.: November 25, 1997.: February 2, 1998 Mode(s), Myth: The Fallen Lords is a 1997 developed by for. Released in November 1997 in North America and in February 1998 in Europe, the game was published by Bungie in North America and by in Europe. At the time, Bungie was known primarily as developers of games, and The Fallen Lords was the first game they had developed and released simultaneously for both and Mac.

It is the first game in the, which also includes a sequel, set sixty years after the events of the first game, and also developed by Bungie, and a prequel, set one thousand years prior to the events depicted in The Fallen Lords, and developed. The game tells the story of the battle between the forces of the 'Light' and those of the 'Dark' for control of an unnamed mythical land. The Dark are led by Balor and a group of lieutenants (the titular Fallen Lords), whilst the Light are led by 'The Nine'; powerful known as 'Avatara,' chief amongst whom is Alric.

The game begins in the seventeenth year of the war in the West, some fifty years since the rise of Balor, with the forces of Light on the brink of defeat; almost the entire land is under the dominion of the Dark, with only one major city and a few smaller towns remaining under the control of the Light. The plot follows the activities of 'The Legion', an elite unit in the army of the Light, as they attempt to turn back the tide and defeat Balor. The Fallen Lords received positive reviews from critics, and is credited as a defining title in the fledging real-time tactics genre. Reviewers praised its plot, and differentiation from traditional games.

The most often criticized aspects were the difficulty of the, which many reviewers felt was far too high, even on the lowest setting, and some awkwardness in controlling units. The game went on to win multiple awards, including 'Strategy Game of the Year' from both and, and 'Game of the Year' from both. It was also a commercial success, selling over 350,000 units worldwide across both systems, earning back roughly seven times its budget. At the time, it was Bungie's most successful game, and served to bring them to the attention of PC gamers and, more specifically, who would purchase the company in 2000. The Myth series as a whole, and Soulblighter in particular, supported an active online community for over a decade after the official went offline. The first formally organized group of volunteer- was MythDevelopers, who were given access to the game's by Bungie. The most recently active Myth development group is Project Magma, an offshoot of MythDevelopers.

These groups have worked to provide ongoing for the games, update them to newer, fix, release, create, and maintain online servers for multiplayer gaming. Contents. Gameplay Myth: The Fallen Lords is a game, and as such, unlike the in games, the player does not have to engage in resource or economic, 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 begins with the player's army already assembled and ready for combat. 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, only Light units are playable, but in, the player can control both Light and Dark units. Screenshot of in The Fallen Lords, showing the selection of multiple units. The player has selected five Berserks (the five units on the left, each surrounding by a yellow rectangle). The image also shows unselected archers and dwarfs, who are currently attacking enemy units.

At the top of the screen is the Status Bar. The of the battlefield is just below on the right.

Basic gameplay involves the player selecting and commanding units. To select an individual unit, the player clicks on that unit.

Once selected, the unit is surrounded by a yellow rectangle, beside which is a meter, which diminishes as the unit takes damage. Units do not regenerate health, 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 on any individual unit of that type. To select multiple units of different types, the player can either 'shift click' (hold down the and click on each individual unit) or use 'band-selection' (click and hold the button on a piece of ground, then drag the 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. The player can also assign manually selected unit groupings to a specific key on the, and when that key is pressed, it instantly selects the desired group of units. 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 and can also be ordered to attack a specific spot on the ground, rather than an enemy. It is also important that the player have their units facing in the right direction. This is accomplished by 'gesture clicking' - using the mouse to indicate which way the units will face when they reach their destination. Gesture clicking is especially important when using, 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. The player can also order all selected units to scatter and to.

When a single unit is selected, information about that unit appears in the 'Status Bar' at the top of the; 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. If no units are selected, the Status Bar provides details of the current mission. The HUD also features a transparent overhead, which displays information about the current battlefield; the player's field of vision is indicated by a yellow, enemy units appear as red dots, friendly 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. However, the mini-map does not initially display the entire battlefield; the player must explore the area for it to become fully mapped. The player has full control over the 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), 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.

All movements can be carried out via the keyboard, although the mouse can also be used to move the camera forwards, backwards, left and right, by moving the cursor to the top, bottom, left or right of the screen, respectively Selecting and commanding units only forms the basic gameplay of The Fallen Lords, however. 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, 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.

However, it can also have more serious consequences. For example, a dwarf could throw a at an enemy on a hillside and miss, with the projectile rolling back down the hill towards the player's own units. 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., 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. 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, is an important aspect of the game. The weather is also something the player must always bear in mind.

