Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Trials of Ascension cancels second Kickstarter campaign | Massively Overpowered

Excellent article about what can mistakes a company can make.

Kickstarter Canceled | Page 3 | Trials of Ascension

Detailed post of what went wrong...I hope Pantheon team reads and learns.

Do you guys have a full time artist yet?

Joppa:

1. Locked encounters in any way- i.e. once a mob is engaged other groups can't affect it, etc?

2. Raid size limits?

3. Any form of cash shop?

4. Any form of instancing?

Only four questions I have (for now).

Will we see feign death pulls and can trains happen?

Have you completely revamped the original class ideas?

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

Will fuzzy trolls and rerolled skeletons be in the game at launch?

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I propose both be raid bosses. Give the Fuzzy troll an instant kill raid ability followed by it saying "God bless everything"

tad10_sl said:

Way too many zones and effort into art.

You should have made one zone and just worked on combat and the engine in that zone until you were happy "with the current performance."

SMH.

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This may come as a shock but the same people who build zones and lore are not the same ones who program the netcode and combat mechanics

Convo_sl said:

Have you completely revamped the original class ideas?

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Unfortunately it seems so, they now seem to be more generic EQ-esque classes, was incredibly disappointed. Hope this isn't set in stone.

Tenks_sl said:

This may come as a shock but the same people who build zones and lore are not the same ones who program the netcode and combat mechanics

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I think Tad is referencing Rob Pardo's formula for game development. Here is a snippet:

"Elwyn forest is the first starting area we did. Northshire Valley is the 1st through 5th level area for the humans and we spent and inordinate amount of time working on that area. We would work on how the combat is going to work? How many monsters can you take at one time? What's the downtime? Does the combat feel fun? What's the first ability you're going to get? What's the pace of the quests? How much experience can you get when you get out of Northshire? Where should we put the trainers? How do we teach you to get to the trainers? We spent a ton of time. We probably spent more time on Northsire Valley by an order of magnitude than any other area because it was one of our first area. We spent a lot of time making it fun first. After we made it fun then we made it big. We didn't go out and build the entire World of Warcraft until we knew what we were building. If we just start building a huge world and haven't figured out all the little details. What's going to make your game fun? What's going to make your combat system fun? How's your quest system going to work? Then once you do figure all that out, you're going to go back through 20, 30, 40 zones and try to retrofit all those ideas back into the game? You're going to be screwed. So we spent a lot of time on making it fun before making it big. And that one of the things that when we went into our friends and family alpha test, that was a whole year before we released the game, everyone was like, "OMG, it's really fun." Like they're all surprised. "You can only play to tenth level, but it was a fun ten levels." But it was a lot easier once we knew what was fun to go from levels 10 to 20 and 20 to 30 and 30 to 40 from there - at that point is was more of an issue of production than design. The design at that point was more creative design than mechanics design."

It's from Pardo's AGC keynote speech in 2006. It should be required reading for anyone that wants to get into game design- even if you are not a big wow fan (I'm not). Here is a link to the full speech.VirginWorlds.com - Exploring Massively Multiplayer Games

I'm aware of the intentions but that works really only if you have a blank check and a roster of people waiting for work. Blizzard has numerous IPs and can shift resources around as required. So they can have this small little team of people with more designers than coders hammering out these tiny details and then suddenly ramp up because they have a bench. That isn't exactly feasible for a start-up like this game where if you want to crank the game out you need everything to happen in parallel.

Tenks_sl said:

I'm aware of the intentions but that works really only if you have a blank check and a roster of people waiting for work. Blizzard has numerous IPs and can shift resources around as required. So they can have this small little team of people with more designers than coders hammering out these tiny details and then suddenly ramp up because they have a bench. That isn't exactly feasible for a start-up like this game where if you want to crank the game out you need everything to happen in parallel.

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I'm not really seeing why a small team of devs can't take the approach Pardo mentions. I don't see why it would be necessary to build both out and up at the same time. The "start small, get it right, expand" philosophy seems just as applicable to a small team as a large one. In fact, it seems like it would be even more appropriate for a small team with limited resources.

Edit: In many ways VG did the opposite of this and paid for it. They went way big, way quick with assets and never got a firm foundation. I hope Pantheon doesn't make the same mistake. Assets are nice and shiny and it's easy to get caught up spending your time and resources on them, but they don't mean shit without a firm foundation.

