features a transparent overhead mini-map, which displays information about the current battlefield; the player's field of vision is indicated by a yellow trapezoid, enemy units appear as red dots, friendly non-playable units as blue dots, and the player's army as green dots. The player can click anywhere on the mini-map to instantly jump to that location. The mini-map does not initially display the entire battlefield; the player must explore the area for it to become fully mapped.[15] The player can also order troops to move to any location on the mapped area of the battlefield by right-clicking on that area in the mini-map.[16]

The player has full control over the camera throughout the game, and can move it backwards and forwards, left and right, orbit left and right (keeps the camera focused on a single spot while making a 360 degree circle around that spot), rotate left and right (the camera remains in the same spot but the player's point of view moves from side to side), and zoom in and out.[17] All movements can be carried out via the keyboard and mouse. Using the mouse to move backwards, forwards, left and right is accomplished by moving the cursor to the top, bottom, left or right of the screen, respectively. The player can also select preferences to allow them to control rotation and orbiting via the mouse, by moving the cursor to the top and bottom corners of the screen, respectively.[18] Zooming can be controlled by either the keyboard or mouse wheel.[19]

Like in the original game, selecting and commanding units forms the basic gameplay of Soulblighter. The battles are more complex than simply commanding units to attack the enemy, with strategy and awareness of the conditions of the battlefield, and even the weather, also playing important roles. For example, due to the game's physics engine, objects react with one another, with units, and with the terrain. This can manifest itself simply in a severed head bouncing off one of the player's units and changing direction, but it can also have more serious consequences. For example, a dwarf could throw a molotov cocktail at an enemy on a hillside and miss, with the projectile rolling back down the hill towards the player's own units.[20] Projectiles in general, both those used by the player and the enemy, have no guarantee of hitting anything; they are merely propelled in the direction instructed by the physics engine. Arrows, for example, may miss their intended target due to a small degree of simulated aiming error that becomes more significant at long range, or the target may move out of the way, or behind a tree or building.[20] If archers are firing at enemies who are engaged in melee combat, they may also hit the player's own units instead of the enemy, causing the same amount of damage. This is also true of dwarfs' molotov cocktails. As such, friendly fire is an important aspect of the game.[21] The weather is also something the player must always bear in mind. For example, rain or snow can put out explosive-based attacks.[22] It is also much easier for projectile units to hit enemies below them rather than above them, and as such, positioning of the player's units is an important aspect of the game.[21]

It is sixty years since the Great War, when Connacht, the hero who saved the world from the Myrkridia one thousand years previously, returned in the guise of Balor, and with his lieutenants, the Fallen Lords, attempted to destroy humanity. Alric, the only surviving Avatara, is now king of The Province, ruling from Madrigal.[27] It is an age of peace and prosperity,[28] with the Dark existing only in stories, although the fate of Soulblighter, Balor's chief lieutenant, remains unknown.[29] The game opens with Alric experiencing a nightmare remembering the carnage of the War. He awakens to find a crow with red eyes at his window, watching him.

The game then cuts to a cluster of villages near Forest Heart. As with the first game, the story is told through the journal entries of a soldier in The Legion,[30] which is now led by Crüniac, who the soldiers think is more interested in politics than military matters, and spends its time on what the men perceive as trivial errands. Their latest assignment has them investigate reports of grave robbing,[31] however, they are shocked to find the village of Willow Creek besieged by undead Ghasts.[32] They clear the village, and learn the grave robbing leads to the keep of Baron Kildaer.[33] They head to the keep and see hundreds of Thrall moving towards Tallow. Crüniac sends a runner to warn the villagers, while The Legion attack the keep.[34] Crüniac proves a more skilled military tactician than his men believed, masterminding an attack which results in Kildaer's death.[35] Soon thereafter, the runner returns with news that every village in the vicinity has been destroyed, and an undead army is amassing nearby. Crüniac sets fire to the Keep, and The Legion flee into the Clouspine Mountains.[36]

Their rearguard is attacked, and Crüniac mortally wounded. With his dying words, he reveals the undead are led by Soulblighter. The rest of The Legion make it to a World Knot and teleport to Madrigal,[37] where they inform Alric of Soulblighter's return. Alric fears he is trying to find "The Summoner", who, it is foretold, will resurrect the Myrkridia.[38] News soon arrives that Soulblighter has sacked several cities as he moves towards Madrigal, and that Shiver, a Fallen Lord killed during the Great War, has been resurrected.[39] Alric is soon forced to abandon Madrigal, fighting his way through a Myrkridian assault led by Shiver.[40]