For example, rain or snow can put out explosive-based attacks. 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. Single-player In the single-player campaign, the player starts each mission with a group of soldiers, and must use that group to accomplish a specific goal or set of goals. These goals can involve killing a certain number of enemies, defending a location, reaching a certain point on the map, escorting a unit safely to a certain area, or destroying a specific object or enemy.

The focus of the single-player campaign is on a smaller force defeating a much larger enemy force; in every mission, the Light units are outnumbered by enemies, often vastly, and so the player must use the terrain, employ the specific skills of their individual units, and gradually decrease the enemy force, or attempt to avoid it altogether. Units in the single-player campaign acquire experience with each kill. Experience increases attack rate, accuracy, and defence, and any unit that survives a battle will carry over to the next battle with their accumulated experience (assuming the next battle features units of that type). Multiplayer When it was released, The Fallen Lords could be used for multiplayer gaming on, or via a on or on. In multiplayer, the player starts with an army, and can customize it by trading units with other players, using point values that approximate the value of the units being traded. Conceived of The Fallen Lords as an alternative to Bungie developing another. The Fallen Lords was originally conceived by as were nearing the end of development of in late-1995.

They had planned to do another as their next game. However, the initial screenshots of 's had just been released, and when Jones saw them, he felt Bungie's new game was shaping up as too similar. As such, he approached his colleagues with the question 'What do you think about having this world with 100 guys fighting 100 other guys in?'

Bungie had worked on several 3D for, and Jones' idea was to bring that experience to a game rather than another. The team agreed with Jones that their new shooter could end up as being very similar to Quake, and, as such, after working on the project for two months, Jones explains 'in one day we switched our project from a shooter game that would have had us chasing our competition's tail to what has basically become Myth.' Dubbed 'The Giant Bloody War Game', the team's initial inspirations for Myth were films such as 's, 'with its close-up portrayal of bloody melees between large forces,' and literature such as 's series, 'in which gruesome tales of battle contrast with engaging and intriguing characters.'

Speaking of the influence of Cook, Doug Zartman, Bungie's director of and one of the game's writers, states One of the things we liked was that Cook presents this pretty world. One side is sort of the good guys, because the narrator is on that side, but they're not on a moral high ground over their opponents. It's not a simple good-evil dichotomy. We're dealing with a sophisticated world here, with politics and treachery and betrayal from both sides - as much conflict from within the ranks as from the enemy. Similarly, Jason Regier explains they wanted to set the game in 'a dark, amoral world where opposing sides are equally brutal and their unity is torn by power struggles within the ranks. We dreamed of that combined the and excitement of action games with the cunning and planning required by.' Zartman further states 'we wanted to capture the feeling that you get watching large groups of people clashing on the open field.

We wanted to recreate the blood-letting and grisly reality of large-scale battles.' However, he was also eager to differentiate the game from the RTS genre, saying, We tried real hard to come up with a term that was different from '.'

We're calling it a 'multimetric tactical game.' 'Multimetric' - I made that word up - because it's not an in the conventional sense. There are many angles a player can have and many views the can take. And we're calling it 'tactical' because there are no elements of the game that focus on. It's strictly a tactical game. Once they had decided on the basic, which would ultimately be called ', their first task was to draw up a list of elements they wished to avoid; specifically, RTS, obvious references to 's, allusions to the, or any kind of narrative involving 'little boys coming of age and saving the world.'

On the other hand, elements they did wish to incorporate included 'ideas that contributed to the visual realism of the game,' such as a 3D landscape, buildings, reflective water, weather, battlefields littered with severed limbs, and explosions that damaged the terrain permanently. They were also determined to include a robust and allow hundreds of troops to appear on a battlefield at once. Cross-platform Work on the game began in January 1996, with four programmers, two, and a.

Originally, the game was to have no music whatsoever, but composer, who had recently been hired by Bungie, convinced the developers this was a bad idea, and he, and Paul Heitsch were commissioned to compose a soundtrack and work on the. A major early decision was to develop and release the game simultaneously on both Mac OS and, which would be a first for the company. Up to this point in their history, their only venture into gaming had been a port of. Bungie had not been happy with the port, and were determined that The Fallen Lords be a genuine cross-platform release. This meant designing the game from the ground up to be cross-platform compatible, rather than developing it for one and then porting it to another. As such, 90% of the game's was platform independent, with 5% written for PC and 5% for Mac-specific functionality.

All of the game's, from to the number of warriors who are left-handed, was stored in platform-independent called 'tags', which are automatically -swapped when necessary and accessed via a cross-platform. As the team was more familiar with developing for Mac OS, the initial coding was done on a Mac using.

