Mutual Friends: Pantheon

Lest we forget, Brad McQuaid and his trusty team are still plugging away on Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. While the would-be true sequel to EverQuest always figures somewhere in the background of my thoughts when it comes to MMOs that might prove worth an emotional investment, I haven't been lurking on the official forums like Keen, so I tend to be vague on details of the game's current status, let alone the specifics of its avowedly niche design.

I did know something about the "Perception" system. I remember some discussion of the mechanics in  one of Visionary Realms' lengthy "Let's Play" videos but until I read Massively OP's short piece on it this morning I'd never really thought about the implications. All I'd really taken in was that quests would pop up automagically according to your character's ability to perceive them, which seemed to amount to nothing much more than a stat.

That would be an interesting design choice in itself. The idea that you would need to raise a stat in order to receive quests is arguably a more elegant version of the longstanding MMO convention that quest access can be tied to faction or reputation. Instead of working to get the questgiver to like you more you'd work to make yourself more capable of seeing what the questgiver wanted.

It's a neat reversal that could have the welcome emotional effect of making your character seem more like an intuitive, insightful adventurer than a desperate, needy supplicant. Apparently, though, Pantheon isn't planning on replacing the old system so much as adding more layers:

Factors such as a character’s insight and investigation skills, class, race, and faction standing all influence whether or not a particular quest will unlock.

Fair enough. Nothing there to frighten the horses. Then we come to:

Yet if you’re part of a group and just one member can get that quest, he or she can share it to everyone else.

Hmm.

Pantheon has always been promoted as a group-centric game. Brad McQuaid has made it clear that there will be solo content and that players can solo and enjoy themselves, but as in EverQuest, those who chose the solo route will be well aware that they're taking a harder road, one which is unlikely to give them the same rewards as their more social counterparts.

The thing about EQ at its height - one of the things - was that it wasn't just a group-oriented game, it was a social game. Even solo players tended to rely on others, even if they didn't actually want play with them. Before you set out to do lonely battle in some far-flung corner of Norrath, depending on your class, you would want to prepare by meeting a Cleric, an Enchanter and maybe a Shaman with the intention of buying buffs.

Buffs in EQ lasted hours not minutes and they changed hands for cash. Anywhere players congregated in safety prior to setting out to earn experience you'd hear Clerics selling their hit point buffs, chanters hawking clarity and KEI, shamans offering a whole range of stat boosts. Open chat channels would ring with their calls, often augmented by Beastlords, Paladins, Druids and even Rangers - anyone who had a buff that lasted an hour or two that someone might find useful.

Suitably buffed, possibly with player-made potions stuffed in their bags, these would-be rugged individualists would then often call for a taxi. Druids and Wizards, able to teleport in seconds to zones that might take literally 30 minutes on foot, were much in demand. So much so that those who didn't relish an evening running passengers to and from North Karana or Dawnshroud Peaks were forced to set their identity to "Anonymous".

In these days of concerns over microtransactions, F2P business models and Pay-to-Win it's perhaps been forgotten that in the Pre-WoW era almost everything was for sale. Indeed, EQ's in-game economy relied almost as much on the sale of services as it did on the auctioning of items (something that was itself far less subject to restrictions like Bind on Equip or No Trade back then).

Even today many MMOs have a thriving, legal secondary economy in which players sell access to supposedly restricted items or areas to other players. EQ2, for example has developed a whole culture known as "SLR". The acronym stands for "Selling Loot Rights": those willing to pay are invited to join instances where a group or raid boss has been downed so that they can loot the No Trade drops, which can't be sold directly.

Pantheon's perception-gated quests will magically become available to the under-qualified by the simple means of joining a group. This will, without any doubt whatsoever, lead both to groups selling invites to individuals for quest access and to qualified individuals offering their services to groups for a fee.

This, I would contend, is almost certainly the intention behind the design. One of them, at least. For roleplayers who exhibit self-discipline then, yes, the Perception system has considerable potential to enhance immersion and feed lore. For regular players, however, it will become nothing more than a business opportunity or an operating expense.

I think that's fine. I liked EQ's idea of an in-game economy as much as most and more than many. The manifold ways that players both could and did interact commercially contributed significantly to the sense of a Virtual World. Perhaps counter-intuitvely, it made the whole place feel more magical rather than less.

The more I pay attention to the details of Pantheon, the more I like the sound of it. No-one has ever been entirely clear what exactly it is that Brad McQuaid does but I am increasingly of the opinion that, whatever it is, other MMOs could do with more of it.