KickStarter Pantheon - (Brad "EQ" McQuaid's new MMO)

[Norfleet]

Hope is a lie, there is only the inevitable slide of everything into shit.

 

[anvi]

Hope is a lie, there is only the inevitable slide of everything into shit.

Definitely seems that way and for many years now. I always thought that might mean some small talented teams could come up with some big successes while everything else declines. But I'm still waiting after a decade or so.

 

[anvi]

I watched the whole hour long Steve Clover video, I love hearing him talk about EQ. Wish there was time to go into Vanguard. The bits he said about Pantheon kind of made me cringe. They were all running around dying and respawning back at base even until recently. 9/10 years in and no death mechanics figured out... Lol. So he put in a new system that sounds pretty good. I just wish I was hearing this several years ago instead of now. He said he is working full time on it now which is great, but also concerning they didn't get such a key guy on the project until just now and he is having to do so much basic and fundamental stuff.

 

[LostHisMarbles]

Monsters and bollocks is also using the Unity engine

Talk about never learning animals.
Why must software people be so fucking retarded?
Rhetorical; a good software engineer is usually an autist, ergo retarded.

And it gets better.
- Creative Direction? I repeat, CREATIVE direction? A guy that worked on Star Stable, lol, for real.
- "Spearheading" all technical aspects? I repeat, technical aspects? A farmer from Bahrain, i kid you not. His past experience? Other than wearing sandals and praying to Allah? He plays emulators. Plays.
- Design and project management? A Twitch partner! Uh huh.

Yeah. I foresee the potential.

* Sorry for being so negative, it just annoys me. Still. They can't resurrect the horse, they can't stop flogging it either.

 

[GhostCow]

Monsters and bollocks is also using the Unity engine

I really don't see any issue with them using Unity for this kind of game. Sure, they'd probably have some better lighting with Unreal, but Unity is faster and easier to work with. It should be completely fine for a game based around zones like Everquest.

 

[LostHisMarbles]

I really don't see any issue with them using Unity

Has been proven to be severely problematic when used for massively (emphasis on massively) online games time and time again, version improvements notwithstanding. And it's problematic in a number of aspects, plural.
Now i assume it's possible someone could be the first in the planet to code from scratch an efficient 100% serviceable module that handles the 'online' aspect just fine; but at the danger of being pedantic, i'd ask you to calculate how statistically possible this is, given that:
i) The "spearheader" of the technical aspects, all of them, is a farmer from Bahrain.
ii) that said farmer, all by his lonesome, will manage to do what no one else, ever, has managed to.

It's easy, it's mainstreamed to bits, it's "free"; ish. I get that.
Many things are "free" in life; sadly most of them just aren't capable of fulfilling all needs.

Building on the above fact, this part feel free to ignore, we've reached a state where no one does anything, no one really knows anything. Meta on meta. Ready-made tools designed for the many are by definintion not the optimal ones to use for something so niche. Expand this further and consider just how the fuck a Star Stable dev, a no one and a Twitch Partner could possibly, ever, do something so complex right; correct, they couldn't. But they can play with tools made by others (who do know) and thus "do".
I won't dare coin this as intellectual debt, it's a gaem of all things, but.. the Meta factor stands. These people saw shit on youtube and think they 'know'. They know fuck all.
I'm also very wary of people with random, unrelated or straight out decline jobs promising me 'old school'. Very wary of that.
I'd need some serious demo to be convinced this is the exception to the rule.

* the Meta factor stands for the gaemrzzz too, the younger gens thinking they 'know' or 'want' it old school, until they sub to the likes of EQ or Vanguard; and fuck right off again, but that's a different subject. Pure opinion this, like i said ignore it, but i don't get an "age" impression here, talking about the devs again; i get "young" (pretty colours, very well lit everything, no forum at all, but sure we've discord and streams, twitching, etc); ergo as i said above, Meta

 

[GhostCow]

Has been proven to be severely problematic when used for massively (emphasis on massively) online games time and time again, version improvements notwithstanding. And it's problematic in a number of aspects, plural.
Now i assume it's possible someone could be the first in the planet to code from scratch an efficient 100% serviceable module that handles the 'online' aspect just fine;

That's exactly what they are doing. I know other MMOs have used Unity and been shit, but I don't know which ones. Did any of them use their own networking solution or did they use one from Unity? Niche Worlds Cult is using their own custom solution. Verant had no problem doing this in 1999 and I don't think they had any super geniuses working for them. It should be even easier to do today.

i) The "spearheader" of the technical aspects, all of them, is a farmer from Bahrain.
ii) that said farmer, all by his lonesome, will manage to do what no one else, ever, has managed to.

