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Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen News - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's Brad McQuaid took part in a special AMA via /r/MMORPG earlier today. During the 'Ask Me Anything' event, Mr. McQuaid fielded a number of community questions including the team's vision for the end game, whether or not there will be instanced raids, how Visionary Realms plans to prevent 'early sunset' ala Vanguard, quest hubs, grind, live events, a player-driven economy and much more.
Comments
Would love him if he could accomplish this if nothing else. Playing FFXI for nearly a decade and multi-boxing for most of that time, it was okay when I was into the game but part of the reason I dont go back is cause I honestly dont miss it lol. It felt like I was 'free' when I stopped. Granted there's companions in the game now but honestly the AI is pretty bad for most of them like tanks and melee, not to mention you have to stay engaged in combat which is annoying if you want to play a mage job
I didn't look through the whole thing, but since we're limited by how many abilities we can utilize at once, does anyone know if there will be an ability leveling system, I suppose similar to ESO. I did like this part alot about ESO; however I didn't like that my secondary bar abilities wouldn't level with my primary (when I used to play more I suppose) and I kept forgetting to switch during quests so they would level.
"First, 2-4 hours is great -- you should in most cases be able to complete something in that time period that you can feel good about, where you get a real sense of accomplishment. As for travel and lfg, please allow me to clarify. First, there will, in addition to mounts, be ways to travel quickly over long distances. These will involve abilities limited to some of the classes. More detail at this time would be premature other than to say that you'll likely have to had explored on foot an area before another class can teleport you to it. LFG features... we will have LFG features galore. Please see my previous reply about how important it is for us to find groups, make real friends, and to keep our players together."
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However I have 20 years of software development under my belt and many of the answers raised red flags (don't worry I understand some things he does not yet want to reveal). Many systems he's just clueless how they will implement and probably will end up in vicious iterative cycle of trial and error for which they are too small company to afford.
Other than that, here are some good bits summarized:
I think the 'Niche' group may be much bigger than people expect. Many players that want to play this kind of game have stopped playing other MMOs and are just waiting for something like this to return to the market.
With Pantheon being somewhat unique on the development front, I suspect it may even make a bit of a killing.
Also to note, much like their game, Pantheon testing will be traditional testing. It won't just be early access, but probably focusing on improving specific parts of the game.
Thanks for adding some perspective to that, I was a bit thrown off by the date myself.
People can talk about the market being "super saturated" all they want, but the truth is there is nothing out there like Pantheon and the further away modern games move from what made first gen mmos great, the more popular Pantheon will be when it launches.
But you need to understand there is a big gap between his wishes and team's capability and company's monetary resources and implementation's actual appeal to players.
Designing and implementing games is a real challenge. Gamers are among if not the most demanding software customers and their picture doesn't seem to be as clear or confident as it's required. Let's just hope I'm wrong on all accounts for the sake of the project's success
Group oriented games (that arent RP centric) are not going to work. People like doing their own thing. Having the need to be grouped makes it a very small market then add in McQuaid and it gets even smaller.
The game couldnt even get funded on kickstarter, not even close. The way everyone throws money at every stupid game concept to come out that alone says all you need to know about this. Lack of funds more than likely pertains to McQuaid than the game concept but the concept is no great selling point either.
I suppose I should just let this go but I have some time to kill.
Brad keeps saying that the game isn't focused on end game raiding. But then he talks about how it's going to have a built in DKP system and a built in raid-loot distribution system and a built in raid attendance tracker and crap like that. Um...ok, if the game isn't going to be focused on raiding then why would they put so much time and effort into that sort of stuff.
He likes to point out that most of the game will be designed for grouping and not raiding. Yeah, alright, that might technically be true in the sense that more areas of the game will probably be designed for grouping. But anyone with half a brain should know how it will play out in a game like the one he's building. It will be primarily about grouping for experience as you level up your character. Depending on the speed of leveling this phase will last two or maybe three months....maybe four at the most. After that it's going to be all about raiding. Raiding will be the only way to continue progressing your character and this will be the case for the remaining lifetime of the game.
So let us just assume the game does well and stays up and running for many years. In that case, for any given character you play the game will be three months of grouping (give or take a month or so) followed by years of raiding. But it's not focused on end-game raiding? Really? Yeah, right.
I'm actually rooting for them to get this game finished and polished and stable so that whatever happens to it after release can't be blamed on the technical functionality of the game and will only be attributable to the design principles. It'll be interesting to watch.
I suppose life would be simpler if could stop thinking but I'm not sure how to do it. How did you managed to stop thinking.
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Like @NitemareMMO, my IT experience screams when a company is already deeply entangled in development, but there are several significant systems that don't appear to have been thought about. Brad is pretty good about informing us when he isn't telling us about something they have thought about, but I think he is a bit transparent when something goes off script. For instance, I am suspicious whenever someone mentions a feature, and the answer is 'Yes, we will put that in later.' It makes it seem to me that the development team is promising everything that pops up in a discussion (afraid to say 'no'), or worse, the plan isn't as solid as the developers claim; the action aren't matching the statements. That smells of 'feature creep' to me, and that almost always translates into delays.
I am still concerned about the niche nature of the market this game is targeting. Like @DMKano, I am worried that the small nature of this population is not going to be sufficient to maintain this game as a viable product 6 months past launch. I really don't want to invest energy into a game that might show up in 2-3 years, only to disappear in year later. I've detailed out my beliefs on the size of this market in other threads. In summary, I feel the people who would be attracted by EQ1-like game play have already gotten bored of this style of game and moved on -- sometime before 2005. I feel the advocates of this game are wildly overestimating the size of this niche.
I guess the red flags are flying today here at Mendelhol.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
"GM events are great for making the world more dynamic, and we will have them, but we're not stopping there. Our Event system will cause the population of a zone or region within that zone to vary depending on different triggers. Someone finishing a quest may cause an event to trigger. Killing a certain mob could cause an event to trigger. The weather, or time of day, etc. could cause an event to trigger. So the world will be more dynamic than what has been seen in many other MMOs. That said, it will not be too dynamic -- players should still be able to learn their way around the game and the world and use that knowledge to their advantage. No one wants complete unpredictability."
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
No pledge from me, going to wait till post release, dont get me wrong loved EQ1 and Vanguard would still be playing Vanguard if I could (Yes I know about THAT Vanguard Project, its far from ready) But Brads wishy washy wish list smells like Vanguard 1.0 and I will wait till wishes become more real before I pony up.
Didn't see it asked, but does anyone know what sort of group size they are targeting? i.e. I know different content will require different size groups, but for general world content would a team of 2-3 be enough 70%+ of the time? Or would you need a minimum of 4 (tank, healer, DPS, CC) with 5-6 being more 'optimal'?
Good cos I'm sick to my back teeth with all these Korean, P2W and RNJesus ridden clusterf*cks