Xenich Started writing this as a PM, but since everything else has been public, i think this would be the most appropriate;
I wish for you, and others like you, to be more critical, of this and
any other a title. Emphasis on
any a title. Desires and facts rarely equate; In this genre however, when the pursuit of said desires amounts to nothing but a furthering of already established bad practices (pay now, just cause we promise!!111!) despite history having showed us better, i tend to speak out. Yes, in vain. Even in here. Which brings me to the point:
I wanted to apologise really, i occasionally fail to reign it in. This one went beyond 'speaking out'. Having presented my arguments, should have left it there, and you free to believe whatever the fuck makes the world better for you. Pressing it on beyond that was pointless for either side. My fault entirely, so you have my apologies.
(since you may come to wonder): nothing to do with your coming to post on this or that thread. You'll see plenty of criticism there written by me; And nothing to do with Crispy's note of warning either..am uninterested in that idiot altogether, never mind what or why has triggered them
I plan to be critical of this title, but at this stage, there really is no way to do so with any tangible evaluation. Once that changes, once a product is testable or visible then I can be more critical of things such as engine performance, game features, etc... As it is now, they are going along as well as as could be expected for a company that failed its KS and floated along with minimal outside funding. I also have invested nothing in this game, so if it fails, it fails... It only produces some disappointment. If you read quite a bit about Pantheon and its team though, there is no begging going on like you see in other game pitches. His pitch is pretty much "take it or leave" in its approach.
As for speculation, well... I think it may come to pass. I think they may end up making the game. Early on, it appeared as if it was touch and go, with the drama, the stagnation on updates, the game visual qualities being sub par, etc... it had the appearance of being one of those cash grabs. Though, time has gone on and a lot of things they have done are moves in the right direction. They got rid of the RMT store stuff they had early on, they have made progress on games look, lore, and fleshed out some basic systems. So, for the most part it "appears" as if it may happen. There is still a long ways to go and obviously, things can circle the drain at any time, but so far things look to be making progress, time will tell.
I am not going to bother obsessing over things I can not verify and wasting effort on things I don't care about. I will follow the game, take interest and hope it achieves what I am looking for. The moment it deviates from that, this game will be filed away in the "don't give a crap" area of my brain where it will soon be forgotten (like all the mainstream MMOs I don't care about). Until then, it is the position of "Trust but verify". So, I will take Pantheons team at their word and then check them to it as they release content. When their actions deviate from their word, then I will take issue.
Here is what I do know though.
Regardless of all the drama concerning Brad and Co, EQ and Vanguard were quality games in my opinion. EQ I played for several years before SoE finally made it too far mainstream. Vanguard, even though it was buggy as hell and had numerous issues was still a quality game with many innovative features of play (until SoE mainstreamed it). So, regardless of what happened, I liked what Brad produced even with all its faults. So... in my view, even in his failures he has produced something I found enjoyable, so if he produces what he has previously produced, the game will still have some enjoyment.
Also, the game industry doesn't need to live off WoW profits. This is something big business established when it bought out all the studios. Being profitable is not enough for them, they need to be extremely profitable. Pantheon is building the game on a budget far less than EQ. EQ took 24 people 3 years on an 8 million dollar budget to produce. Pantheon will have nowhere near that, but... they do have up to 14 employees now (they hired back some of the old team with the money from that new investor) and are about to finish a level 1-10 investor demo of the game which will be fully functional and content featured (I think they said around 2-3 zones done). Where they go from there, I don't know. I think they said they would not be doing another Kickstarter and would be seeking investment through other sources. What that is, I have no idea but they mentioned it would not be a standard publisher deal investor to avoid the problems they had when making Vanguard with Microsoft's pullout and SoE acquisition.
I know that a game can have a small subscriber base and still be profitable. EQ at its height was 550k subs and that was an extreme success back then. Many games have been successful on much much lower subs. It all comes down to what they expect to make to justify keeping the game going. From what is described, if the game has a solid subscription base that allows them to continue keeping the doors open and providing new content to the game, then they think it is a success. Look at Project 1999, it has over 10k players, it is free and it is early old school EQ in design. It doesn't cost that much these days to host servers and run an MMO as it used to. If a game nearing 20 years old with craptastic graphics and a clunky interface can pull that many people, how many could an updated game with similar features pull and how much would it cost to run it? I mean, we already saw with companies like Larrian that you can produce quality content on a low budget and be very successful. I think it is reasonable to consider that they could achieve some success with a base number of subs filling a specific role in the market that is non-existent.
Other than that, what we do know is listed in the tenants, discussed heavily in the forums as features. I am still very concerned myself as there are a lot of mainstream interest (especially since the recent screenshot release) where people are already attacking people discussing old school features (ie Corpse runs will cause the game to fail, game must have fast travel or it will fail, classes must be balanced between each other or it will fail, Game must have PvP or it will fail, etc...). I have seen this happen many times before. I watched LoTRO, DDO, WoW, Rift, etc... be destroyed by the mainstream demands and being that this games entire point is to bring back those features that are no longer present in today's games, well... for me that is a concern.
There is a possible solution though which could make EVERYONE happy. They discussed that they would be willing to have different server rule sets to fit certain play styles if there is enough demand. So, it may be possible to have a server that is more of a mainstream design of Pantheon and one that is more of an old school design. They even said that though they are not making the game a PvP focused game, if there is enough interest, they would be willing to open up a PvP server specifically focused to that. I think such approaches would solve a lot of the problems we have these days in the MMO market. Imagine how many games could pull back people if they took that approach to truly customizing a server for a specific niche crowd? I know that many of the games I played in the past, that if they would have copied the original server rules off to its own and then did separate design focuses, I would still be playing them to this day.
As for the drama earlier, already forgotten, and crispy? I don't worry about him.
