An Extravagant Journey To Nowhere?

If you'd asked me this time last year if I was interested in paying $40 for a couple of years unrestricted access to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, I'd have answered "Hell, yeah!". I've said a number of times in various comments here and there over the decade or so since the game was first announced that I'd be willing to pay the same for access to the test builds as I paid for Landmark and that cost me a lot more than forty dollars

I bought in to Landmark at the earliest opportunity, the paid alpha that started at the beginning of February, nearly eleven years ago. From memory, I think it cost around a hundred dollars for the Founder's Pack. I bought one for me and another for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present; a couple of hundred dollars in total. 

As I said in that very first post after the NDA dropped, something that happened almost immediately, presumably because SOE didn't fancy trying to police the whole thing for a moment longer than they had to, "That officially makes my Founder's Pack purchase worthwhile right there."

I was referring to the blogging possibilities but in the end, I very much felt I got my money's worth out of Landmark from the gameplay as well as a source of material for posts. I spent a great number of happy hours there over the three years the game lasted.

Two of those years were in testing; just one as a live game. As a commercial product, Landmark was an abject failure, surviving barely a year after its launch in 2016. I'm sure there were multiple reasons why the game closed down but the main one was because no-one was playing it.

In common with most games developed by Sony Online Entertainment, Landmark had an in-game chat command that let you see how many other people were playing. I was in the habit of checking it every time I played. How many were online when I was? Almost literally no-one. Every time.

These days, there's a positively nauseating amount of faux nostalgia for the game with people praising it to the skies for all kinds of things it never was. If those people loved it so much, I have to wonder, why were none of them playing it at the end? Or pretty much the entire time the game was "live"?

The most irritating part of the whole self-serving love-fest is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Back in 2017, when the closure date was announced, the infinitesimally small part of the internet that gave a damn at all was outraged! Not because of the closure per se but for Landmark's supposed role in the already-announced abandonment of the shibboleth,that was EQNext.

I was no more convinced by that anger then than I am by the suppposed affection now. I spent much of the post I wrote about it at the time railing at "the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark", all of whom were falling over themselves to pour vitriol on Daybreak, whose only real error had been to let the game struggle on as long as it did.

I quoted Tyler F. M. Edwards extensively, along with Feldon at EQ2Wire, as they ripped into both the MMO community and the former SOE management for the endless self-delusion and gaslighting that led to such over-inflated, unachievable expectations in the first place. It's curious that both those links still work. Gaming blogs lasting longer than the games they cover - who'd have imagined?

Landmark, of course, was supposed to be the creative pipeline for John Smedley and Dave Georgeson's surreal and wholly unconvincing EQNext project, a bizarre and from this distant perspective positively deranged plan to have players build the infrastructure of one game while playing another while getting paid for doing it, presumably at pennies on the dollar compared to what it would cost to employ professional artists. 

Thinking about it now, it's like some weird, twisted pre-echo of the crypto/NFT Pay2Earn model, where somehow playing a game earns you money while you have fun, a virtuous circle of back-scratchers, all sitting on each others' laps and taking in each others' washing so no-one needs to buy chairs or do their own laundry ever again. Or something like that.

EQNext, lest we forget, was the pipe-dream successor to EverQuest although, awkwardly, EverQuest already had a successor, EverQuest II, something no-one seemed willing to acknowledge back then. Or now, for that matter.

Even more awkwardly, EQ had already received a much more convincing sequel in the form of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, a game which, for all its well-remarked and rehearsed flaws, very clearly iterated and expanded on the original EverQuest formula, something it was well-placed to do, considering it had at its head the prime visionary responsible for the franchise itself, Brad McQuaid.

For a short while Vanguard fared rather better, commercially, than Landmark but also suffered badly from being pressed upon an eager and receptive public in a painfully unfinished and, for some, wholly unplayable state. As happened with Landmark to a lesser degree, most of those shortcomings were addressed and overcome in live development but by then the damage had been done. There was no-one left to see how much better the games were becoming.

Once again, I bought into Vanguard at my earliest opportunity. I applied for testing and got in a few months before launch, when I found the game would barely run on my PC, something that happened to many testers and later to paying customers. Instead of giving up on the whole thing I did some research on what was needed to get the game to run comfortably. Buy a new PC was the solution.

There was a lot of helpful information on the beta forums concerning which graphics cards and CPUs handled the game most effectively, so before the game launched, I had new PCs built for myself and Mrs Bhagpuss, using components chosen specifically with the aim of running Vanguard reliably. This they did extremely well, meaning that while other players were raging and rage-quitting over the inability of their state-of-the-art rigs to run the game at all, we were both playing quite happily on mid-range PCs with as much facility as we'd ever played any other MMORPG.