When PC builds were required, the team switched to Windows, using. Ultimately, the entire game was written in. To ensure the game looked identical on both PCs and Macs, the team created and implemented their own and, which allowed them to use custom graphics for all interface items. The font manager supported, two-byte fonts, and a variety of, allowing international localizations to be completed relatively easily. Programming Although The Fallen Lords employs a fully 3D terrain, with 3D polygonal buildings, the characters are.

To bring the 3D environment and the 2D characters together and construct each, the team developed four separate; 'Tag Editor' edited the stored in the cross-platform data files; 'Extractor' handled the 2D sprites and the sequencing of their; 'Loathing' acted as the; and 'Fear' dealt with the 3D polygonal such as houses, pillars, and walls. Jason Jones explains, Myth lies on top of a flexible, and every one of those little bits that goes into Myth is called a Tag. The Tag Editor lets you edit everything from the physics of the game, to the color of the units, how they move, and how they attack. There's another tool that we use to import called the Extractor, and there's a third tool called Loathing. 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. The fourth tool that complements Loathing is called Fear.

Fear takes care of all the models; it is used to import the 3D models into Myth. Loathing was specifically built around the Myth and allowed the team to modify the 3D landscape, apply, determine terrain type, script the, and position structures, scenery, and enemies. The artists used on an to create polygonal models and render all the characters. The 3D models were imported into the game using Fear, while the 2D sprites were cleaned up in and imported and animated using Extractor. To create the for the terrain, the artists used Photoshop to draw the equivalent of an aerial photo, and then applied it to the 3D landscape using Loathing.

Initially, the developers had planned on using -generated landscapes, but they felt the randomness of such landscapes would make it difficult to design interesting levels, and so all maps were instead constructed by hand. Implementing was a particularly difficult challenge. The terrain in the game is a 3D constructed of square cells, each of which is into two triangles. Certain cells have an associated terrain type which indicates their impassability, and may contain any solid object. The team originally planned to use the, but soon realized this would create problems in terms of the realism they desired. As impassable obstacles can lie anywhere on the map, and as the square cells are quite large, the obstacles are not guaranteed to be aligned at their center.

Furthermore, even if an obstacle did occupy exactly one cell, the A. algorithm would make a unit walk up to the obstacle, turn, and continue around it. The developers instead wanted their units to move to avoid obstacles ahead of time, as they approached them, such as smoothly weaving through a forest instead of continually heading straight for a tree, only to stop and suddenly walk around it. As such, they wrote their own pathfinding.

As the terrain in the game never changes, paths could be calculated once and remembered. Then, the team factored in arbitrarily placed obstacles and periodically refined their pathfinding using a -based scheme.

If the planned path caused the unit to hit an obstacle, the path was altered, with the AI choosing whether deviating to the left or the right was the shorter option. Their system worked for 90% of cases, but in testing, the developers discovered several scenarios where their pathfinding algorithm didn't work especially well. However, by the time they made this discovery, it was too late to implement the changes that would have been necessary to fully correct it. As such, their assessment of the pathfinding in the final version of the game was that 'it works pretty well and provides the effect we sought, but there's definitely room for improvement.' Speaking of the game's, Jason Jones explains; if you want to have an archer hit a target that's at a higher elevation and moving, you have absolutely no alternative but to solve the. It's not real, but it's about as real as you get, and if the arrow doesn't fly through the air right, or doesn't bounce off a tree like the gamer is expecting it to, they'll notice.

There's just no good way to cheat with the physics. By November 1996, Bungie had a demo with rudimentary gameplay in place. In an effort to create media buzz, they took the demo to several gaming magazines. Speaking in 2000, Doug Zartman explained that the physics engine was a major factor in the game even at that early stage; There wasn't much gameplay in what we showed them - two small groups on opposite sides of a small map rushing at each other, becoming a bloody knot at the middle where they all collided and blew each other up. And the AI was crude. But the reviewers could see that it had strategic combat on real 3D terrain - something no other game at the time had, something that radically changed how the game was played; an archer could fire farther from the top of the hill than from in the valley. It was easy to demonstrate to the press that an archer on high ground was going to defeat an archer down in the valley.

Release Writing in 1998, programmer Jason Regier stated of the game; It doesn't take fifty people to create a major cross-platform software title. Bungie Software has barely half that number of employees in the entire company, and we not only develop all our games, but publish and distribute them as well. Macintosh and PC versions of Myth, all our internal tools, and our were essentially developed by only six people, and everything shipped on time with no major. There's no big department here at Bungie; the public did our testing for us, and we listened to them as seriously as if they were coworkers on the project. We didn't hire any game designers, writers, or to come up with our game concept and story line. Myth truly is the combined vision of our team, and each of us feels that it was our game. We came to work each day excited about the project, and we're damn proud of what we managed to create.

