New MMO on the horizon from new company Visionary Realms. It's a spiritual successor to EverQuest, and has quite a few of the original Everquest developers working on it. This includes Brad McQuaid the guy who was behind original EverQuest before Sony took it over. For those of you who played EverQuest this is probably something you want to keep your eye on. For those that never played EverQuest or know what it is, it's basically the grandfather of the modern MMO. It was the first widely successful game to basically take the DnD model and turn it into a fully 3D multiplayer online game, and it set down many of the things that would come to define later MMOs like Runescape, World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, and Star Wars Galaxies, to name a few. Pantheon is looking to pick up where Everquest left off, without having a "developer" like Sony looking over their shoulders telling them where to go with the game. They're going to use the old school pay to own/subscription model, none of the F2P with micro transactions bullshit. Also, the game is already fully funded through development, so no worries about the project dying before it sees daylight like Revival did (Yes, I'm till upset about that). If you're a fan of old school MMOs and are a bit jaded with the direction MMOs have taken in the wake of World of Warcraft's unprecedented success, this might be the game for you. https://pantheonmmo.com/ The angle they're going for is a return to old school MMO gameplay. And they have laid out a few "tenants" that they're keeping constantly in mind while they design the game. They're below. An awareness that content is king. A requirement that classes have identities. No single player should be able to do everything on their own. A belief that game economies should be predicated on delaying and minimizing item value deflation. A commitment to a style of play that focuses on immersive combat, and engaging group mechanics. An understanding that a truly challenging game is truly rewarding. An expectation that with greater risk will come greater reward. An understanding that player involvement is required for progression. All actions (or lack thereof) should have consequences. Positive actions should be rewarded. Apathy or lack of action should not be rewarded with bonuses. A belief that meaningful character progression will always involve a player increasing in both power and prestige. A mindset that some degree of downtime should be part of a game, ensuring players have time to form important social bonds. A belief that an immersive world requires intelligent inhabitants. An understanding that faction and alignment should be an integral part of interacting with the world and its citizens. A sincere commitment to creating a world where a focus on cooperative play will attract those seeking a challenge. A belief that the greatest sense of accomplishment comes when it is shared - and earned. An agreement that player levels should be both meaningful and memorable. An assertion that player vs. environment should involve more than NPCs -- Engage the World!
Optimistically cautious, there were plenty of 'features' of the old MMO's that I wasn't particularly thrilled with.
Eh, I feel like that's personal opinion. Along with the technology of the time making it hard to implement those systems in ways that were fun, and not tedious. I feel like MMOs now a days are too busy chasing and trying to emulate WoW that people have forgotten what makes an MMO fun. The community and the inherent difficulty present that forces players to utilize the community to accomplish tasks they can't otherwise do on their own. Most MMOs these days are just single player games with an online chat until max level, where you're forced to group up only because instances and raids require more people. To me that's not "Massive" and barely ticks the box for "Multiplayer."
I can't really comment on mechanics, since I almost never stuck with one long enough to dive into it. My experience with older MMO's consisted of going into an area, talking to an NPC, being told to go to x area and kill y amount of some random monster. Find another NPC and rinse/repeat until I got bored and quit. The endgame may have been amazing in all of those games, but getting there was always so tedious and time consuming I just couldn't do it. Modern games seem to place more emphasis on providing context and at not wasting my time doing the same damn thing 500 times. Some of them are still repetitive in places, but the ones I've tried have definitely toned it down. Bottom line, if I don't feel like the game understands that I have a job and a life, and can't spend 10 hours a day playing it, I'm out.
This looks interesting, but implementation is everything. I personally like a lot of lore in a game. EverQuest had a ton of detail and background in it, but some of the later projects by Brad fell a bit short. Putting this on my watch list. Sad that the FAQ hasn't been updated in 22 months though.
A lot of what you mention is, in my opinion, inherent for an MMO. MMOs, by nature, are time sinks and therefor aren't for everybody. I get what you're saying, though. MMOs can very easily become mundane and repetative. But I think this is more a constraint of the fact that theres so many players. It's difficult to make things unique and fun to the individual player when you have hundreds of thousands of players. Skyrim has a decent story, but that story quickly falls apart if you throw thousands of people into the mix and ALL of them are Dragonborne. But, I also enjoy story based quest lines. I really enjoy the questing in WoW now where they have adopted zone wide storylines that build as you move through the zone and end in a huge finale. It's great, if it's your first time through... subsequent playthroughs have me wishing they'd just send me off into the woods to kill hundreds of boars. MMOs need to tread this razerthin line between story and mundane tasks. Too much story and it's got no replay value, too much mundane tasks and it's a slog to get through in the first place.
I'm actually enjoying most of my time in Guild Wars right now. The individual takes are still fairly samey, but they're broken up into bite sized chunks so that I can play for an hour and still feel like I've done something. But I can see it getting to be too much on a second playthrough. It's not much, but it's just enough of a difference to make it fun for right now.
I'll freely admit I'm not the target market for 90% of MMO's. I've found a few that I can play for a while, but it's pretty rare.
This is part of my gripe with modern MMOs. Yeah, they're fun, dont get me wrong. I love WoW and GW2 storylines. But they're so focused on those storylines and making them accessible, that the leveling process basically becomes an on-rails single player game with an online chat box, until endgame where you're suddenly forced to find people only because raids and instances aren't soloable. To me, that's not an MMO. You can completely remove the online aspects from WoW and GW2 and those games would still stand on their own. Hell, WoW is already basically single player in all but name until max level due to sharding and instancing. The online and community aspects of MMOs have been put on the back burner in favor of catering to the type of player that wants to roll around in their own personal adventure box. But that's not what an MMO is supposed to be. I respect that you're able to recognize about yourself that MMOs probably aren't really your thing. Most gamers these days it feels like they think every game needs to apply to them. But games, like movies and art, have genres and different genres apply to different people. I feel like Pantheon is attempting to return to the niche that MMOs used to fill before Activision watered down the genre by making WoW more "accessible." And I'll admit, that niche is not for everbody.
The Borg is also the first gaming centric social group I've ever been part of, so I never really got to experience any of the group activities for those older games. It's possible that if I had been playing with friends I would have enjoyed them.
Definitely. MMOs are all about the community and social interaction. But "developers" like Activision are trying to turn them into something they're not. And since WoW is still the big name on the block, other MMOs try to emulate that. Even though what theyre attempting to emulate is what's slowly killing WoW and MMOs in general.
I agree that the unwillingness of developers to deviate from the WoW formula is not doing the genre any service. I'd love for this to succeed following a different path than WoW, I'm just cautiously optimistic about the whole thing because while there are plenty of good things about the old MMO's that have been left behind, there are also plenty of terrible things that should probably die with them (at least in my opinion) I would love to see some kind of actually useful crafting system that actually matters for once. I would love to see a team system that encourages working as a group the whole time without making it impossible to play without one (probably the hardest thing to get right) I'd love to see progression that feels meaningful without being punishing or just a means to the end game.
I think thier open world dungeon system kind of tackles this issue pretty well. Like, you have your normal zones that are soloable, but then within the zones you have large sprawling open world dungeons that you'll need a group to tackle. And the difficulty and rewards of the dungeons scale depending on how deep your group decides to go. So your group can decide to putt putt around near the entrance and farm the easier stuff for lower rewards, or go deeper and take a higher risk for more rewards.