Who are you talking about? I just know these guys by name. I don't know anything about their personal lives. Ali is the one who did the networking code and I haven't seen anything to make me think he's an incompetent programmer.

 

[LostHisMarbles]

If you've still to grasp who or what i'm talking about, i'd dare say we have an issue, and my use of English isn't the cause of it.
And.. Well, if that's exactly what they're doing, i guess you've nothing to worry about, always a good thing

 

[anvi]

Unity always has areas that are too small. That recent Mechwarrior etc, I always feel like I want to run around something but it's the edge of the map. Edge of the map and invisible walls was something gamers hated 30 years ago so it's pretty obnoxious having games today with the same problem. Especially when there are games now with huge areas like ArmA or procedural worlds etc. I think a Unity mmo will end up being half maybe quarter the size of EQ's bigger zones, and that's just the old ones.

I don't know what Monsters & Minions even wants to be yet. It looks like a smaller, kids version of EQ which I can't see working. EQ was epic and brutal and huge and it only worked because it was all of those things combined. I think a new game wouldn't do well if it was EQ-ish without being all those things. If it's brutal nobody would put up with it now. People only put up with it back in the day because of how epic it was. The reward was more or less worth putting in all that time and effort. I don't see anyone doing that for a little game. And if they make it easier, then I don't see it having the same addictive quality. And if they make it exactly like EQ, then it's still going to be inferior to the original just because of the scale of it.

I hope it succeeds but to me it looks like a side project. I don't feel much better about Pantheon either. I think their funding stopped, maybe when Brad died. I think they have some good people working on it but I think it's only a few and only part time if that.. I think they need 3 years now and a team of 10 new content creators and then it might be close to as good as EQ. But I think they don't have the money to do that so they are bullshitting people and pretending everything is still underway.

 

[Norfleet]

Smolness of Areas is not really something caused by Unity, though. I played a submarine game in Unity and the mission areas are enormous and largely to-scale, so you're fighting enemies a dozen or so nautical miles away and without the time-compress function, you would NOT be reaching the edge of the playspace anytime soon, and even WITH, it takes awhile. Therefore, size and smolness of map is clearly NOT a limitation imposed by the use of Unity, but simply the way the designers make the game. If you want to be shooting at something 50km away with weapons that will take minutes to arrive, you totally can.

 

[anvi]

Smolness of Areas is not really something caused by Unity, though. I played a submarine game in Unity and the mission areas are enormous and largely to-scale, so you're fighting enemies a dozen or so nautical miles away and without the time-compress function, you would NOT be reaching the edge of the playspace anytime soon, and even WITH, it takes awhile. Therefore, size and smolness of map is clearly NOT a limitation imposed by the use of Unity, but simply the way the designers make the game. If you want to be shooting at something 50km away with weapons that will take will take minutes to arrive, you totally can.

I wish Mechwarrior was like that I shoot stuff 50km away in Arma with artillery and stuff, having big areas is so important to me. Especially with fast jets, they make the biggest maps seem small. I guess that gives me hope for an MMO in Unity, as long as it can also cope with lots of people doing realtime stuff all the same time.

 

[GhostCow]

Unity only seems bad because it's used by so many bad devs. That's to be expected because it's baby's first real game dev engine. Doesn't mean it's a bad engine.

