Why Mithrall is Going Third Person

A note about the build first.

Mithrall isn't released. What playtesters and the internal team have been seeing is over a year behind where we actually are now. That gap isn't because we slowed down. It's the opposite. We've been rewriting systems from the ground up: cleaner architecture, automated testing, a higher quality bar everywhere. We're moving faster than we ever could before, and the gap between the playable build and what we have internally is going to keep widening until we ship the next playable version.

OK, with that said, let's talk about something that's been splitting our community for a while.

First person or third person

We get asked this a lot. We've been quiet because we wanted to think it through honestly. Here's the full story.

Where we started

We are hardcore PvP gamers first. That's how the studio thinks. And on PvP, our default position has always been: first person, period.

Reasoning: third person in PvP enables what we call rat behaviour. Corner-peeking. Sitting behind a wall and watching a chokepoint you literally cannot be seen at, then picking off anyone walking through with zero counterplay. We've spent years arguing publicly that this is the wrong way to do PvP. Anyone we've played with knows the position.

So Mithrall was going to be first person only. Decided, confident, done.

Then ARC RAIDERS happened

We have to be honest about this. ARC RAIDERS is a masterpiece. Third person. Hardcore-flavoured extraction PvP. Everything we said third-person PvP couldn't do, ARC RAIDERS does, cleanly, and at a polish level that's hard to argue with.

We were skeptical going in. We were wrong. The launch was one of the biggest of the last five years and the retention numbers are stunning. The slow decay you can see now is the wipe loop catching up after a thousand-hour ceiling, not the camera. Embark will figure that part out, they've proven they can.

For us the lesson was specific: a great third-person camera and controller, in the right hands, can outperform the FPS-purist line we'd been holding for years.

The technical reality nobody talks about

Camera and character controller. CCC, in studio shorthand. It is the single most important "feel" decision in a game and one of the hardest things in the industry to nail. Months. Sometimes years. Polish never stops.

Doing both first and third person properly means:

• Two complete animation sets for every single action
• Two camera systems with their own collision, lag, weight, and feel tuning
• Twice the playtest cost, twice the surface area to balance

At our budget, that's not ambitious. It's two mediocre camera systems instead of one great one.

And first person is the harder side. You build a first animation set that looks right from inside the player's head, and a second one that looks right when other players see you do the same action from outside. If you only build the FPS-from-inside set and someone watches you from outside, you get this:

That's from Crysis. Watch how the player's body contorts to make a first-person peek animation visible to outside observers. Weird, right? Every first-person game in PvP has to solve that problem twice, and most of them solve it the way Crysis did, with results that range from "acceptable" to "embarrassing."

Third person sidesteps half of that pain. One animation set. Players can see their character, their gear, their armour, their progression. All the polish budget goes into one camera that has to look great from one perspective.

The decision

We're going third person.

We know this is going to upset some of the players who tried earlier playtests and liked the first-person view. You weren't wrong. The first-person version was fine. But fine isn't the standard we want Mithrall judged against. We'd rather ship one camera at the quality bar ARC RAIDERS set than ship both at "kind of OK."

That's the call. We made it after long discussion, with our eyes open, knowing some of you will disagree.

What this means for the timeline

You aren't going to play the new version tomorrow. Camera and controller rewrites at this depth take time, and we're not going to release a half-baked build just to look productive. We'll keep showing progress as we go. We're not putting a date on the next playable build until it deserves one.

Thanks for being patient with us. The wait will be worth it. We'll prove it through the work.

More soon.

• François