I'd played other RTS games in the past, namely Starcraft and Civilization, but Myth: The Fallen Lords grabbed me in a way that those others didn't. Resource gathering? None. You didn't build armies of units with the full expectation of losing some, and just throw them at some enemy targets. You had what you were given at the start of the level, occasionally you got reinforcements, but that wasn't anything to rely on. You had to position them wisely, plan ahead, and use the terrain to your advantage. Each one of your men were valuable.
The story was another aspect of Myth that captivated me. Each level opened with a journal entry, which is an ingenious mechanic to present a human element and a character to connect with in a game when you essentially see your characters as units looking all the same. Though you never definitively see the narrator ingame, you still follow him through the entire game, only a couple times does he write about events he wasn't present for. Though the writing in the journals is straightforward, with a great battlefield diary flavor to them, there are details that people have picked apart for years, trying to figure out all the nuances and backstory of the game which lie hidden. This isn't the same as World of Warcraft's sprawling, skippable world story - Myth tells a tale that's like Lord of the Rings crossed with Vietnam war fiction, grim and desperate. The larger questions about the workings of this world, the whereabouts of several of the Fallen Lords (sorcerer generals held in the main bad guy's thrall) and the earlier years of the war, go unanswered in the journal of a simple soldier. And yet, hints of these things make themselves known, whether in the journals as the narrator mentions in passing something he's heard, or in flavor text for the units.
The sequel Myth II: Soulblighter I felt to be a little bit thinner in terms of story, but it made up for it with some superb maps, and the release of the tools needed for one to make new maps, units, plugins, and just about anything one wanted, given the proficiency. My 2D art skills in Photoshop led me to creating the texture maps for new levels, spending many happy hours blending grass into dirt into sand into water into mud, trying to evoke the most convincing landscape possible when overlaid on the terrain mesh. I realize this isn't exactly story related, but modding for Myth led myself and many others within the community to write new stories, some set in the Myth universe, others entirely new, for our custom maps, units and scenarios to follow. Granted, I was rather young and most of the backstories I wrote when I was in Chemistry class don't look as good to me anymore as they once did, but it was the earliest and most intimate brush I had with the story element of video games.
Related links
http://myth.bungie.org/ - The place for anything Myth, really. The Asylum used to be a huge center of discussion about the story, but it's pretty dead these days. Still, all the journals and everything are there.
