Manouk said:I think the industry needs to get away form listening to "them" and create their own game, if no one likes it, so be it. Let the business chips fall where they may.
I agree with this beyond scope. I think this is a problem with entertainment in general today, not just games. Business focus has taken over to the point where the artistry of the work is removed. The design decisions are focused on monetary appeal, not the vision of the creators and due to this, the great works of art, the things that have formed and shaped the history of artistic achievement are no longer driving, inspiring and motivating creation. Everyone refuses to take risks, and continues to apply the same formula based on the masses appeal. I mean, why put out a new movie or game that isn't tested, widely accepted and praised in concept when you can provide a proven concept that has consistent results?
I think it is time for the artists to go back to the days of rebellion, where they flipped soceity the bird and did what they, the individual sought best, regardless if the masses accept it or not, that they belly up to the table and go all in as the great accomplishments weren't achieved by playing it safe and attending to the numbers.
philo said: We have already seen VR start to become more lenient in their stance on a few systems as time goes on. This is a major concern of mine as well.
I don’t see things going this way at all, in fact, I see the opposite happening. Can you please cite some specific examples where you see VR making the game more simple or breaking from what they originally set out to build?
I’ll provide an example where their stance is changing in the opposite direction. Originally, they stated that while the game was predominantly designed around group play, that there would still be some content designed for solo play. This can be found in section 1.4 of the official game FAQ as well as by Joppa in the dev stream below.
However, in this latest newsletter, Joppa answered a community member question and stated:
Ernest Scribner: Is solo viable to level max? Is there any solo content?
CP: Currently, there are no plans to design content specifically for solo players.
So for me personally, I do not see VR caving to a crowd wanting an easier game. Safe travels...
AgentGenX said:This is going to be the best mmorpg ever. Brad and Chris Perkins are MY pantheon. What the hell, throw Ben in there too!
Yes it would be awesome, and more or less listen to us some if it becomes a boring title. But EQ is still going pretty strong so its hard to top what Brad worked on in the start.
Old MMO players are very critical on games these days. Take it from someone who backed over 10 projects in the last year, i still hope for Pantheon to be the best of all of them.
pantheon need to have that magic that everquest once had !!
When it launched, players crowded raids with bosses that only respawned once per week. Each of the game’s different servers developed its own personality, with law imposed by the largest guilds.
Break the rules and kill-steal or loot someone else’s monster, and you’d earn server-wide infamy and shame. “Your name would be out there,” says franchise producer Holly Longdale. “You’d be mud. You might as well start a new character.”
From the beginning, ‘EverQuest’ was designed to push players into situations requiring cooperation. In-game documentation was sparse. Often, players would loot items with no obvious usage and have to ask peers for guidance.
These often led to quest lines and lore that was documented by fans outside the game. This, in turn, fostered a community ethos of “coopetition.”
“I took three days off work,” she says. “There were, in total at one time, 120 people waiting. It was the last weekend this item was going to drop off a rare mob. They were called Journeyman Boots that let you run faster. It was a huge camp, and I maintained a list online… That was three days. I didn’t sleep. I finally got my boots.”
There's a premise in these discussions that I think is false, namely that VR need to strike a balance between making the game "hardcore" enough to keep the likes of "us" interested and "casual" enough to keep things running financially.
When I was a young man in the 70's and 80's, HiFi was a big thing. Some of us spent much more money on record players with moving-coil pickups, tube amplifiers and loudspeakers than we did on vinyl records because sound quality was hugely important to us. Then came the CD and digital amplifiers, and everybody believed it to be the end of vinyl, and consequently of record players and pickups. Today the CD has been annihilated by streaming. Ease-of access is much more important than sound quality. To most people, that is, but not to everybody. A "hardcore" segment of sound enthusiasts insist that analogue sound is superior to compressed digital streams, and today more vinyl than CDs are sold worldwide. A pick-up manufactorer like Ortofon sell more pickups than they did back in the days and have an excellent business. Most of us don't even know such an enthusiast, yet there's obviously enough of them out there to keep the vinyl and pickup businesses going.
I think VR with Pantheon could become for the gaming industry what Ortofon and Dynavector are for the music equipment industry. Sitting on a small niche of their own with enough supporters to make a healthy business. Brad & Co may not become billionaries, but absolutely nothing suggests that this is their ambition.
