I was reading a PC Gaming article that juste came out for a famous game starting with a Z named character...
Really good article if i must say so, i wont provide the link, im sure some of you may even have read it!
What it made me think off and i am kinda glad the writer of this article realized it is that we are tired as gamers, as a rule, to being led around as if we were imbeciles that needed hand holding all the time!
Which brings me to this tenet of Pantheon!
This feels like a small vindication that what this team is doing is on the right track. I havent played that Z game yet but from what this article was saying i could see the similarities between that game and what Pantheon is trying to accomplish. Not only with this tenet but some of the others as well. Maybe just maybe the era of WoW is coming to a close and the era of Pantheon like game is upon us!
I look at the current gaming market, and while there are still 'WoW clones' and 'Eastern Ports' arrving....
... two trends give me hope for the future!
1. More players of WoW (and other clones) are moving to 'uber-casual' status:
Here, I define 'Uber-casual' as :
"Players who, while playing the game nigh-on every day, only do so to collect their 'dailies' and promtly log off thereafter. The only other time they will spend an appreciable time in-game will be just after an expansion is released - and only thereafter until they have reached/gained the new 'level/class/shiny' on offer."
They will eventually abandon even this, once their circle/guild find a 'better' alternative.
2. More developers are pushing a 'challenging' agenda
While most of the in-roads in this direction have been single-player games,
<Insert long list of games designed to kill you again and again>
there has been a small, but steady, stream of multi-player games arriving on the market doing this,
<Insert shorter list of mainly (zombie) 'sandboxy' survival games>
and a trickle of MMOs
<Insert 'Shroud' and the other three>
that hark back to the 'Golden Age' of MMOS.
To my mind - the only determining factor will be how to overcome the issues Bartle* laid out when he discussed both the state of MMOs and the way in which previous MMO gameplay skews the player's perceptions of all games that follow. This is a factor Pantheon will have to consider carefully.
Beyond this, it does seem that there are sufficient disenfranchised players for the phrase:
"If you build it, they will come..."
to be justified!
Evoras, feels justified in his confidence that Pantheon will succeed!
* cf (google) 'Richard Bartle' 'Bartle test' 'Richard Bartle wiki' 'Richard Bartle publications'
Senadin said:i wont provide the link
Was this supposed to be a pun? lol
Anyway, it's a natural cycle - when the market was in its infancy, most games were really challenging, but people played them because they didn't really have any other choice. And then companies realized that people wanted more user-friendly games, and so that's the direction the market went in because that was where the money was. And now some companies are starting to realize that a lot of consumers aren't willing to pay for these types of games anymore because people are bored of them and it's hard to make them stand out. But what does stand out and what people are willing to pay for now is quality and challenge. So the market is slowly starting to shift in that direction. And maybe in another 20 years, it'll change again. Who knows. What I do know is that we are currently on the brink of a new generation.
Big shout out to Demon Souls and Dark Souls for slapping the gaming market into realizing there is a huge number of people that like difficult/non hand holding games. More evidenced in the wild success so far of the Ninendo Switch as people are incredibly excited to play the new Zelda because it is harder; many call it "Zelda Souls."
As Dullahan said, the demand for traditional MMORPGs never went away, it was just neglected in favor of casting the broadest net to make the most money. But we are well past the early 2000s and the user base for online gaming is waaaaay larger than it was back in the day. A return to the core of MMORPGs is ripe for picking up more than enough players on top of us old fans to start rippling changes in the stale MMO market. Hopefully Pantheon is the boulder in the ocean that starts the wave.