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

There were a lot of people on the Vanguard team. My guess and hope is the people responsible for the better aspects of the game, whether ideas or actually getting them halfassed into a game that had everything going against it from a business perspective, are still employed in the industry or rationally moved on. I mean, for fuck sake even degenerates like Salim are getting real jobs in the industry, and he has a verifiable track record of shitty design decisions and questionable implementation.

The key being, Salim actually DID things at least, whereas to this day it's still somewhat of a mystery what Brad has even contributed to the more prevalent bullet points on his resume.

Brad's approach has been to take a lot of the credit, and only say he's taking responsibility for mistakes that he proves he doesn't learn from. But mostly, taking credit for things that increasingly seem to have been accomplished in spite of his, ahem, best efforts. Brad himself has even said he had little to do with the day to day operations or creation of Vanguard, and was more upper management and the money guy (read as: taking credit, spinning shit for outsiders and investors, and not giving a shit how millions were spent as long as he could keep up his extravagant personal lifestyle).

Meanwhile, Brad took his success with Everquest, used it to shit away a huge budget from some pretty deep pockets and shit out an abortion of a game (that had a lot of ideas but was stillborn), before disappearing, failing at some mobile startup, having some sort of position at SOE doing who knows what, to running a Kickstarter campaign so shitty it was embarrassing, to starting a personal website where he admitted to taking a huge chunk of money from the private donations for personal use, 'hiring' a team of volunteers, and now trickling out jack and shit at a glacial pace.

Long story short, Brad can't even keep or maintain regular, steady employment in the industry. Whether it's incompetence or addiction or hubris, it doesn't matter, nobody wants him but a few folks who offered private donations that he stole instead of using them to make a game!

And we're supposed to be hopeful because some of the classes in Vanguard were pretty cool?

Yeah, and let's all praise Hitler because he was surely the engineer formulating designs or one of the mechanics turning bolts, right?

Abefroman_sl said:

It's fucking amazing. He steals their money and they still fucking go out of their way to defend him.

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First off...I tossed in 50 bucks when the website launched, when the whole money fiasco happened I stopped my donations so not really a make or break amount
Second I could give a fuck less about Brad GmrGod McQuaid...I want what Pantheon is promising and every since Chris Joppa Perkins has taken over the game has taken a turn for the better...
things are looking up and I am once again hopeful that this game will be made. Now with that being said I also wont be throwing any money at it again...I will buy it when it comes out and if its what they are promising I will support them then. The whole post about the kickstarter article was because again and again over and over I keep hearing how he got all this money from kickstarter when in fact he didnt, not in any way defending what he did with the money he got just stating once again it wasnt from kick starter.

What is it promising outside of generic promises to be a hardcore oldschool mmorpg?

Sithro_sl said:

With engines like Unity around, someone could make an EQ style game on a modest budget. It should honestly be getting cheaper and cheaper to do.

But Brad being the guy to do it? Lets just say I'm... Hoping for the best but expecting the worst?

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Yeah with Unity and UE4 being such an easy platform to develop on being a game programmer has never been easier. You used to need to know all about physics, math and the most complicated parts of the C++ language to get by in that world. Anymore you just need to know how to use either Unity or UE4 (which isn't trivial they're quite large and complex) which isn't nearly as bad as needing to put your 4 year BS of CS to the test all day erry day.

Draegan_sl said:

What is it promising outside of generic promises to be a hardcore oldschool mmorpg?

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It's promising to be a true mmo. We haven't had one of those in years!

I agree with the new engine stuff. I think you still need skilled people tho. At least if you want a semi unique game with your own models and scripts. There is programming know how required. Execution is what I'm most curious about with this team. How will they fair outside the constraints of unity? I think that's a fair a question and something they need to prove before going all in.

You need to know programming in the sense you need to be a competent programmer. Much of the complexities these days are abstracted away with the feature sets offered in modern game engines. I just downloaded and booted up UE4 and it is unreal (kek) just how much that platform does for the developer.

I won't sit here and say anyone can do it because we would have a bunch of quality indie mmos out with these engines. That's just not the case. Hopefully in the future. The big studios are a let down.

UE4 has some pretty cool demos out there using only Blueprints. Blueprints don't have any user written C++ behind them. I'm only on day 2 of even investigating UE4 so I'm not sure how the blueprint system works or any of that.

Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint RTS Example Game - YouTube

The key thing with making an MMO is not the engine and building/scripting stuff. It's making sure your client is talking with the server which are both talking to the database properly. That's the real difficult part. The network engineering is going to make or break any game that wants a lot of people on at the same time. That's why a lot of survival "MMOS" are like 20-30 people tops.

Yeah I don't know how good the canned networking is for Unity or UE4. I'd imagine it is at least workable, though.

Draegan_sl said:

The key thing with making an MMO is not the engine and building/scripting stuff. It's making sure your client is talking with the server which are both talking to the database properly. That's the real difficult part. The network engineering is going to make or break any game that wants a lot of people on at the same time. That's why a lot of survival "MMOS" are like 20-30 people tops.

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Yea and I think that's a legit concern with this project. The big studios don't even get this right let alone a much more inexperienced staff.

It is probably because the big studios are using a hand rolled network layer. When you have to start from scratch much more can go wrong than using a fully vetted 3rd party to handle it.

In a few years there will be a decent amount of 3rd party solutions for handling 100+ people in a zoned instance. You'll soon have the ability to make your own game at home similar to how you do minecraft servers.

Quickly reading up it seems like UE4 can offer around 100 concurrent on a single machine. Which obviously isn't really enough for an MMO unless you have some really magic chunking to direct each chunk to a dedicated VM.

Convo_sl said:

It's promising to be a true mmo. We haven't had one of those in years!

I agree with the new engine stuff. I think you still need skilled people tho. At least if you want a semi unique game with your own models and scripts. There is programming know how required. Execution is what I'm most curious about with this team. How will they fair outside the constraints of unity? I think that's a fair a question and something they need to prove before going all in.

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Couldnt agree more

"True MMO" sounds like a gimmick that you'd hear on an infomercial at 2am. Gives you all the "feels" and nothing else to go on. Sounds like bullshit to me.

Well MMO gamers are the crusty old men of the gaming world and QVC is targetted at the retirement home crowd easily scammed by "Buy now it is 99% off LIMITED TIME"

So yeah actually True MMO is basically the silver plated commemorative 9/11 coin of this forum

At this point, how do you sum up an old school mmo? People have thier own expectations on what that means. I think we saw that with the class discussion. Unlike a lot of the folks here, I don't doubt the core teams passion to make this game. Passion has been lost in this industry and I think a team like this could potentially deliver a game that will stand out to its core audience.

I'd assume if you were hitting the main points it would be forced grouping, non instanced, no magic teleportation. But I still am curious if those things all sound good because we were 18 year old kids who had nothing but time on our hands so all this really immersed us in the world. I think as a full grown man I'm not sure if it would have the same appeal.

Draegan_sl said:

The key thing with making an MMO is not the engine and building/scripting stuff. It's making sure your client is talking with the server which are both talking to the database properly. That's the real difficult part. The network engineering is going to make or break any game that wants a lot of people on at the same time. That's why a lot of survival "MMOS" are like 20-30 people tops.

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Brad needs to get Smed to give up the Planetside2 netcode then. Absolutely no issues with hundreds of players on screen.