The Legion head to Tandem, where Alric plans to hold the fortress at White Falls, on the river Meander, thus preventing Shiver from moving north.[41] Meanwhile, he decides to find The Deceiver, a Fallen Lord who was openly antagonistic towards the others during the Great War. He was thought killed, but his actual fate remains unknown.[42] Alric sends a small detachment to The Deceiver's last known location, and they learn he was trapped in the Dramas River when it froze solid around him, forcing him to use what little sorcery he had left to keep himself alive, unable to break free.[43] The detachment locate and release him, and he advises them to head north to enlist the aid of the Trow, allies of his in ancient times. The Legion do so, and the Trow agree to join the fight against Soulblighter.[44]

The detachment, The Deceiver and the Trow head south and meet with the rest of The Legion, learning Tandem has fallen. However, Alric has ordered The Legion to recapture Muirthemne, formerly Llancarfan, capital of the Cath Bruig Empire.[45] His plan is to find the Ibis Crown in the city's haunted catacombs, and reclaim the title of Emperor, rallying humanity behind him.[46] A small group of volunteers enter the crypts of the city and find the Crown, with Alric declared the new Emperor, and the journeymen resuming their position as the Emperor's Royal Guard; the Heron Guard.[47]

Meanwhile, The Deceiver and a detachment travel to Forest Heart to locate a fragment of the Tain, in which Alric believes The Summoner to be hiding.[48] They successfully find the fragment, enter the Tain, and kill The Summoner, cutting off Soulblighter from the Myrkridia.[49] Acting on his own authority, The Deceiver then attacks Soulblighter's camp, but he and his men are captured.[50] Phelot, a shade in charge of the prison, is in the service of The Deceiver, and frees them. The Deceiver attacks Soulblighter, who turns into a murder of crows to escape. He succeeds, but The Deceiver kills one of the crows, preventing him from fleeing in this manner again. The detachment then meet a scouting party near Silvermines; Alric and The Legion are moving to attack Soulblighter, but have been pinned down by Shiver, whom The Deceiver immediately heads to confront.[51][52] He hunts her down, and Phelot destroys her army. The Deceiver then kills her, but her death triggers a magical energy backlash that also kills him.

With Shiver dead, Soulblighter is forced back against the Cloudspine.[53] His army is defeated, but he flees into the volcano Tharsis, where he plans to shatter the Cloudspine itself, causing widespread devastation. Alric and The Legion pursue him,[54] and Alric breaks the rock on which he stands, plunging him to his death in the molten lava. With Soulblighter's death, the narrator learns of "The Leveler", an immortal evil spirit. The forces of Light and Dark rule the world successively in thousand-year cycles, with each Age of Light climaxing with the arrival of The Leveler, who ushers in an Age of Darkness. The Leveler inhabits the body of the hero who defeated him in the previous cycle — thus the hero who saves civilization is destined to destroy it - as a result Connacht returned as Balor. Soulblighter was not The Leveler; he tried to force the cycle, and as a result may have broken it. Whether this is the case will not be known for over nine hundred years, when it comes Alric's time to assume the mantle of The Leveler.[55]

Bungie conceived of Soulblighter prior to the release of The Fallen Lords in 1997, with the only thing that would prevent them from making it being if The Fallen Lords was a commercial failure.[62] However, when the original game proved a success, becoming Bungie's biggest selling game thus far,[1] the sequel immediately went into development. One of their main goals with the sequel was to include numerous gameplay aspects and game mechanics which they had wanted to feature in The Fallen Lords, but had been unable to implement due to time constraints. Alex Seropian, co-founder of Bungie, explained that "there were still some things at the end of Myth that we wanted to do, but we just ran out of time. Myth was a terrific product, but we knew we could do a lot better".[62] Of the initial planning for Soulblighter, Seropian said:

We had a lot of specific design goals for Myth II. Part of those things are enhancements to the engine as well as the gameplay. There were some things in the gameplay and artificial intelligence that made the original annoyingly difficult, and those were some of the things we wanted to enhance. In addition to that, we decided to touch basically every facet of the game. We wanted to make the music and sound better, the graphics - so we basically retouched every area of the Myth gaming experience.[62]

