This is certainly a summer of surprises when it comes to MMORPGs. Guild Wars 2 finally caved and added the housing everyone's been asking for since 2012. EG7 bought Palia and gave it to Daybreak. And now Visionary Realms announces Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen will go into Early Access before the end of the year.
Or so I read at Massively OP last night. There's a confirmatory link to the game's Discord, which apparently I've never bothered to join. I have now but I don't have access to see anything other than the same quotes I've already seen in the MOP article.
The "Source" banner at the bottom of the post also credits a Press Release but there's no link. As for Pantheon's official website, at time of writing, the latest news there is the June Newsletter, which just covers the introduction of a couple of new classes, Ranger and Summoner, plus a few lesser details.
There will be a lot more information soon but who wants to wait for that when we can speculate wildly now? Not me, as you can see!
The first and most obvious conclusion that just about everyone not already committed to the game is going to draw from this sudden and completely unexpected announcement is that Visionary Realms is running out of money. The only problem with that one is that everyone's been assuming they were running out of money for years now and they haven't run out of money yet so why would it be true this time?
The other problem with that explanation is that it assumes going into Early Access is going to bring in more money than going it's going to cost. I have no idea how the finances of these things work but it's not immediately clear to me how that scenario would play out.
Those pledges are expensive. The cheapest is $50, the cost of a full game, and that gets you a fairly minimal amount of access, just a few weeks per year. For something closer to full-time access (Although the game isn't available year-round at the moment.) you'd be paying an unbelievable $750 at the cheapest "VIP" level.
Early Access is, presumably, going to be some kind of always-on, permanent affair. I'm not sure I can think of any games that called themselves "Early Access" and didn't keep the servers up all the time although I suppose it's possible to run EA in Seasons.
If EA really does turn out to have something akin to permanency, even if there might be server wipes at some point before an offical "Launch", I'd be very interested in playing. I balked at paying $50 to play one week every couple of months but I'd be happy to pay the same for unrestricted access to servers that were generally up and running most of the time.
That, though, would seem to undercut the whole financial structure they've built to date, where they ask a relatively small number of people to pay a relatively large amount of money and then don't let them play the game all that much. Open EA would suggest an intent to reverse that, bringing in a lot more people and charging them a lot less.
It's notable that the minimal information released so far assures the current testers they'll be covered. "Existing pledges will receive a copy of the Early Access release at no additional charge." That offer remains on the table for a few months, too: "Early adopters can still pledge for game access and additional perks prior to Early Access launch in December." Best of all "All pledges will be free to play during Early Access – no sub costs, no additional fees, and pledges will get a head start before Early Access launches."
On the face of it, that seems to peg an EA buy-in at $50, if you go for the cheapest pledge ahead of time. Will it really be more than that after December? That'd be a big ask for an EA build. I'll be very interested to hear the full details when they come but if I'm reading the intent correctly, there seems no point in waiting. If you want to play at any point, you might as well pay the $50 now. Then you'll be covered until the game launches for real, which on past history of the Early Access model is likely to be several years off.
All of that is highly speculative. What's clearer is the kind of content that's going to be available come December. The announcement proudly claims
6 full zones.
12 classes.
6 playable races.
And that's it? It's not much, is it? I mean, okay, the races and classes, fine. Lots of games have three or four classes and one or two races. But six zones...?
They'd have to be very, very big zones, wouldn't they? Pantheon has always tried to position itself as the true, spiritual successor to EverQuest and Vanguard. It's right there in the company name, Visionary Realms, which refers directly back to the famous Brad McQuaid Vision™ that became such a meme in the MMORPG community before memes were even a thing.
As Gemini neatly puts it "There isn't a definitive public record of the exact number of zones in the original EverQuest at launch in March 1999" but by my count, EverQuest launched with more than sixty zones spread across three continents.
Vanguard is even harder to assess since it used a different system, splitting the world into "chunks" that could be a lot smaller than EQ's "zones". It also had three continents (There were going to be five but two got culled when the game had to launch early.) and the list of named chunks runs to more than a hundred and fifty.
Game architecture and design has changed a lot since either of those games was new. I'm willing to believe Pantheon may pack a lot of content into the six zones it has. They probably make much greater use of the z-axis and it's entirely possible the count doesn't include dungeons, which I believe may be integral to the geography, not instanced, and therefore not counted separately.
No matter how much slack you want to cut the game, though, six sounds like a paltry number. At the very least they probably need to come up with a better way of counting the discrete, playable areas in the game before they pitch Early Access to people who aren't already invested. Otherwise it's just going to be embarassing.
Finally, there's the crucial question of whether the game is ready for even the limited exposure Early Access is likely to bring. According to the website, Pantheon is still in pre-alpha. I realize all game developers these days follow the Humpty Dumpty school of grammar, making words mean just what they want them to mean, but by any definition "pre-alpha" is very early to be thinking about taking money from all-comers.
According to the announcement "...processes are streamlined, focused, polished and productive. So much so, that we have built up the confidence to release into Early Access in December 2024." Confidence is important but is it enough?
Of course, Pantheon wouldn't be the first game to go into Early Access long before it was ready. It happens all the time. It's one reason why a lot of players won't touch EA titles at all. I guess the question is whether more damage would be done by keeping the game behind a super-high paywall indefinitely when it's already been that way for far too long or whether letting people who aren't card-carrying supporters in to see just how far along development really is will just confirm what a lot of people probably believe - that it's nowhere near ready for genereal release.
I've long been interested in Pantheon. Brad McQuaid's take on MMORPGs, based as it was on the tabletop campaign he used to play and the old DIKU-MUD mechanics he adapted for the primitive three-dimensional graphics of the late '90s, was my gaming comfort zone for a couple of decades.
I'm still very fond of it and I'm always happy to try another game in the same mould but when it comes to adopting one as a new, full-time hobby I honestly feel it might be too late. The world has moved on and to some extent at least it's taken me with it. I might be getting to the point where I have to admit I enjoy the faster-paced, more kinetic approach of the kind of games I've been playing for the last few years to the slower, more static style I once preferred.
At least now Visionary Realms have taken this unexpected step I'll be able to put that theory to the test. Maybe I am ready to go back to the old days after all. At $50 for unlimited access I'll certainly be willing to find out. Come December, I'll be there. How long I'll stay is another matter altogether.
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Making Churchillian references in the headline?
ReplyDeleteIt has been what, a decade since Brad started down this path? We might have gone long enough that I have lost my enthusiasm and forgotten about it that I could start back fresh without any expectations. We shall see.
Ah, I'd forgotten the Churchilian connection. It's just one of those phrases rattling around inside my brain, which is ironic since apparently the same was probably true of Churchill. I just did a bit of googling on it and there's some fairly testy discussion that makes it very clear the phrase was in comon use in the Victorian era, with a number of citations from the kind of material Churchill would quite likely have been familiar with. He obviously borrowed it, whether consciously or not. He certainly popularized it, though, and kept it current.
DeleteI'm quite looking forward to Pantheon in Early Access. I'm sure it will be entertaining. I suspect it's going to get ripped to shreds but at least we'll finally be able to make our own judgment instead of having to guess.