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Flagship's collapse has been shrouded in some mystery and it looks like my favorite Flagship product -- ok they only had two -- but anyway it looks like Mythos is in Hanbitsoft's hands and might come back someday. Jeff Green has a rather sizable interview with Bill Roper at 1Up. Roper left Blizzard and is the founder of Flagship. He gives lots of detail on what's happened to the studio.

The Mythos beta shut down quickly and quietly last night, ending my time with the game that I felt had a lot of potential. With the code probably inherited by Hanbitsoft, the Korean developers of the system following the collapse of Flagship Studios it's possible that it could see the light of day as a real game sometime in the future, but that really depends on whether the lawyers get involved. If there's anything contested about its ownership or the IP it would very likely be a completely outdated game by the time the litigation was done.

As for free-to-play hack-and-slash games, there's always Dungeon Runners, which incidentally now accepts PayPal for some types of transactions.

Source: Massively.

VoodooExtreme has followed the Flagship Studios scuffle to its completion, and it has ended with the complete shutdown and dissolution of the studio and the handoff of their two games to Korean companies at least partially due to loan agreement terms Flagship took. Comerica has taken over Hellgate and Hanbit has taken over Mythos, by far the more interesting of the two games.

A new interview with the chief of operations at Flagship, Max Schaefer, is up at Eurogamer MMO and it has some nice tidbits on how they hope to implement micropayments in the free-to-play Mythos, as well as a piece of their development roadmap.

Max mentions that instead of just selling items, their focus will be on selling enhanced functionality and things players can opt for to get a greater chance at advancing more quickly or have a better chance at finding better loot. Examples given include stash enhancement -- the stash being the storage treasure chest each character has available to them -- such as larger stashes and stashes shared between accounts (so you can have your melee-focused character hand over that great magic staff that is otherwise useless to your magic-wielding character via your stash). Another example would be buying the map to a particular area or dungeon that has a high Luck associated with it, meaning the chance of valuable drops is higher. (Maps operate as keys to new areas -- sometimes marked as "temporary" on the map if they're instanced -- so if you don't have the map you can't go there.)