One of Regier's few disappointments was that during the early stages of promotion, Bungie advertised a that would allow players to modify elements of the game. As he explains, 'We had hoped that user scripts could be written for extensible artificial intelligence, as well as custom formations, net game rules, and map behaviors.' The team selected as the basis for the scripting language.

Early versions of the game allowed some simple scripts to work for presentation purposes, such as instructing a unit to search the battlefield for the heads of the enemy and collect them in a pile. However, the programmer responsible for the scripting language left Bungie midway through production, and 'we were left with a number of features to implement and no of user-friendly interfaces with the game code. Given its incomplete state at such a late stage of development, there was little choice but to drop this functionality.' Technology The Fallen Lords originally supported both and 's 3D acceleration. Shortly after the game was released, Bungie issued a v1.1 upgrade, which reduced the difficulty of the single-player campaign and added support for 's, and 3dfx's. Jason Regier wrote of working with; When the project started, 3D acceleration hardware was only just starting to become popular.

Nevertheless, we tried to keep hardware acceleration in mind when designing our. When the opportunity arose to add hardware acceleration, the implementation worked beautifully. We worked closely with people from 3dfx and Rendition and added support for their in about a week. It's amazing how much these accelerators add to the smoothness of the terrain, the fluidity of camera movement, and the realism of the units and effects. Total Codex bundle In 1999, Bungie re-released The Fallen Lords for Mac OS and Windows as part of a special edition called Myth: The Total Codex.

The bundle included The Fallen Lords v1.3 (Bungie's last upgrade of the game ), the Soulblighter Myth II: Chimera, and official Strategies and Secrets guides for both of the main games. Community Although the official Myth servers closed in February 2002, 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, who purchased the company in 2000, wanted them to concentrate on. 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. With the blessing of, who had acquired the rights to the Myth in 2000, Bungie released their entire archive of Myth-related materials to MythDevelopers, including the source code and all artwork featured in the game.

MythDevelopers were also granted access to the source code for, which was developed by in 2001. Bungie also their Myth source code in 2002. 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, they also worked to update the first two games to newer on both Mac and PC, fix bugs, and create to enhance both the games themselves and the mapmaking tools which Bungie had released with Soulblighter. MythDevelopers disbanded in December 2003, with Project Magma becoming the main development group for The Fallen Lords and Soulblighter, and FlyingFlip Studios for The Wolf Age. Servers Prior to disbanding, MythDevelopers created and operated PlayMyth.net, the most popular online Myth server after the official servers were taken offline.

Although built using the Soulblighter server, PlayMyth could also run both The Fallen Lords and The Wolf Age, which was developed by MumboJumbo using a network gameplay system designed to run on rather than Bungie.net. PlayMyth went offline in October 2007 after it was repeatedly, with the most popular servers becoming MariusNet.com and GateofStorms.net. MariusNet had been online since just prior to Bungie.net's Myth servers going offline, and was officially approved by Bungie. The original impetus behind the project was as a temporary replacement for Myth players in case the original servers were shut down, which had been rumored for some time. The Bungie servers had not supported The Fallen Lords since November 2001, and the community believed the servers would soon close for Soulblighter as well.

Myth The Fallen Lords Steam

When The Fallen Lords servers closed in November, the only way to play a multiplayer game was via a or, and MariusNet was created as a Bungie.net 'emulator', which, like PlayMyth, supported all three Myth games, and thus gave players a way to play The Fallen Lords online. At the time, Bungie had not open sourced the metaserver source code, so creating a network for The Fallen Lords was accomplished via. Dave Carlile, the main programmer of the server, explains We started with some information about the Myth 2, and hoped Myth 1 was the same or very similar.

Todd Snyder then used a to look at the data being sent back and forth between the Myth 2 client and the server in order to learn more. We initially made a partial Myth 2 server to get the basics down, then spent hundreds of hours figuring out the differences in structure in Myth 1. For a few of the more difficult pieces we used a to take apart the client code, and also a to trace through the code.

MariusNet closed in 2014 when the server company shut down, and the was damaged whilst being moved to its new location. GateofStorms, which was created by Project Magma, and only supports Soulblighter v1.8 (released by Magma in 2013), remains active, and continues to host individual games and tournaments.

