In what is the most unexpected news of the day, Petroglyph have brought their ill-fated mythological MMORPG, Mytheon, back from the dead. The game released today on Steam for $4.99, temporarily discounted to $3.99. Even more unexpectedly, the game is currently boasting a one-time purchase model, meaning your entry fee is all you will ever need to pay in order to play.

Mytheon originally launched into Beta in 2010 to little fanfare. The instanced MMORPG that made use of a deck system and summoning was unique, but failed to garner the attention needed to survive. It ended up shutting down a year later in 2011, almost completely unnoticed. Petroglyph then went on to work on End of Nations, another online effort that, to this day, has not released. Eventually, they went back to retail RTS titles, releasing Grey Goo earlier this year.

Given the company's return to its roots and the short lifespan of Mytheon, this is a rather shocking turn of events. The low, one-time buy-in fee may have to do with its commercial failure as a free-to-play game in the past, but it may also be an attempt to entice Steam users looking for cheap games to give it a shot. It is still an ARPG-styled MMO and can be played with friends or on your own due to its instanced nature. The one-time buy-in assures you that you will be on equal footing with everyone else, granted you have put the time in. The real question is whether the game will continue to be updated if it is successful this time around.

For more information, head to the Steam store page.

Will you be playing Mytheon this time around?

Update: In response to inquiries about why now, why the low-cost buy-to-play model, and whether or not Mytheon will continue to be updated, a developer from Petroglyph had this to say.

As you know, Mytheon was first released by the original publisher back in 2010 and there wasn’t very much in the way of marketing and PR effort put behind the title. Our opinion was that it couldn’t get the numbers it needed to sustain a community of players required for an MMO because it was generally invisible. We thought players would appreciate an inexpensive MMO where they weren’t compelled to spend more to complete the content without extreme grinding and a huge investment of time. Our design team spent the last few weeks readjusting the leveling curve, added features that made player progression much easier, and took all of the purchasable items and placed them into the random loot tables. We think the result is a good balance between challenging content and reasonable effort to progress though the content. And, since the servers don’t cost much to operate, we’re able to keep the cost really low for our players. For the immediate future we will be looking at adjusting difficulty and balance where necessary to make sure it’s a solid experience as well as fix any serious bugs that pop up now that it’s released. We also have a completely new chunk of content based around ancient Egypt that was never launched, but close to complete. We would like to get it out there, but our first priority is to ensure that the core game is supported.