I point all of this out to mark the contrast between what I was willing to do ten or fifteen years ago in order to play an MMORPG that really appealed to me and what I'm willing to do today. Back then, not only was I ready to pay a couple of hundred dollars just to get into an alpha, I was willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars buying new PCs to play a new game.

Today it appears I won't even stump up $40 for a game I've been waiting to play for almost a decade. So what changed?

A few things. I'm not going to claim that, like Wilhelm, I've fallen off the MMO path, but I am certainly no longer pounding down that trail, ignoring every turning. I still enjoy MMORPGs. I still play them. But nowadays I play a lot of other games as well and I enjoy them just as much. Maybe more.

At the moment, though, I'm not spending all that much time playing video games at all. Maybe a couple of hours, most days. Often not even that. Sometimes I go a whole day without logging into any games at all! I'm not making any grand claims about being over gaming or anything silly like that. It's just that I seem to have a lot of demands on my time just now and something has to give. Games are an easy place to make the cull.

Still, I absolutely will make time for something that interests or intrigues me. Play-testing Stars Reach, for example, has been quite awkward but I've made the effort and intend to continue. 

Tellingly, in some ways Stars Reach, whose development team includes one Dave Georgeson, is very much the spiritual successor to the game EQNext was supposed to be, only this time it's being developed without most of the hubris and bluster with a far more grounded idea of the time and effort involved. And, of course, with the benefit of another decade of technological development, which I suspect is where the magic sauce that seems to be making the whole thing work this time has come from.

Pantheon Early Access, being available 24/7, is immeasurably more convenient for me to play than Stars Reach with its two-hour tests so, especially given I've been itching to play it for years, what's holding me back? Surely it can't just be that $40 tag? It is a bit steep for an EA game, true, but given that VR, until very recently, was planning not only on charging for the game itself but also piling a monthly subscription on top, $40 for at least two years play seems like a decent deal.

(The subscription, by the way, is no longer a certainty. The notes on the EA launch on the game's Steam page include the following fudge: "originally, we contemplated on following a sub model, but are still evaluating our options and will be using the Early Access phase to open that dialogue with players."  The ground is clearly being softened for a more accessible payment model.)

No, it's neither lack of time nor lack of money that's keeping me from playing Pantheon right away. It's experience. Personal experience. Granted, there was only about an hour of it but it was more than enough. 

I was very eager to get a hands-on with the game when Visionary Realms somewhat unexpectedly opened the doors briefly for any interested parties to wander in and take a look. There was - and presumably still is - an NDA on that, so I'm not going into any detail, but I don't think any NDA can reasonably prevent me saying how I felt while I was playing . I can sum it up in a word: bored.

I can forgive games in development a great deal. They can be buggy, glitched, laggy and nowhere even close to being finished and I'll still happily spend time with them and give them good word of mouth, so long as I'm engaged, interested, amused or entertained. Boring me, though? That's unforgivable.

And I'm quite hard to bore. I'm very easily pleased. I can and do play through the starting areas of countless MMORPGs with pleasure, even when I have no intention of carrying on. I love early-game play and I particularly love diku-MUD-inspired leveling. For a game with that heritage to fail to grip me even for as long as it takes to get out of the starting zone is almost unheard of but Pantheon managed it.

Obviously, without being able to discuss the reasons for that in any shape or form, my boredom stands entirely as a description of my state of mind. It tells you nothing about the game itself, other than that I didn't manage to become engaged, let alone enthralled by it.

I didn't, for whatever reason, which is why I'm loathe to drop forty dollars to see if it gets better, later. Maybe it does. It would certainly need to.

It would also seem that I'm no longer willing to spend real-life money just to have something new to write about. For that, I don't even need to enjoy the game. Negatively critical posts are often easier to write than positive ones and they can be more entertaining to read, too, provided you get the tone right. The problem is, I'd still have find something to do in the game that wasn't as boring to read about as it was to do and I'm not sure what that might be.

For the time being, then, a combination of factors prevents me from adding Pantheon to my Steam account. It's a bit pricey for what they're offering and I find it hard to imagine wanting to play it or write about it rather than any of my many other options. I mean, it's hard enough right now to get myself to log into games I like. Honestly, if I can't persuade myself to spend time with games I'm enjoying, what chance is there for a game that makes me feel bored just thinking about it?

And yet, for all of that, I almost certainly will buy into Pantheon's Early Access, eventually. Probably sooner rather than later, too. The New Year should see a substantial drop in demands on my time and very likely there'll also be a significant deterioration in the weather, both of which should mean more time to play video games. I don't expect to be able to resist the temptation to "just take a look" for too much longer.

If and when I do, you can be sure I'll give some account of what I find. There's no NDA on Early Access, although I'm sure someone will try it one day. Let's just hope I can summon up enough enthusiasm to get out of the starting area next time.