That's not how I see it. The Dev Streams are good for showing (nearly) finished product. Minimally Marketable Product in development terms and emphasizes the Show aspect that Joppa is always so keen to do. The parting of the veil allows for higher degree of interaction with the community and is intended to be talking heads, which is better for discussing things before they get to the show stage of development. There are ample items on the punch list for Alpha (https://www.pantheonmmo.com/newsletter/_2022/September/) that are still in To-Do or Design Complete status that would make for engaging discussion in a parting of the veil
Maybe everyone feels that there has been ample design discussions on this topic and I've missed them but I've been following pretty closely and other than some comments in passing, I think there is plenty of room for hearing about the design details:
Pets: To Do
What it is: Development of the systems and user-interface required to support permanent and temporary player-controlled minions.
• Scheduled for implementation once the new networking is in place.
Ability Loadouts: To Do
What it is: Development of a tool to allow players to save and load pre-defined hotbar configurations.
Perception System: To Do
What it is: While we are able to support preliminary implementations of Perception content, additional development is needed for supporting tools and UI required to implement Perception and its related features and progression on a larger scale with the quality intended for Alpha and beyond.
Faction: To Do
What it is: While the Faction system is fully integrated and working, additional development is needed to support leveraging Faction for other aspects of gameplay, such as gaining access to specific Tasks, Storylines, Merchants, etc.
Swimming: To Do
What it is: Implementation of a swimming locomotion system including support for Z-axis movement, the creation of a new suite of swimming animations, and implementation of a water system.
Acclimation: To Do
What it is: Implement improvements to the Acclimation user experience by improving the audiovisual components, improving the UI and Glyph acquisition/equipment systems, and implementing additional climates.
LFG Tool: To Do
What it is: Develop a UI and supporting infrastructure to allow players to list themselves as looking for a group, or looking for additional members, using specified criteria in order to find other players to pursue shared gameplay goals.
Basic Guild System: To Do
What it is: Develop a UI and supporting infrastructure to allow players to form guilds with a private chat channel, basic hierarchies, and membership management commands.
And there are items in the In Progress and/or Complete status that I personally wouldn't mind a deeper discussion but also agree those are better for Dev Streams, such as Banks, Starting Experience for new players.
Rather than talk about designs for post-launch features, let's dig into details on the alpha features.
DagnyStout said:There are ample items on the punch list for Alpha (https://www.pantheonmmo.com/newsletter/_2022/September/) that are still in To-Do or Design Complete status that would make for engaging discussion in a parting of the veil
Rather than talk about designs for post-launch features, let's dig into details on the alpha features.
I would guess that VR's biggest hesitation about talking details about the topics you suggest is that the ones in Design Complete or To-Do still have a lot of details that either won't be decided until implementation or may well get changed in that process. They have had to deal with 'disappointed subscriber expectations' often enough in the past when they needed to change some significant detail about an aspect of the game that was near & dear to some of our plans. Telling us lots of details about what they are about to create carries much more risk of being wrong than waiting a relatively short while to tell us what they have finished creating.
As far as the Parting of the Veil feature generally, I certainly learned plenty from the first PofV episode and I expect to test out taming & mounting at some point in Alpha. My personal expectation from how the feature was announced was that the 'deep dives' that Joppa & Minus would get into were mostly going to be stuff that will be in the game at release and quite likely in during Alpha, though not necessarily on the first day of Alpha.
I say this in response to your comment about PofV subjects that are 'post release' and 'a twinkle in Joppa's eye'. If I'm mistaken in my understanding of what to expect in future ones, then I might be more supportive of the direction of your post.
Ditto. If these features are indeed planned for Alpha, then I would feel differently. Perhaps some clarification there would be helpful. I know Joppa attempted to address this concern directly in the first PoTV by talking about how these are not scope screep -- that they have always been in the works and then again on twitter, but I'm not a tweeter so I don't have that detail. I still took away that these were in the vision but not planned for Alpha. Entirely possible I am minunderstanding!
I also enjoyed the PoTV discussion but I can also empathize with people who see a lot of time and energy being put into something that isn't on the road to alpha and that the same time would be better spent on those things, not just the time on screen but all the prep, etc that we know goes into these sessions.
Jumping in this thread to say Thanks to Joppa and Minus for clarifying the cope of PotV and the relationship to the road to alpha. I would encourage them to continue to emphasize and provide that context at the front end of each episode. Providing the context along the lines of -- the discussion today is around a system/feature that we have planned for after alpha versus one we have planned for alpha will go a long way in mitigating criticisms.
I'll still push for PotV to focus on topics that ARE in the works for Alpha though! The marketing folks have gotten us this far, so I want to trust their plan; but, I also hope they are measuring the effect on social mdia sentiment, pledges, etc from these discussions. I'm just one person, but the motivator to up my pledge recently was seeing progress led me to believe that jumping into pre-alpha to provide feedback as we approach alpha was a good use of my limited resources. I'm a die-hard fan of agile development and iteration, so I believe getting a minimally marketable product in the hands of a sympathetic audience is so important to the ultimate launch.
I don't think most of those would make a good episode for parting the veil. Many of the alpha roadmap options are just the show and tell style items that should end up on the monthly recaps. I am not saying they are easy to build, but easy to explain and show. Swimming once implemented with animations and the like will likely be a 30 second video of a PC at a lake swimming out then diving under the water to scramble to pick an item out of a ships wreckage.
I think parting the veil needs to keep focusing on topics they can deep dive into the more interesting mechanics even if its only 2-4 shows a year. Banking in a world that isn't built around player logistics only needs a few lines to explain. Anything that has nuance is what parting the veil needs to cover.
If mounts were simply, players buy a mount skill then the mount itself and it pops out of the horse pocket after .5 seconds like every other MMO the video would have been worthless. Some aspects of Pantheon will be generic and thats ok.
Alll that said I agree with two of your requests:
Pets certainly will be interesting once they are in the game.
Perception/Consider they have talked about a ton already but the topic is line an onion.
Stealth vs invis vs crouch walk vs illusions vs disguises vs ?? is something they could talk about for hours that would help shape how I think about the game.
A deep dive into player racials would be very interesting if they are changing racials for things like night vision which they brought up.