marvel as the ground at the explosion point ripples in a visually interesting way, altering
the landscape for the rest of the game. Of course, if the target is killed, players can
expect the body parts of that destroyed enemy to roll back down the hill toward the
dwarf.
Another significant improvement that results from the 3D engine is the ability of
players to see the battlefield at a level of detail not possible in a top-down or isometric
2D game. Players can rotate the camera in order to see past objects that might obstruct
their view or merely to find the perfect angle for a given battle. Furthermore, players
can easily zoom in and out on the action. The zooming in has little gameplay benefit, and
is almost exclusively useful for the visceral thrill of seeing a battle close-up, immersing
players in the action in a way 2D RTS titles simply cannot. The angle of view is signifi-
cantly different as well, being at a much lower angle relative to the battlefield than any
strategy game that preceded it. The camera’s position was no doubt chosen partly for
aesthetic reasons and partly for gameplay considerations. Regardless of the motiva-
tions, the result ofMyth’s close-up view of the battle is a decidedly more intimate
experience for players, where the individual units become more important and more
real than they ever do in an RTS game with a more removed perspective. Thus, the inti-
macy of a first-person shooter such asMarathonis married to the tactical gameplay of a
strategy game, resulting in an entirely new type of gameplay experience.
The 3D engine employed byMythis not all that sophisticated, especially by mod-
ern standards. The characters on the landscape, for instance, are simple sprites instead
of being fully 3D polygonal beasts. This was no doubt important so that a great number
of units could be on the screen at once. What fun would an RTS game be if one could
only have three units on the screen at any one time? At the time, rendering a large num-
ber of fully 3D, humanoid creatures on the screen at once would have brought PCs to a
crawl, and even today can be an extremely challenging undertaking.
InMyth, every bit of technology is used to its greatest gameplay effect, as is typical
of projects run by designer/programmers such as Jones. This hybrid developer under-
stands what the technology can do perfectly while also understanding what would be
compelling in terms of gameplay, making for very economical game development.
Thus, when the technology does something that can enhance the gameplay, the
designer/programmer instantly notices it and is able to exploit it to its maximum effect.
This differs greatly from so many projects where programmers implement complicated
functionality that is never used because the designers never fully understand it.
Of course, adapting gameplay from 2D to 3D is not without its drawbacks. For
instance, despite being able to zoom in and out inMyth, one is never able to zoom out
from the action quite as much as one would like. This is in part because of the precedent
set by other RTS games, which, because of their 2D engines, can have a much more dis-
tant viewpoint, a viewpoint that lends itself to tracking and moving large numbers of
units. A patch was released forMythshortly after its publication that allowed players to
zoom the camera out farther, but with the side effect of decreasing their frame rate,
since more landscape and hence more polygons are now in view. Of course, the engine
could probably support viewing the landscape from still farther away, but the amount of
polygons on the screen would quickly become prohibitive, decreasing the game’s over-
all speed unacceptably. Thus, the limitations of a 3D engine come to constrain the
gameplay choices the designer can make. Another gameplay drawback that results
Chapter 16: Game Analysis:Myth: The Fallen Lords 299