Arden_sl said:

I'm not really seeing why a small team of devs can't take the approach Pardo mentions. I don't see why it would be necessary to build both out and up at the same time. The "start small, get it right, expand" philosophy seems just as applicable to a small team as a large one. In fact, it seems like it would be even more appropriate for a small team with limited resources.

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I don't know Pantheon's actual team structure but lets say it is something like 4 designers, 3 coders, 2 artists, 2 world builders. For the most part much of this work of "build small, iterate, iterate, iterate, expand" is localized mostly to designers and coders. The artists need something to make and sure they can make the Northern Fuzzy Troll, the Desert Fuzzy Troll and the Firelands Fuzzy Troll and can plop them all down into a test zone (which I'm 100% sure exists -- which is also where the coders develop the skills associated with the Fuzzy Trolls) but they also need to think about making the tilesets for the desert, mountain and firelands at the same time. So they could iterate 100 times on the tileset for the Meadow Fuzzy Troll's habitat but is that really getting them anywhere? Probably not. You can refine mechanics pretty easily in a test zone and WoW has already shown the team how players like quest layout and handholding. Pardo's big problem was WoW just had a very fundamental groundwork laid by EQ but he was in charge of making it accessible. Which is probably where much of the iteration came from on the team. Having able and willing bodies there that could be making things just sit idle because you want to iterate a single zone 100 times won't get this project anywhere.

Tenks_sl said:

I'm aware of the intentions but that works really only if you have a blank check and a roster of people waiting for work. Blizzard has numerous IPs and can shift resources around as required. So they can have this small little team of people with more designers than coders hammering out these tiny details and then suddenly ramp up because they have a bench. That isn't exactly feasible for a start-up like this game where if you want to crank the game out you need everything to happen in parallel.

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Yeah. No. If Brad and Co. had spent all their time working on developing a demonstrably fun game within one or two zones they could take that to kickstarter and get fully funded for the rest. People, such as myself, didn't fund the kickstarter because there was nothing there.

Arden_sl said:

"Elwyn forest is the first starting area we did. Northshire Valley is the 1st through 5th level area for the humans and we spent and inordinate amount of time working on that area. We would work on how the combat is going to work? How many monsters can you take at one time? What's the downtime? Does the combat feel fun? What's the first ability you're going to get? What's the pace of the quests? How much experience can you get when you get out of Northshire? Where should we put the trainers? How do we teach you to get to the trainers? We spent a ton of time. We probably spent more time on Northsire Valley by an order of magnitude than any other area because it was one of our first area. We spent a lot of time making it fun first. After we made it fun then we made it big. We didn't go out and build the entire World of Warcraft until we knew what we were building. If we just start building a huge world and haven't figured out all the little details. What's going to make your game fun? What's going to make your combat system fun? How's your quest system going to work? Then once you do figure all that out, you're going to go back through 20, 30, 40 zones and try to retrofit all those ideas back into the game? You're going to be screwed. So we spent a lot of time on making it fun before making it big. And that one of the things that when we went into our friends and family alpha test, that was a whole year before we released the game, everyone was like, "OMG, it's really fun." Like they're all surprised. "You can only play to tenth level, but it was a fun ten levels." But it was a lot easier once we knew what was fun to go from levels 10 to 20 and 20 to 30 and 30 to 40 from there - at that point is was more of an issue of production than design. The design at that point was more creative design than mechanics design."

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It's funny because this was the exact opposite of how VG was developed, they started out by making a giant world with a massive number of art assets.

Luxer_sl said:

It's funny because this was the exact opposite of how VG was developed, they started out by making a giant world with a massive number of art assets.

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Yep. That's what I said in my edit

Bruman_sl said:

Excellent answers, thanks! Glad to see you guys are indeed keeping an eye on network performance. I also don't think you'll hurt much from taking a break on the video updates. The last two have shown a lot of polish over the previous ones, where you can at least leave it without a bad last impression imo, all things considered. Definitely keep us informed with what happens with encounter sizes!

Here's a few more for your next visit.

