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

Muligan said:

The reality is (and has been from day one) if they are able to make this, we'll all give it a try. Brad and their team will have to be willing to accept the criticism throughout the process and deservingly so. However, they are making some decent process and we are approaching the point (probably later this year) when people will need to test and constructively criticize this game to see if they listen to their playerbase. To me, that is the most important piece left to this and will reveal their true direction. The problem with games over the years is the inevitable changes to cater to the squeaky wheels. Pantheon's greatest selling point is to be something (or close) that once existed. If they can stick to their guns and filter out the worthwhile suggestions that will benefit the life expectancy of the game, i'll be far more impressed than the game actually being released. Making this game feel like Everquest without it feeling like Everquest is going to be the most difficult part of this game. If they can somehow make it happen and not abandon ship, i'll be impressed.

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Totally agree with this. I am truly impressed they have made it as far as they have with the mess they started with, but it seriously looks promising now. The real challenge for them now is going to be sticking to their vision, while selectively responding to the inputs and criticisms of their player base. My biggest fear at this point is that once some of the whale VIPs get in game and start getting rolled, the whining will start and the same backslide in challenge/ soloability/ time to level etc. we have seen in so many other games will start to seep in here.

Only time will tell on that point though.

qwertyqweqwertwqert said:

The only time I felt any sense of excitement in the video is when they got the named, and even then it died pretty fast. I still play EQ and often I will 6 box a group myself, and the sad reality is that if you just set every character to cast a nuke (even the cleric), every mob dies instantly. So I pull a few mobs onto my tank, have each other character cast their nuke once, and the mobs die one by one, and you can do that all the way up to level 60 something. EQ was only really fun when everyone was a noob and needed to learn the game. The problem with making a game that is just like a previous one, is that we will have nothing to learn.

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Not that I am saying that McQuaid and his merry band of keyboard-turners were at all good, but a lot of the lack of tension in that video was because they were using 'god' powers all over the place. Every time someone went down they had the shaman use a rez it normally doesn't have or a GM teleport to get the person back. If I think back to EQ, the times things went south, it was most often in bit parts (trains aside) where we lost and enchanter.. or a dps.. and then the adds piled up and then people started dying. You aren't going to see that sort of tension when GM rezes and teleports are constantly being plyed to keep the twitch stream moving along.

I am not saying this game won't seem easy to hardened MMO vets -- just that you can't really base an opinion on the streams we have seen.

Byr said:

Combat doesnt have to be twitch based to not feel slow. Even just letting us move while casting would go a long way to making combat feel a bit more active even if it doesnt speed it up at all.

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We don't how their combat is going to eventually end up. Right now it looks very EQesque, but that doesn't mean it's not going to iterate into something more dynamic.....

turbo said:

Not going to lie; i don't want a damn EQ reskin, i want a Vanguard reskin. O/D targeting, casting while moving, extremely unique classes that all had wide variability in what they brought to the table , long gear grinds (Celestial Ward chain before they made pieces more easy to get and exp way faster was one of my alltime favorite MMO journeys back when NO ONE had done it on our server so truly exploring all the massive dungeons etc......that was the only time in 17 years i've truly been immersed in a MMO game. Not saying there wasn't clearly technical faults but the game itself was awesome for the time and if they could give that a nice 2017 shine...i'd drop $2-$3,000 founder donation thingy or whatever to help fund. Just give me a chaos volley spell pre nerf.....greatest spell in all of MMO's history.

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EQ was the foundation Vanguard lacked. I'd much rather just cherry pick those few improvements, and put it on top of EQ.

O/D targeting, casting while moving are both in. Unique classes, slower progression, and longer gear grinds were inherited from EQ. The problem with Vanguard was that, until later game, progression just wasn't that meaningful, and the game wasn't very challenging or even multiplayer at times.

So while we shouldn't overlook what was good about Vanguard, hard pass on reskinning it.

turbo said:

Not going to lie; i don't want a damn EQ reskin, i want a Vanguard reskin. O/D targeting, casting while moving, extremely unique classes that all had wide variability in what they brought to the table , long gear grinds (Celestial Ward chain before they made pieces more easy to get and exp way faster was one of my alltime favorite MMO journeys back when NO ONE had done it on our server so truly exploring all the massive dungeons etc......that was the only time in 17 years i've truly been immersed in a MMO game. Not saying there wasn't clearly technical faults but the game itself was awesome for the time and if they could give that a nice 2017 shine...i'd drop $2-$3,000 founder donation thingy or whatever to help fund. Just give me a chaos volley spell pre nerf.....greatest spell in all of MMO's history.

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Some spells can be cast while moving they said

Magician tower stream on May 2

The vision is spreading. It used to be just Brad's Vision. Now, it's their vision.

