Into The Sunlit Uplands - Pantheon Goes For Early Access

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.

The Season system introduced a while ago allows you to "Pledge" (Aka pay.) to gain access to the servers for varying lengths of time, depending on how much you're willing to stump up. That's a one-off payment that gets you into the testing program with no further payment required until the game launches.

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.

Aradune At Sunset

I had other plans for what I was going to write about today but the news of Brad McQuaid's untimely and utterly unexpected demise put paid to all of that. There's no information yet on the cause of his death, which came out of the blue. By report he was working on Pantheon up to this week.

He was fifty-one, ten years younger than me. He'd been a professional MMORPG developer for a quarter of a century, almost exactly half his life, virtually the whole of his adulthood. Before that he'd been an independent games developer, starting his own company in 1989, publishing his first game, War Wizard, four years later.

He joined Sony Online Entertainment in 1996, where he brought Norrath to life, incorporating concepts and ideas from both his own tabletop roleplaying campaign and TorilMUD, the dikuMUD variant whose systems and gameplay formed much of the structure of what would soon become the most successful Western MMORPG of its era, EverQuest.

From there he went on to form his own, ill-fated company, Sigil Games, where he presided over the development of one of the best MMORPGs ever made, ironically also one of that genre's most infamous disasters, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Vanguard launched in January 2007 but it probably needed at least another year of development and polish to meet the expectations of the quarter of a million eager fans who bought it. The launch had been brought forward by financial pressures, the game was full of bugs and just five months later Sigil was no more, its assets, namely Vanguard, purchased by SOE.

That must have been one of the lowest points in his life, his passion project floundering and failing, his name and reputation trampled underfoot. It looked for a while as though that would be the end of his dream but it turned out Brad was as unstoppable as his namesake, Aradune. After a spell in the wilderness he returned briefly to work on EverQuest in 2013 before announcing the following year his intent to create the spiritual successor to both EQ and Vanguard: Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

That project got off to an inauspicious start with a failed Kickstarter launch. At that point many observers thought it had to be game over for Brad but they'd reckoned without the unwavering dedication to the MMORPG cause which seems to have driven him throughout his all-too-short life.

Alternative funding was secured and over the last five years opinions on the game's prospects have shifted. Once thought of at best as wishful vaporware, at worst some kind of scam, Pantheon has risen to feature on many MMORPG fans' lists of most eagerly awaited new titles. It is, of course, too early to know how Brad's death will affect Pantheon's future but we can only hope it goes on to become the success he would have wished and the capstone to his estimable career.

Brad McQuaid was a worldmaker. Vision was what he famously brought to every project on which he worked. Management may not have been his forte but few disputed his power to see other worlds and bring them into being, sometimes, it seemed, by sheer force of will.

Brad's vision affected almost everyone likely to read this post. I expect the blogosphere to ring with tributes and memories.

Without Brad, the last twenty years of my life would have been radically different, as would the gaming experiences of even MMORPG players who never set virtual foot in Norrath or Telon. But for him, there might have been no EverQuest. Even if there had, the game that could have been made without him might never have achieved the success and attention it did.

Had EverQuest not been a hit there most likely would have been no World of Warcraft. And without WoW, MMORPGs might have been little more than a peculiar footnote in the history of gaming instead of the major sub-genre and pervasive influence they have become.

Speaking of influence, Brad McQuaid has probably had as much impact on my life as any individual I've never actually met. He stands in a select group alongside musicians, writers, film-makers and artists who have shaped the way I think, feel and believe.

I've spent much of the last twenty years living inside Brad's head, seeing things through his eyes, sharing his vision. So have millions of others. It's a legacy that will long outlive him.

Rest well, Brad. Your vision lives on.

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

According to Belghast's schedule for Blaugust, this is Developer Appreciation Week. It used to be a separate event, one I eyed with suspicion.

Who really "develops" MMORPGs, anyway? They're usually built by large teams, sometimes involving hundreds of people. The massive companies that fund them comprise numerous departments, some of which work almost independently, others which have to constantly negotiate and compromise just to get anything done.

Then there's the someone, or several someones, with the unenviable task of wrangling the disparate elements while keeping to a schedule and a budget in the hope of eventually bringing a finished product to market. That, infamously, was the role Sigil Games, makers of Vanguard, lacked.

