Flagship's Max Schaefer

Certainly there is - you don't want to be too derivative and you want to have enough new exciting stuff that people are interested. We have no interest in remaking Diablo, or remaking WOW, or Fate. We want to come off as something new with new gameplay experiences. What you're playing right now in the Overworld is the first act that we've made, and it's probably the most derivative of previous games. As we go with the game, we're going to be able to get more off the beaten path.

Oh yeah! [laughs]. If we made a mistake with Hellgate, it was trying to do too many things for too many people. We wanted a cutting edge graphics engine, we wanted multiple business models with subscriptions and free play, and single-player, we wanted to combine third-person play with first-person play, we wanted to do random 3D levels, and when you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much. We ended up rushing it to market and not keeping it in the oven long enough, just out of necessity.

We learned from that, and going forward as a studio, it's a new emphasis of ours to do things that are more efficient and better-planned, and smaller teams on smaller projects so we can get more ideas out there. With Mythos we're definitely taking our time, we're well within our budget and our means to make it. It's a little bit of a turning point for us - don't try to do everything for everybody. Just be more realistic about your design goals. Bring it back to nine tenths instead of ten tenths and things will go much sooner.

We do make a reason for you to buy items, but we don't want it to be necessary to have them, nor will we take the fun out of finding items. So we're not going to sell the best sword or the best armour - we're probably not going to sell any swords or armour. What we're going to do instead is cosmetic things - funny hats and cool shirts, that sort of thing. We're going to provide service-orientated things like being able to buy bigger Stashes or shared Stashes among your accounts, but then for gameplay itself what we're going to sell to people is things like maps to dungeons that have more luck. So you'll get slightly better drops in that dungeon, and maybe 15 per cent more experience.

What's cool about that is you can bring your whole party there, but only one person has to buy that map, so you can have a bunch of people benefiting from the purchase of one guy. Part of the free and item sales model is that you have to benefit both the free players and the paying players at the same time. The map model is really good for that. You still have to go out and find your items - you still have to kill the monsters and complete the quest. We give you a little bit of a boost in doing it, in the item drops and the luck, and that's the sort of thing we want to concentrate on - indirectly benefiting your character.

The item sales rely on it being a compelling free experience, because the free players support the paid players, by providing the community, by providing the items that the paying player wants to buy from them. We expect there to be the majority of people who never buy anything, that's just generally the way it goes with these games.

You always hope that something like that will happen, but it's so unpredictable. What we really want to do is come out and provide a solid alternative to these games. We're under no illusions. WOW had ten times the staff we did, took three times as long, had twenty times the budget - and those are pretty talented, hard-working guys as well, so to think that we could go straight head to head is probably unrealistic. However, what we can do is target it better and we can find out what the core gaming experience that people want is and really try to hit that. I think that the free model and the item sales model give us the potential to capture a lot more of an audience than if we had gone with a boxed product and subscription model.

Can we take down the big boys? I think we can take down some of them. And I'd like to put a dent in the others.