Isn't that what general discussion is for? I can't help feeling it has been moved because it was critical (potentially) of VR. Is that what I'm paying for now, censorship of my views?
Please put in back in General discussion where I intended it to be discussed, as a general topic, with the general populace. It is clearly about VR and Pantheon and not at all 'Off Topic'.
Bloodfire said:Isn't that what general discussion is for? I can't help feeling it has been moved because it was critical (potentially) of VR. Is that what I'm paying for now, censorship of my views?
No... you vote democrat for pro-censorship "no freedom of speech".
Bloodfire said:Isn't that what general discussion is for? I can't help feeling it has been moved because it was critical (potentially) of VR. Is that what I'm paying for now, censorship of my views?
Please put in back in General discussion where I intended it to be discussed, as a general topic, with the general populace. It is clearly about VR and Pantheon and not at all 'Off Topic'.
To answer your first question, No, that's not what the General Pantheon subforum is for.
General Pantheon is for discussions about current Pantheon topics, General information relating directly to our game and anything that has been released by us (if it doesn't fit into a particular category or subforum). Some other posts speculate but usually tick one of the other boxes, and I allow them to stay.
Your post is speculating on the success of our game that isn't released yet, therefore it is not general talk (speculating), it's not current (hasn't been released yet), it wasn't published by us (no official statement on our games' success), it doesn't fit into any other category so therefore it is off-topic. Which is still fine by the way; I haven't "censored" you, I moved it to the appropriate subforum for you and everyone else to continue discussing as per the guidelines and to keep the forum clean and tidy for everyone to enjoy.
Bloodfire said:Isn't that what general discussion is for? I can't help feeling it has been moved because it was critical (potentially) of VR. Is that what I'm paying for now, censorship of my views?
Please put in back in General discussion where I intended it to be discussed, as a general topic, with the general populace. It is clearly about VR and Pantheon and not at all 'Off Topic'.
What are your views? You posted some very open ended questions and then walked away. Being skeptical is fine if you have a legitimate reason. Otherwise, it comes across as fear-mongering. The devs have been very clear from day 1 that they are building a game for a target audience rather than mass appeal, and are committed to maintaining that vision as so many other games have tried and failed lately to go with the mass appeal route. Anyone that has played a Brad McQuaid game knows that he is diehard about his vision and he has also stated that Pantheon will be the last major game of his career. He is dedicated to sticking with it to the end. He has also said he already has a loose plan mapped out for now until 5-10 years after launch that is cohesive with their overall vision.
It's important that we as the community actually understand what their vision is. Their vision is not to make a game for older players. Anyone who thinks that is suffering from selective hearing. Introducing younger players has always been the goal. But rather than conform to what they want, the goal is to show them that there is a different way to play MMOs that is still fun. The VR team believes that ultimately younger players want challenging and cooperative games. But those come in many forms. The goal is to usher the younger generation into a type of MMO that has been lost for a long time. To show them a style of challenging game that they may not be used to. Now in order to do that, there has to be an onboarding process that is more user friendly than some of the older games. But that can absolutely be done without compromising the entire foundation of being a challenging, immersive, and community-oriented game. Inevitably, it still won't be for everyone, but that's okay. That's how confident they are that a good portion of the younger generation will enjoy Pantheon in addition to the older generation:
"But our target audience is bigger than that group. We are casting a broader net, so to speak. We are absolutely convinced that a large group of younger players will end up loving the game, assuming we can reach them, show them something that seems fun and interesting, provide answers to their questions no matter how simple or sophisticated. These people love Dark Souls, Call of Duty, the better MOBAs, the survival games -- they crave both challenge and risk and reward, but they also crave experiencing these things together with other real people. There's just something that's part of human nature where if you experience something exciting, dangerous, tension-filled, etc. and you experience that with other actual people, those events have a greater impact and create much deeper and longer lasting memories. So our challenge (the dev team and the community's) is to figure out how to reach these groups and explain to them what they're looking at, why things work the way they work, and how much FUN these games can be." (Source: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/blogs/151/178/how-to-get-through-to-people-who-just-don-t-get-it )
And here's another blog post from Aradune on the topic: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/blogs/151/176/pantheon-new-features-and-new-players
So it seems like if you actually look into it, VR has clearly already put a lot of thought into how to tackle this. That's the best we have to go off of currently. You can choose to believe that or you can choose to not believe that. That's pretty much all there is to it, so there's not really any meaningful discussion to be had about it.