It's all a bit vague, though, isn't it? In popular music you have the performers, the songwriters and the producer to consider. All their roles are relatively easy to assess. If you're particularly involved you might also look at the engineer or arranger. Literature is even more straightforward: the author and, maybe, very occasionally, the editor.

Movies are probably the closest analogy to video games; huge, collaborative endeavors involving hundreds of individuals. In the early days of cinema, responsibility for quality and success was generally assigned to the Studio, then to the Producer and, of course, the Star.

After Cahiers du Cinema promoted auteur theory, imprimatur shifted to the Director, where it somewhat shakily remained until the recent global trend towards megafranchises nudged focus back to the Studios once again.

For most of the decades I've played video games I couldn't have named anyone who worked on most of them. The exception would have been those idiosyncratic dog-and-pony shows so common in the 1980s, where one individual, coding in his (it was nearly always "his") bedroom, managed to cobble together something that made him a millionaire overnight.

Rather than admire those people I thought of them as bizarre. Rarely did any of them go on to make a second game anyone cared about. I can't remember any of their names and why would I? They were the equivalent of lottery winners.

I played EverQuest for quite a few years before I began to learn the names of the people who created it. The only reason it happened at all was because I was on the official forums all the time and some of the old guard would pop up and post there occasionally.

Also, players would rehash, with incredible lack of consistency, the origins of the game. After a while I got so confused and irritated by the contradictions and misinformation that I started doing some research of my own. From that I slowly began to understand that the games I was playing were created by individual human beings with agendas of their own.

Prior to that I really had never considered how the games came to exist, any more than I would waste mental energy on how my refrigerator was designed and brought to market. A game was a commercial product you bought in a store. It was either good or it wasn't. End of.

As the years went on and I became more and more deeply enmeshed in the culture surrounding MMORPGs, I came to recognize the names of many game developers, particularly the showmen (and they were nearly always men) with the big egos. I didn't think much of most of them.

More than that, I actively disapproved of the cult of personality many of them cultivated and of the fawning adoration expressed by their fans. In my book these people were, at best, technicians. They might be deserving of appreciation and praise by their peers, who could understand the skill sets, but I couldn't see any reason why any player should care, so long as they were competent at their jobs.

I think that attitude finally began to shift during the protracted and often disturbing collapse of Sigil Games. The detail that came out of that, particularly concerning Brad McQuaid, was both a soap opera and a tragedy. And I had to consider that, for all his very human faults and failings, Brad had made two of the best MMORPGs I had ever played and facilitated some of the most joyous and long-lasting memories of my life.

From then on I began to pay a lot more attention to who was behind the games I liked or didn't. I started to make decisions on what to follow or even buy based on the names behind it. I lost all faith in EQNext quite specifically because of the gurning, grinning, self-aggrandizing crew of supposedly charismatic developers SOE chose to front the PR push. Who could possibly take anything any of those people were doing seriously?

By complete contrast, the handover to DayBreak Games came as a glass of ice water on a burning hot day. The first few weeks and months were worrying but once everyone got their feet under the table and particularly when John Smedley departed, I started to get the strong feeling that the grown-ups were back in charge.

In the years since then I've had little cause to revise that opinion. There may be chaotic maneuvering going on at the corporate and financial levels but down in the engine room, where they make and maintain the games, everything has been humming sweetly.

Holly "Windstalker" Longdale, someone I never really paid much attention to when she was buried in the background of the Dave Georgeson circus, has come very much into her own as the ringmaster in charge of the EverQuest franchise. Under her stewardship there seems to be both clear direction and clear intent as well as the capacity to complete. I have confidence in her.

The nature of the MMORPG marketplace and the obfuscated and often concerning nature of Daybreak's corporate structure means no EQ player can ever feel truly relaxed about the future. Still, I feel better about it now than I did for many years in SOE's decline, when unforgivable debacles like the PSS1 scandal threatened to drive the entire operation onto the rocks.

I also have a modicum of faith in good old Brad McQuaid. There he is, plugging away at Pantheon, the game everyone once dismissed as a con or vaporware. Now, for quite a few, it's the Great Hope for The Future. I believe he really does mean to "make worlds, not games". Whether finances will allow him his dream is less certain but I trust him at least to try.

In the end the developers I appreciate are twofold: the visionaries and the caretakers. We need both if we're to have MMORPGS that delight and last. Here's to Brad and Holly, the past, present and future of the games I want to play. Long may they stick around, doing that thing they do.