Reception Reception Aggregate score Aggregator Score 91/100 Review scores Publication Score B+ 8.9/10 90% 8/10 Awards Publication Award Real-time strategy Game of the Year (1997) Strategy Game of the Year (1997) Game of the Year (1997) Game of the Year (1997) The Fallen Lords received 'universal acclaim' upon release, and holds an aggregate score of 91 out of 100 on, based on nine reviews. The game was seen as a defining title in the emerging real-time tactics genre, helping to solidify the elements of the genre both with gamers and in the gaming press. It also served to bring Bungie to the attention of PC gamers for the first time and, more specifically, who would purchase the company in 2000 so Bungie's new game, could be developed as a for Microsoft's debut, the. 's Michael E. Ryan scored the game 8.9 out of 10, arguing that upon the initial release, 'standing between Myth and gaming perfection were an absurd level of difficulty, a poorly implemented unit-facing command, and a handful of nitpicky flaws.' However, he praised the v1.1 update, which dealt with the difficulty and unit-facing problems, and as such, argued, ' Myth can now rightfully claim its place among the best strategy games on the market.'

He praised the plot, the different styles of gameplay, the level design, and the range of available units. He was also impressed with the graphics, writing ' Myth is one of the most impressive games you'll see this year.' He concluded 'When you combine the excellent multiplayer support, the great graphics, and the dramatic gameplay improvements offered by the 1.1 patch, you get a truly remarkable real-time strategy game.' 's Jamie Cunnigham scored it 8 out 10, praising the interface, the range of units, the level design, multiplayer mode, and the use of the camera during battles. Of the graphics, he wrote 'Every part of scenery, from huge boulders to arrow heads, is tracked in 3D space. Which means that if you blow up an enemy unit, organs fly out and bounce off others - complete with and splat noises.' However, he was critical of the difficulty, writing ' Myth is let down by what can only be described as an overwhelming frustration whenever you play it for any length of time.

So much attention has been paid to the technology that some of the fun element has suffered.' 's Calvin Hubble rated it a B+, calling it 'one of the most impressive looking strategy games to hit the market.' He praised the graphics, calling them 'simply spectacular.' He also lauded the online multiplayer mode. However, he was critical of the difficulty level, finding the game too hard on even its easiest setting.

He concluded ' Myth is a great game to look at. After beating the first couple of levels, the enjoyment could quickly turn to nausea as try after try fails to pass one single level. The graphics and realism are breathtaking, if only the single player game wasn't so difficult.' Sales and awards According to, co-founder of Bungie, The Fallen Lords cost roughly $2million to develop and market, by far Bungie's most expensive game up to that time, and as such, they needed it to be financially successful, especially as it was their first original PC game. The game did prove a commercial success, selling over 350,000 units worldwide at roughly $40 per unit, earning the company $14million, and becoming Bungie's most successful game thus far. In the United States, the game sold 40,617 copies during 1997. By 2000, the game had over 100,000 people registered with online accounts at Bungie.net.

The success of the game also helped Bungie rank #101 in 's 1998 list of the 500 fastest growing in North America. Primarily due to the success of The Fallen Lords, Bungie's profits had increased by 2,228% from 1993 to 1997. The game also won numerous awards, including 'Real-Time Strategy Game of the Year' from, 'Strategy Game of the Year' from, and 'Game of the Year' from both. Online Game Review named it one of the fifty greatest games ever made. In 2012, The Fallen Lords was listed on 's All-TIME 100 greatest video games list.

Myth The Fallen Lords Mac Os X

References.

Another classic game has returned from the mists of time for one more go-round with Mac gamers: Bungie Software’s legendary squad-based real time tactical action game Myth II: Soulblighter. It’s now available as a Universal binary for Intel and PowerPC-based Macs alike, thanks to the efforts of.

Before Halo and after the Marathon series, Bungie branded itself in many Mac and PC gamers’ minds as the company that created Myth and Myth II, two fantasy-based real time tactical action games in which you assume control of small armies made up of different kinds of units, such as sword-wielding warriors, archers, dwarves who throw bombs and so on. The game’s story pits the forces of The Light and The Dark in an epic battle for supremacy.

Myth II was first released in 1998. On Thursday Project Magma released a public beta version of Myth II 1.6 — an update that contains the Mac OS X Universal binary version, Mac OS X-native versions of Fear and Loathing — the Bungie-made “mod” tools that let you craft your own scenarios, and more. It’s available for download as a “final quality release,” to make sure that it can be more thoroughly tested before it’s declared the final release.

Please note that Myth II 1.6 is not a complete game — you will need Myth II Soulblighter to be installed from the original installation CD in order to make use of this new file. This story, 'Bungie's Myth II game resurrected for Intel Macs' was originally published.