-What type of quests are you all planning to go with? I'd assume the answer is "more EQ style than WoW style", but that still leaves a lot open. Will be able to loot whenever, do turn-ins later? All of them repeatable?
-Thoughts on NPC interaction? "Type the magic word (EQ)" vs "Click the magic word (EQ Live)" vs "Box with options (VG/WoW)" vs [something else]?
-Will there be a type of quest journal/log (even if you do go EQ style)?
-Will quests give significant exp, or is the main source of exp going to be from killing mobs (EQ style I'm assuming, again)?
-Any other "classic EQ" type design decisions you want to share? [needing food/water, learning languages, weight, various factions in the same city, etc]
-And of course the most important question - will vendors sell to others, what I sell to them?
-Is your current team page (Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - Wikis Profile - About Us) still up-to-date? Any other members missing, or that have since left?
-And this is just me being curious - being a team of volunteers, what kind (if any) development process are you using (various Agile methodologies [Scrum/Kanban/etc], or more Waterfall, or just kinda whatever)? Is more of the team full time, or more of them doing it after work? I'm a software developer with about 12 years under my belt, and I'm always curious how other teams and places do things - especially very "non-standard" projects like this one.

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Hey everyone, I'll get through as many questions as I can right now and I'll try to be back for more a bit later.

1) Quest functionality and style will be much more in line with EQ1 (loot whenever, turn-ins later, repeatable, etc.) But there will be variance. Some quests will only be completed once. Some quests may only be open/active for a certain period of time, etc. We want to keep what worked well and build a bit of depth/nuance into it where we can.

2) We're not solid on this one yet, though my leaning is more towards Classic EQ. However, one thing I would like to explore is dynamic NPC response in these interactions. Not truly dynamic, of course, but I'd like for the NPC to react differently if he asks you a question and you get it wrong. Or, he presents you with two paths that are mutually exclusive - if you go down one, the other may never be open to you again.

3) Yes on the quest journal, though we'd like to keep it minimalistic and give the player the ability to write in their own notes.

4) It depends on the quest, but the majority of quests will be tuned more towards the physical/prestige reward of completion, not experience gain. Still being discussed, feedback here is very helpful to us right now.

5) Encumbrance is making a return to some degree, nothing concrete to share yet. We're exploring a vision skill, want to bring back a sense of racial identity through the way you see the world. Languages will be important again, as will research and reagents. I'll share more as I think of them.

6) Vendors will sell to others what you sell to them, absolutely.

7) Current Wiki is accurate with a few changes pending shortly, can't say more right now.

8) If there's an official name for the development process we're using, I'm not aware of it I will do some research on the ones you mentioned though.

Have you guys discussed having an epic questline like EQ?

Will there be KoS style factions ala EQ?

gogojira_sl said:

I've got a question that can easily be taken wrong, but I'm being honest when I ask it:

How much experience in game making (an MMO in this case, making it more insane) does the team have? And how much of that second Sparkling era team remain? You know, fuzzy trolls and all that.

I think most people see improvements, but I'm going to predict one of the two main sticking points is based around who's working behind the scenes (I'll let you guess at the other). It's not a knock on what you've done, but how far you guys can take it.

Also, tell the lore writer to lay off the high fantasy thesaurus.

Thanks for stopping by, Joppa.

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Of course, glad to stop by.

I know there are many people questioning our ability to make this game based on game development experience. It's understandable, especially when you factor in how*interesting*Pantheon's development trajectory has been so far.

Here's the truth though, starting with me: as of right now, I have about 7 months experience developing MMORPGs. I'm not a legend, I don't have a track record to point to or a long resume. I'm building my legacy every day and my track record is ongoing and visible. Has Pantheon improved in the last 7 months? Has there been a steady increase in quality, intelligent trajectory and team stability as I have risen to this position? That's all I have to point to, no smoke and mirrors.

As for the others, there is a varied mix of experience. Brad of course has a great deal of experience and for all the shortcomings of the past, he brings a great deal of insight into how these games are made. The key there is friction though, mainly between he and I as we make incremental decisions on how to move forward. I get to be the insider voice of the angry but passionate, hopeful gamer that wants Pantheon to be everything we know it can and should be, and I hold him accountable to that, and he welcomes it and appreciates it. I'll speak more on this question later.

Also, to the Sparkling question, the Wiki is accurate. If you don't see a name on there, they have absolutely nothing to do with Pantheon's development, period.