*** Unusually, I have borrowed all the images here from the web. If anyone owns one and would rather it wasn't used, please let me know and I'll remove it.***

Cut To The Chase : Pantheon

Visionary Realms, the developer behind Brad McQuaid's "Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen", has a predilection for releasing very, very long live streams, during which various developers talk at great length and in considerable detail about the systems and concepts behind the game. This is a form of publicity that has its merits but for anyone with a less-than obsessive interest in the project it can be counterproductive.

It's true that watching other people play video games has become a thing in the second decade of the twenty-first century so there's probably some demographic that actively looks forward to a full evening of watching a bearded guy in a beanie hat talk over muddy footage of a pre-alpha but its a demographic that doesn't include me. That doesn't mean to say I'm not interested. I'm very interested. It's more that I just want the bullet point version.

Amazingly, someone has thought of that. And not just thought about it but done something to make it happen. Thanks to the invaluable MassivelyOP my attention was drawn to this google docs summary.

It's a fantastic list of topics hyperlinked to the exact point in the stream where those subjects are discussed. I spent half an hour flipping through it and learned a lot. And what I learned I liked.

CohhCarnage, hosting the stream, asks the VR devs a number of questions put to him by the viewers of his channel. Sometimes he answers from his own perspective as someone who's played the game as it stands right now. There's a wealth of detail but the key takeaway comes in his reply to the simple question "How close to EverQuest is this?" to which he replies "...in my mind it's what EQ2 should have been...EverQuest One with a little bit of Vanguard and some modern mechanics".

And isn't it just? You can see that in every second of footage. It looks like Vanguard, it plays like EQ and the footage of the Perception System demonstrates that everything doesn't have to be exactly the way it would have been a decade ago, let alone all the way back in 1999. What's more, if you scroll down that Google Docs page to the summaries and screenshots after the links you can see the similarities go way, way further than skin-deep.

When Pantheon was announced I think it's fair to say we were all skeptical. No, let's be fair - the most optimistic among us were skeptical - the rest varied from derisive to outraged. When the Kickstarter crashed and burned you couldn't have taken bets on Pantheon ever appearing in any form, not at a thousand to one odds. And yet here it is.

Perhaps the reason Visionary Realms are so keen to use lengthy livestreams of actual gameplay as a promotional tool is that this way no-one can be in any doubt that the game really does exist. Look, there it is. Those are people actually playing it. And having a good time.

Compare that to the EQNext "gameplay" footage that some people at the time seemed to think was almost too good to be true. Irony, much?

So it seems Brad is back for real this time. After all the debates and discussions over just how much input and influence he ever had in making EQ into the classic it became, there can't be any doubt any more, can there? EverQuest, Vanguard and Pantheon - separated at birth. The common factor would be Brad McQuaid. Whatever it is he does he's doing it again.

Kind estimates would suggest we won't see Pantheon hit anything you'd call a "launch", whatever that means these days, until 2018 at the earliest. I will be sixty in 2018. God help me. I was forty when I picked up EQ at whatever that long-forgotten, long-since closed down video game store was called.

Twenty years on, will I want to start over again, playing an MMO that looks to all intents and purposes to be the same damn game I started with? You'd think not but every one of those streams I dip into the more I want to say yes, I probably do.

Even the lore, which on the initial announcement underwhelmed me to the point that I couldn't find my whelm at all, is beginning to grow on me. This explanation of why the Gnome character in the party looks like an android kabuki player had me thinking "I want to play a Gnome". And yes, I know I always want to play a gnome, but now I want to play that gnome.

There were other things in the stream that made me feel more positive about the direction development is taking. The reply to the question "Is this game able to be played by a soloer?" was immensely reassuring, for example. "On the whole we're a group-centric game but we will never discourage soloing" seems to me to hit exactly the right tone.

There's also a great moment where Brad talks about the game going into wider access next year and a PR person comes in behind him to say "When Brad says we hope to do something for Q1/Q2 it's really, really important to note that's a goal - it's not set in stone". You tell him, PR Guy!

If that alpha does arrive in the first six months of next year it will be for "pre-alpha pledgers only" (PR Guy again). I'm glad he clarified that because I was idly considering pledging if it would get me into the game early. It looks entirely playable already and after all, who knows if any of us will be around when Pantheon actually releases? We're none of us getting any younger.

