Before I dig into this mornings topic I feel like I need to preface it a bit. I really want Pantheon Rise of the Fallen to succeed. The release of new Western MMORPGs that are not highly focused on becoming pvp kill boxes is an extreme rarity. The Everquestian and Warcraftian dynasties are barren. It is a fevered dream for me to someday tuck into a brand new game that doesn’t involve playing k-pop idols in heavy armor. What I actually want is something more akin to a World of Warcraft or a Lord of the Rings Online that takes advantage of all of the niceties of everything we have learned in the last twenty years of gaming. However what I am apparently getting instead is a love song to the pain filled days of Everquest.
That is not to say I didn’t know this going into following Pantheon. This is a game created by the late Brad McQuaid. I also feel like I should preface once again that I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I should have known with crystal clarity what I was in for. Brad has effectively developed the same game three times, each time trying to realize his original vision with a higher level of fidelity. You have the original Everquest that was severely limited by technological constraints. Next up was Vanguard that appeared to go through some severe development time constraints of needing to push forward to market in an incomplete state. Lastly you have Pantheon which seemed like a final attempt to make good on what he was seeing inside of his head but never quite capable of realizing in digital form.
I feel like another important statement is that both Everquest and Vanguard ultimately eased up on the harsh restrictions that were originally placed on the player on both games. Everquest made itself considerably more casual friendly with the introduction of graveyards that summon bodies, a massive teleportation network that allows players to move around more quickly and freely, and even the introduction of instanced content that was more casual friendly. In an effort to find an audience, Vanguard went through a lot of more casual player friendly changes as it struggled to stay afloat. I remember playing it launch and deeming it just not very fun, when I was used to World of Warcraft at the time. I went back considerably later towards the end of its life cycle and had a blast running around and exploring Telon.
Coin weight should matter, and we’ve decided to go that directionJoppa – Pantheon Creative Director
However all of the above doesn’t exactly explain why I am writing about Pantheon this morning. Yesterday while casually browsing the interwebs I stumbled onto a blurb from MassivelyOp talking about the decision to add coin weight into the game. For those who were not from that era of gaming, back during the Everquest days, the coin you were carrying had weight to it and you regularly needed to dump coin in the bank to keep from being encumbered. For those poor monk players they were constantly fighting a losing battle trying to keep their total item carry down below a specific weight number in order to keep from being debuffed. It was a bad idea then and it is a bad idea now. By the time of Dark Age of Camleot, the immediate successor to Everquest, coin weight had been abandoned and effectively has been gone from the genre ever sense.
The fact that this community wants coin weight back in the game tells me that they have a deeply masochistic streak. I think more than anything it also sets a tone for the type of game that Pantheon is trying to be. If you have coin weight then you are likely probably also going to have full item loss on death and corpse recovery, and on top of that the ability to lose levels. Essentially it sets a tone for a game that I really don’t want to personally play, because I would never freely return to a game that put me in the sort of negative positions that Everquest did. I don’t want to get those real world calls on a Sunday afternoon begging me to log in and resurrect a corpse because they had lost their level and needed the experience back and it was just about to rot. I also have no nostalgia for twelve hour long runs in Fear, Hate or the Plane of Sky.
They’re looking for people with the time and dedication of college students but appealing to the nostalgia of middle-aged gamers who no longer have that kind of time.
Tipa – via Tweet
I think last night Tipa hit the nail on the head and phrased my thoughts in a much more concise manner. Pantheon is being built for an imaginary demographic, that has the tastes of a 40 something but the free time and real world constraints of a teenager. I also wonder if this is the video game equivalent of a midlife crisis… the desire to recapture the glory of our past adventures in a modern game without having the logic to understand that is a bygone era. We put up with a lot of these punishing design patterns, not because we loved them… but because there was no other game out there for us to be playing that offered the same kind of experience. The critical thing we have now that we lacked then is the freedom of choice and a wealth of options that we could be playing that asks significantly less of our time.
What I want is a game that feels like Everquest felt like, without actually making me re-live the trauma of the past. I also want that game to be delivered with all of the knowledge we have learned in the two decades worth of online gaming that have happened between now and then. I am somewhat saddened by the fact that Pantheon won’t be that game. However I am more saddened by the fact that Pantheon is effectively being built for an audience that I question actually existing. Sure there is a community of backers and folks like Cohh Carnage fueling this fire, but I have also experienced this all a number of times as games launched. Players will absolutely tell you with utter conviction that they want this thing today, and then post launch tell you how it didn’t end up feeling as good as they thought it would. Players ultimately don’t know what they want.
What I do however know for certain is that I don’t have the room in my life that demands total control of my play time, and the requirement to always be grouped with other players. Sure folks will tell you that you can solo just fine on certain classes… as someone who tried to solo level a Cleric in the original Everquest, I can tell you that really is no life at all. The truth is I didn’t really have the time to play Everquest the first time around. However I was so hungry for that type of experience that I was willing to risk marital strife in order to get that experience. I know more than one marriage that ended over that game and the time constraints placed upon its players. While “coin weight” really isn’t as big of a deal as I am probably making it out to be, for me it is emblematic of a “vision” that I want no part of. I feel like we have probably swung too far in the direction of player convenience to make interesting game decisions. However I feel like this reaction is way too far in the other direction.