Byr said:

If i had to describe the stream in one word it would be Slow. Im just not sure theres an audience for something like this anymore.

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There's absolutely a market for a slow-paced and challenging mmo. No question. It's probably not a multi-million player market, but this game isn't set up to require multiple millions of subscribers to succeed.

I know we've been through this a million times but what I think people underestimate about EQ was the way the world and progression was set up. Starting cities, newbie zones, camp spots, EC tunnel, and dungeons with non-instanced, limited camp spots all provided people to form bonds. I'm not trying to overdramatize or tie any deep emotion to the game but it made the game more enduring and memorable. It made progression and character development less mechanical and more of a joint effort. Games like WoW are such passive processes when it comes to progression. You click a couple times on the interface, you're thrown together with random people, just plow through it, and part ways, Rinse and repeat.

If Pantheon wants to tap into the niche community and provide something that other games shy away from is to not be afraid to for players to depend on one another. It doesn't have to be a grind or challenging but you have to take away the instant gratification and where everyone gets their own zone and their own loot. I camped many camps to help others get drops, sure I got EXP in return in many cases but ultimately you did what you had to do for friends and guildies.

I think it's just a better experience for a MMO to provide a world where the people are constant, impactful, and living part of the world. I hope that's what we ultimately get from Pantheon.

Muligan said:

I know we've been through this a million times but what I think people underestimate about EQ was the way the world and progression was set up. Starting cities, newbie zones, camp spots, EC tunnel, and dungeons with non-instanced, limited camp spots all provided people to form bonds. I'm not trying to overdramatize or tie any deep emotion to the game but it made the game more enduring and memorable. It made progression and character development less mechanical and more of a joint effort. Games like WoW are such passive processes when it comes to progression. You click a couple times on the interface, you're thrown together with random people, just plow through it, and part ways, Rinse and repeat.

If Pantheon wants to tap into the niche community and provide something that other games shy away from is to not be afraid to for players to depend on one another. It doesn't have to be a grind or challenging but you have to take away the instant gratification and where everyone gets their own zone and their own loot. I camped many camps to help others get drops, sure I got EXP in return in many cases but ultimately you did what you had to do for friends and guildies.

I think it's just a better experience for a MMO to provide a world where the people are constant, impactful, and living part of the world. I hope that's what we ultimately get from Pantheon.

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The thing that most people don't get is that most of those were attributed to luck. Except when Brad was involved. Brad took credit for every fucking one of those things like he was up coding on coke and meth all night for fourteen days straight. I mean, I won't argue that he was up for fourteen days straight on oxy, but coding? Pffft. Brad don't code.

That's all it was. Luck. The same way with XCOM : UFO Defense.

Pure stupid luck.

You can argue about it all you want to. That's all it boils down to.


EDIT : And now that I think about it, you can toss the ME trilogy in there. They had no idea what they had in their hands. The release of ME:A proves that. *shakes head*

I mean, I don't wanna get into a discussion of single player games here, but we can if you want to.

I'd argue that a lot of recent games have been so tightly engineered that it really hasn't given them a chance to get lucky. I hope this game is built well enough to avoid terrible bugs but poorly enough to give a chance to get lucky with the world and various mechanics.

gugabuba said:

I'd argue that a lot of recent games have been so tightly engineered that it really hasn't given them a chance to get lucky. I hope this game is built well enough to avoid terrible bugs but poorly enough to give a chance to get lucky with the world and various mechanics.

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Japanese games? Of course. They do it by rote. They don't do it by iteration.

Continue to be impressed by the progress between streams. Pantheon A CONTENDA! Who knew?

To many artificial limitations in today's games. Pan'Theon will be no different.
I remeber power leveling and twinking in early EQ, no stupid item and buff scaling, bullshit. No limits on item drops becuase you out level something.
Some level 50 buffs with max level damage shield and regen at level 1 and you were a god.
The acclimation system is just like another way to add bullshit artificial limitations, a keying system, saying you can't go here because you haven't looted X item yet.
Just let the fucking players do what they want, ffs, stop trying to milk people out of money by limiting what they can achieve in X amount of time.

This game looks so good. I really like the part where they just kept pulling mobs and attacking

ili said:

To many artificial limitations in today's games. Pan'Theon will be no different.

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Some of these I can understand, but I think they said you could not change the spells you had memorized during combat. Why limit that? Just makes things less interesting.

gugabuba said:

Some of these I can understand, but I think they said you could not change the spells you had memorized during combat. Why limit that? Just makes things less interesting.

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Yeah, I wasn't really on board with that. I had no issue with how EQ handled it. You could sit to mem a new spell but sometimes you'd get sitting agro and get smacked in the face. So it was risky to try, but certainly possible, and allowed for people to pull some great wins out when they sat and memmed that one spell they needed to turn the tide.