 

[LostHisMarbles]

Speaking of the eases of Unity (lol), let us return to the topic; i quote from the Pantheon team's latest monthletter:

Network Overhaul: In progress
What it is: Development of a custom network solution to enable performant player concurrency and server-side calculations on the required scale of an MMORPG.
• Support for seamless zoning has been completed. Work is ongoing on supporting cross-zone communication, group persistence and custom zone borders.
• Key post-ViNL functionality still pending includes:
• NPC pathfinding across zones.
• Local Weather Profiles.
• Dynamic Entity Spawning Systems (Pets, Adds, Event-driven Spawns).

This now, this month, after years. And years
And obviously while taking money, because they'll fix it! Honest to God folks, in time and everything!

* If not evident, what the above says in plain ole English is that were 'a' server to go online right now? With the usual amount of people expected to be logging in? Nothing would work, would probably crash.

 

[GhostCow]

I gave up on Pantheon when Brad died. They don't have the programming talent or the funding and without Brad they don't really have design talent either. M&M is truly our only hope.

 

[LostHisMarbles]

I gave up on Pantheon

Had you pledged btw? If you don't mind saying of course.

 

[GhostCow]

No, I never pledged. I've been into MMOs since EQ's first expansion back in 2000 and since then I've done some hardcore pre-gaming with a lot of MMOs that turned out to be shit. I learned my lesson about that long before stuff like crowd funding and early access existed. I barely follow MMOs that I'm excited about because it just makes the wait seem longer and it's more disappointing when they turn out to be shit. I only check up on MMOs that are in development a few times a year at most.

 

[LizardWizard]

Wondering what kind of money they're throwing at COH for shilling this. Or maybe he's really pining for that EQ beta 98 esque gameplay, with even less content and atmosphere.

 

[LostHisMarbles]

For real? Money?

Free game pass, free jewtube content plus a bonus for all the extra subs he's gathered, who says he wanted more?
I know you guys have been born with an RJ45 plugged in your anus, but logic remains logic.. one look at that dude's face and the conclusions rush out to meet you, you don't need to try real hard.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Wondering what kind of money they're throwing at COH for shilling this. Or maybe he's really pining for that EQ beta 98 esque gameplay, with even less content and atmosphere.

That clown invested a sizeable amount of money into Pantheon. He has spoken about it before. Calls himself an investor.

 

[grimace]

Wondering what kind of money they're throwing at COH for shilling this. Or maybe he's really pining for that EQ beta 98 esque gameplay, with even less content and atmosphere.

That clown invested a sizeable amount of money into Pantheon. He has spoken about it before. Calls himself an investor.

Financially illiterate patron of the arts does not make one an 'investor'.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Wondering what kind of money they're throwing at COH for shilling this. Or maybe he's really pining for that EQ beta 98 esque gameplay, with even less content and atmosphere.

That clown invested a sizeable amount of money into Pantheon. He has spoken about it before. Calls himself an investor.

Financially illiterate patron of the arts does not make one an 'investor'.

Maybe he owns 38% of the company as an angel investor.

 

[Norfleet]

Wondering what kind of money they're throwing at COH for shilling this. Or maybe he's really pining for that EQ beta 98 esque gameplay, with even less content and atmosphere.

That clown invested a sizeable amount of money into Pantheon. He has spoken about it before. Calls himself an investor.

Unless his investment actually entitles him to returns, ownership, and/or control, then he is not an investor, but a sucker. Regardless, it also means anything he says is biased and thus cannot be trusted.

 

[KevinV12000]

Does anyone have any update at all on where this is? I've checked their website, and it's hard to separate the marketing from the reality, as usual. Anyone know? I'd hate to think this is dead, it's my last hope for at least some version of Vanguard being available.

 

[GhostCow]

Does anyone have any update at all on where this is? I've checked their website, and it's hard to separate the marketing from the reality, as usual. Anyone know? I'd hate to think this is dead, it's my last hope for at least some version of Vanguard being available.

It's never coming out. Just forget about it. Look up Monsters & Memories instead.

 

[Saerain]

Does anyone have any update at all on where this is? I've checked their website, and it's hard to separate the marketing from the reality, as usual. Anyone know? I'd hate to think this is dead, it's my last hope for at least some version of Vanguard being available.

Well, another employee died this week, there's that.