Reviewers praised its plot, graphics, gameplay, level design, online multiplayer mode, and differentiation from traditional real-time strategy games.

Soulblighter was praised for improving on virtually every aspect of The Fallen Lords, with critics citing more detailed graphics, enhanced sound effects, more varied gameplay, better AI, and a more intricate level design.

The first formally organized group of volunteer-programmers was MythDevelopers, who initially formed with the purpose of fixing the bug-ridden Windows version of The Wolf Age.

[30] In Soulblighter and The Wolf Age, it can be accomplished by either gesture clicking, or by pressing the left or right arrow key as the units move to the selected location.

[33][34][36] In Soulblighter and The Wolf Age, all formations—as well as commands such as stopping, guarding, scattering, retreating, and reversing direction—are also available via a single click in the Control Bar at the bottom of the screen.

[47] In Soulblighter and The Wolf Age, the player can also select preferences to enable rotation and orbiting via the mouse by moving the cursor to the top and bottom corners of the screen, respectively.

[50][51][52] For instance, archers firing at enemies engaged in melee combat risk hitting allied units, causing the same amount of damage.

[10] Thus, for example, a dwarf could throw a molotov cocktail at an enemy on a hillside and miss, with the projectile rolling back down the hill towards the player's own units.

Rain or snow can extinguish explosive-based attacks,[54] and in The Wolf Age, strong wind can cause problems for archers in hitting their targets.

[67][68][69] Myth: The Fallen Lords was originally conceived by Jason Jones as Bungie was nearing the end of development of Marathon Infinity in late 1995.

[70] Dubbed "The Giant Bloody War Game",[70] initial inspirations were films such as Mel Gibson's Braveheart and literature such as Glen Cook's The Black Company.

[71] Doug Zartman, Bungie's director of public relations and one of the game's writers, explained: "We wanted to capture the feeling that you get watching large groups of people clashing on the open field".

[72]Once they had decided on the basic game mechanics, which ultimately became known as "real-time tactics", they drew up a list of elements they wanted to avoid (RTS clichés, references to Middle-earth, allusions to the Arthurian legend, any narrative involving "little boys coming of age and saving the world") and those they wanted to incorporate ("any ideas that contributed to the visual realism of the game", such as a 3D landscape, polygonal buildings, particle-based weather, and battlefields littered with body parts).

At the time, Bungie's only Windows game had been a port of Marathon 2: Durandal,[73] with which they had been unhappy, and they were determined The Fallen Lords be a genuine cross-platform release.

[78] One of Bungie's main goals with the sequel was to include gameplay aspects and game mechanics which they had wanted to feature in The Fallen Lords, but had been unable to implement due to time constraints.

The reason we went with sprites for the characters is because in Myth you can have one hundred units on the screen at the same time, and if they were all polygonal models, even those with the fastest home computers wouldn't be able to play the game.

[93] Of the move to full 3D, Dochtermann points out that the 3D engine allows for things not possible in the previous games: "There's some very cool kinematics stuff.

"[93] The new game engine also supported real-time shadows and dynamic lighting, as well as being capable of blending six to seven different texture layers, depending on how close the camera is to the action.

In a post titled "Some ugly, but honest truths", Meggs wrote: The basic reason was that there was no next project lined up and funded, nor was there expected to be in the near future, it's expensive to keep a team of salaried people around doing nothing, and MumboJumbo was not a huge business with infinitely deep pockets.

[98] The same day Meggs made his post, November 16, MumboJumbo closed their offices in Irvine, California, with a view to consolidate their resources in their Dallas headquarters.

[99] Three days later, MumboJumbo denied the Myth III team had been laid off, saying all staff members had been invited to work in the Dallas office.

The first organised group of programmers, artists, and coders from the game's community was known as MythDevelopers, who requested and were granted access to the source code so as to continue its development.

[105] With the permission of Take-Two, Bungie released their entire archive of Myth-related materials to MythDevelopers, including the source code, artwork, all creative files (such as maps, 3D models, scripts, etc.

[102] MythDevelopers disbanded in December 2003, with Project Magma becoming the main development group for The Fallen Lords and Soulblighter,[106] and FlyingFlip Studios for The Wolf Age.

[108] FlyingFlip's final patch for The Wolf Age was v1.3, released in 2004, which introduced multiple gameplay and stability improvements, as well as bug fixes, and performance enhancements.

[111] Also developed in association with MythDevelopers in 2003 was v1.4, which introduced OpenGL support for the OS X version and allowed the player to play Soulblighter with Fallen Lords style gameplay (dubbed vTFL).

[106] Magma's plan with v1.5 was to get the gameplay and plug-in compatibility back to the standard of Bungie's last official version of the game, but retain the v1.4 features that worked.

[106] Magma's final patch, v1.8, was released in 2013,[114] and added several new game modes to multiplayer gaming, improved the usage of CPU resources, added a new texture decompression code which loads sprite frames twice as fast as before, enhanced both the texture mapping and the pixel shader, and included (for the first time in a Magma patch) Linux-specific improvements.

[118] At the time, Bungie had not open-sourced the metaserver source code, so creating a network for The Fallen Lords was accomplished via reverse engineering.

[12] IGN's Dan Adams wrote of The Wolf Age: "Fans of the series shouldn't be disappointed by MumboJumbo's effort to follow in the mighty footsteps that Bungie left behind".