New to Soulblighter were moving 3D models within the gaming world, something none of Bungie staff had ever created before. For example, the opening level features a fully functional windmill, and a later level features a drawbridge that closes as the level begins, and which the player must then lower so their army can gain access to a castle. Although the original game featured the same kind of 3D polygonal models, none of them moved, and implementing this feature proved to be one of the biggest challenges the team encountered in making the game.[1] Another challenge also involved something not seen in the first game; a level set indoors. For this level, which is set in a large castle, the AI had to be rewritten as two enemy units could be right beside one another but not be able to see each other because of a wall between them. Previously, two units standing beside one another would automatically attack. Writing this new code into the AI scripting language proved especially difficult for the programmers.[63]

The team also approached the cutscenes differently. In The Fallen Lords, the cutscenes had been created by an American animation studio, but had received a mixed response from both the developers and fans of the game, with some feeling they felt cartoony, and were tonally disconnected from the rest of the game. This was something the team wanted to ensure was not repeated in Soulblighter. As Seropian explains:

Myth has a different style to it, almost like a classic kind of look, and we just thought that rendered animation wouldn't look as good with it, so we went with cel animation. Some people liked it, some people didn't, and in the final analysis we decided that it looked a little more cartoon-like than we wanted. For Myth II we decided to go with a Japanese company and have more of an anime style, more of a cutting-edge, rougher-edge look and feel to the animation.[64]

In terms of the game's graphics, as with The Fallen Lords, each level in Soulblighter is constructed on a polygonal mesh. The mesh used is four times finer than in the original, and hence the graphics are more detailed and smoother. Also like the first game, although the game world itself is fully 3D, the characters populating each level are 2D sprites; those in Soulblighter have many more frames of animation than those in The Fallen Lords, and so move much more smoothly.[65] Explaining why the team stuck with using 2D sprites in a 3D terrain, producer Tuncer Deniz states:

It's a performance issue. The reason we went with sprites for the characters is because in Myth you can have one hundred units on the screen at the same time, and if they were all polygonal models, even those with the fastest home computers wouldn't be able to play the game.[66]

"Fear" and "Loathing"

Screenshot from Blue & Grey, an American Civil War era total conversion, created by the community using the Fear and Loathing tools.[69]

With the release of Soulblighter, Bungie included two programming tools called "Fear" and "Loathing", which allowed players to create new units and maps.[70] Both The Fallen Lords and Soulblighter had been created using four tools developed by Bungie themselves; "Tag Editor" edited the constants stored in the cross-platform data files; "Extractor" handled the 2D sprites and the sequencing of their animations; "Loathing" acted as the map editor; and "Fear" dealt with the 3D polygonal models such as houses, pillars, and walls.[71] Speaking of Fear and Loathing, The Fallen Lords's producer and programmer Jason Jones explains: "Loathing is basically the map editor for Myth. You import your map into it, you change the heights, and you place your units on the map in Loathing. Fear takes care of all the models; it is used to import the 3D rendered models into Myth".[72]

Loathing was specifically built around the Myth engine and allowed the team to modify the 3D landscape, apply lighting, determine terrain type, script the AI, and position structures, scenery, and enemies. The 3D models were then imported into the game using Fear.[71] Bungie themselves strongly encouraged the creativity of their fan base in using these tools. For example, in April 1999, they issued a press release regarding the World War II total conversion Myth II: Recon, saying that "this kind of plug-in was exactly what the Myth II tools were intended to inspire, and is an excellent sign that Myth mapmakers are taking this game world in fascinating new directions".[73]

Although the official Bungie.net Myth servers closed in February 2002,[90] the Myth series continued to have an active online fanbase for over a decade, particularly Soulblighter. After Bungie released the Total Codex bundle in 1999, which contained The Fallen Lords v1.3, Soulblighter v1.3 and the Soulblighter expansion pack, Myth II: Chimera, they ceased working to develop the game's source code, as Microsoft, who purchased the company in 2000, wanted them to concentrate on Halo.[91] As such, they were approached by a group of programmers, artists and coders known as MythDevelopers, who asked for access to the code so as to continue its development.[92] With the blessing of Take-Two, Bungie released their entire archive of Myth-related materials to MythDevelopers, including the source code, artwork, all creative files, and documentation.[92] MythDevelopers were also granted access to the source code for Myth III: The Wolf Age, which was developed by MumboJumbo in 2001.[92] Bungie also open sourced their Myth metaserver source code in 2002.[90]

