I’m trying to remember a game I played in the late 90’s early 2000’s.
PC internet based game - I don’t remember if I downloaded anything, but certainly didn’t pay for anything
Top down realtime “battle” game
1- 4 online players, randomly assigned.
the goal was to capture the other guys fort on the map
you controlled several types of characters:
swordsmen - moved fairly fast
archers - shot from a distance, vulnerable to soldiers
dwarfs (2) threw hand grenades slow moving
Shambling zombie that exploded when it got close to the enemy. vulnerable to archers
That sounds right. Free to play was a pretty alien concept in the late 90s, early 2000s. You had another decade or so before that practice kicked in. Back then, something free was either going to be a person’s hobby or a demo.
What happened to games like Myth? I assume they got smashed by Dota, but that didn’t come along until like 2006 so there was still time. I don’t remember many clones either, but Myth (and Bungie) were always the Mac company.
The problem with Myth was that it didn’t have much going on aside from fighting. RTS games generally have other stuff going on to increase the tactical and strategic options and challenges.
Total War’s combat is just like Myth, in that your armies smash against each other in real time, but it also has the city building and resource management outside of the battles to keep things interesting.
They made two sequels, which provided diminishing returns. The real time strategy space got really crowded in the late 90s/early 2000s, and properties like Age of Empires and StarCraft were taking up a lot of air. Microsoft, which owned Bungie by that point, decided it was a waste of time trying to go head-to-head with them, and had Bungie focus all of its development on their new Halo IP.
And thank you! This has been bugging me for some time. It came up last night when my son asked what computer games I used to play. And I was like “uh that one with the guys that fight each other, and the one guy blows himself up, and there were grenade throwing dwarfs.” And he just looked at me like I had something growing out of my ears.
Yes, that was it… Maybe only two players (again, demo, not full game). And maybe not totally top down, but sort of angled? If that makes a lick of sense.
I do not think “Myth: The Fallen Lords” was isometric. I think it was a 3d landscape with sprites that moved across it. Not quite the same thing.
We tried real hard to come up with a term that was different from ‘real-time.’ We’re calling it a “multimetric tactical game.” ‘Multimetric’—I made that word up—because it’s not an isometric game in the conventional sense. There are many angles a player can have and many views the camera can take. And we’re calling it ‘tactical’ because there are no elements of the game that focus on resources or management. It’s strictly a tactical game. - SOURCE
Yeah, you had your troops, and maybe you might rescue more troops, but you could never train more, so every death counted. Even more than that, your troops gained experience as they defeated enemies and got subtly but definitely better, and the same (experienced) troops carried over from mission to mission, so you REALLY wanted to keep them all alive, if possible.
And I never played Myth III, but II was excellent. I loved the gameplay, which was a very good match for my style, and it was also an absolutely beautiful game.
“Isometric” has a technical definition that does not entirely align with common usage. In video game circles, anything with an angled over-head view is generally referred to as “isometric” view. That’s what Doug Zartman means when he says its not isometric “in the conventional sense” in your quote.
100% agree. One of my all-time favorite games. I was (still am) mad that Microsoft bought Bungie and made all future Bungie games X-Box exclusive (and, of course, Bungie was mostly gutted and ruined after that anyway…as almost always happens when a good gaming company is bought by a big business…looking at you EA).