MythDevelopers used this material to improve and further develop the games. Although their initial focus was on the bug-ridden release version of The Wolf Age,[92] they also worked to update the first two games to newer operating systems on both Mac and PC, fix bugs, and create unofficial patches to enhance both the games themselves and the mapmaking tools.[92] They also developed their own library, dubbed the Myth Core Library, which provided networking, input routines, and other low-level functions.[79] This enabled MythDevelopers to avoid the necessity of licensing any external libraries, and instead allowed them to develop everything in-house. This was part of their deal with Take-Two, as they couldn't incorporate anything into the games which they would be unable to give Take-Two the rights to should the company ever ask for the source code back; all modifications remained the intellectual property of Take-Two, who were free to use them in a future commercial version of Myth, if they ever wanted to re-release an upgraded version of one or more of the games, or incorporate the modifications into the development of a new Myth game.[92]

MythDevelopers disbanded in December 2003, with Project Magma becoming the main development group for The Fallen Lords and Soulblighter,[79] and FlyingFlip Studios for The Wolf Age.[93] From 2003 to 2018, Magma released several major patches for Soulblighter, each of which featured fixes for bugs, graphical problems, gameplay problems, and interface issues, as well as improve the Fear and Loathing tools and the online multiplayer mode.

Soulblighter received "generally favorable reviews". It holds an aggregate score of 88 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on twelve reviews.[94]

GameSpot's Michael E. Ryan scored the game 9.3 out of 10, calling it "about as good as a computer game can possibly be". He felt it improved on the original in every way, specifically citing the graphics, gameplay, and multiplayer mode. He also praised the mapmaking tools. He concluded: "Bungie basically improved all the good features in Myth; added a number of gameplay, multiplayer, and graphical enhancements; and then threw in some slick and powerful editing tools to boot. The end result is one of the best games to be released this year".[23]

Game Revolution's Calvin Hubble rated the game an A−, calling it "both one of the best sequels to hit the scene and one of the finest titles on the RTS market". He too felt it improved on the original, writing: "Bungie did an excellent job at reading the faults of the original by making change where change was needed and leaving the successful areas alone". He praised the level design and gameplay variety, citing "some of the most creative and immersive environments in the industry". He also lauded the graphics and multiplayer mode, concluding "Myth II offers the best real-time strategy experience in the industry. It has everything that made Myth one of the best games of last year, plus a free set of steak knives ... Myth II is simply one of the best sequels ever designed".[20]

IGN's Tal Blevins scored it 8.9 out of 10, praising Bungie for seeking fan feedback from The Fallen Lords, and implementing the most requested changes. He was especially impressed with the graphics, writing as "watching a line of troops wade across a stream, their reflections bobbing in the river's current is simply spectacular". He concluded by "highly recommending this game to anyone, even those who have never played an RTS game before ... Myth II breathes enough new life back into this series to qualify as an incredibly fun game with tons of replayability".[3]

PC Zone's Paul Mallinson scored it 8.5 out of 10. He praised the improved controls, and the enhancements made to the game engine, concluding: "If you liked the original Myth, you'll love this. Graphically, Soulblighter is much better, and there's not much wrong with the gameplay. There's a fine single-player game to get your teeth into, and an easily workable multiplayer alternative to back it up. There's even a campaign editor which enables you to make your own missions. Add all these things together and you have to conclude that Myth II: Soulblighter is undoubtedly an excellent package".[97]

CNET Gamecenter named Myth II the best Macintosh game of 1999.[99] It was a finalist for Computer Games Strategy Plus's 1998 "Real-Time Strategy Game of the Year" award, which ultimately went to StarCraft.[100]

Next Generation reviewed the PC and Mac versions of the game, rating them four stars out of five, and stated that "Myth II: Soulblighter's charm lies in a bundle of improvements and high production values that make the parts greater than the whole. While it may not have reached WarCraft or C&C status yet, the series is deservedly a growing legend in its own time".[95]

• Whitley, Peter (February 1999). "Mythed you 2". The Duelist. No. 34. Wizards of the Coast. p. 87.
• Backstab #15[1]

• Project Magma