Too late for that though. Take a look at the available pledges. The cheap seats are all gone. No one else is getting into alpha and as for Beta, well, I might be interested but not without a date. $100 isn't out of the question, seeing it includes two digital copies of the game itself, but a hundred dollars for something that may never happen? Although that makes it half the price Smed was asking for Landmark at the same stage of development...

No, I can wait. But I'll wait with interest. And if there's a beta announcement sometime next year then I'm not ruling anything out.

The Torch Passes : Pantheon, EQNext

Now here's a thing. In all the dust and smoke kicked up by the falling giant that would have been EQNext it was all too easy to miss the latest PR push from the only other current pretender to EQ's throne, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

Almost exactly two years ago, when Brad "Arudune" McQuaid unleashed his ill-fated Kickstarter campaign to an embarrassed shuffling of feet and jingling of pocket-change, the great EQNext project was still all systems go, even though none of it was actually going anywhere. Smed was still in charge of the the EQNext roadshow with Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson as the ever-grinning master of ceremonies.

Compared to their three-ring circus act, Brad's indie effort looked like a dog and pony show. Once the Kickstarter went down in flames barely half-way to its goal most observers thought that was curtain down for ever. There was even a little speculation over whether the Great Smed would wave his magic wand over poor, deluded Brad once more, the way he'd done when Brad so spectacularly failed to realize his vision with the launch of Vanguard, and haul the Pantheon project on board the good ship SOE.

Hero's Song. For a very small value of "Hero"

And now, here we are in 2016. EQNext is dead. Sony Online Entertainment is dead. Smed is...well, he's failing his own Kickstarter for a game that sounds vastly less-ambitious and less interesting than anything Brad ever put his name to over the last twenty years. There would have been some serious money to be made had anyone run an accumulator on those odds.

I didn't watch the Twitch stream live as Brad and a bunch of his co-developers at Visionary Realms showed off their pre-alpha build to anyone who cared. I only vaguely knew it was happening. My interest in Pantheon, never strong to begin with, pretty much fell off a cliff after the Kickstarter failed.

Brad, however, turns out to be made of stronger stuff than I or probably anyone who'd vicariously winced at his career downhill since the infamous parking lot firings would ever have believed. Instead of rolling over and giving up, Brad and his Visionary Realms crew (VR - that's an unfortunate acronym) have rolled on, picking up funding from who knows where.

Two years on not only is the Pantheon project still alive, not only does it have a smart new website, no, much more than that, against all odds it appears they are actually making a game. Ald Shot First, who is far more on board with Brad's vision of a fully group-centered retro retread of EverQuest running on a modern game engine than I will ever be, has full coverage of this weekend's big reveal.

So far I've only watched the first fifteen minutes of the hour-and-three-quarters of footage that's up on YouTube. That was more than enough to convince me that Pantheon is the real thing after all.

It might look rough around the edges. The animations and spell effects might look faint and sketchy. There might not be any lens flare, light shows, spectacular explosions, giant lion-men walking on their hind legs or buildings falling down but by all that's holy those guys are playing an MMO!

To be precise, they appear to be playing EverQuest. Only with prettier pictures. The dream is real.

Ald observes that "More surprising than anything is how modern the interface appeared. I was worried we'd get some sort of terribly clunky interface all for the sake of either EQ nostalgia or some sense of stubbornness many old school players seem to have. So far i'm not seeing that." I take that to mean he hasn't played EQ for a good while, because that interface looks remarkably similar to how I have EQ set up today.

I like my spell bar on the left but otherwise that's just about perfect.

The entire thing just screams EverQuest, from titles of the classes to the text in the chat boxes to the names of the mobs to the placement of the camps. And, of course, to every last detail of the gameplay. Starting with the pulling, through the the adds and the fights to the brief territorial tussle between two groups of players vying for the same Orc Camp, to (and this was the capper for me) the minute's sit-down for the entire group after a big fight so the casters could get their mana back, this could be me playing EQ a decade and a half ago.

I'm not in the least bit convinced that's something I want to do. I did it already. It was fun while it lasted but those days are gone. I'd like to think I've moved on. I know for sure the world has.

Still, it really is good to see that someone, somewhere is still holding the faith. EQNext, had it ever appeared, seemed set to erase every last vestige of affection for the look, feel and gameplay that supposedly made EverQuest the world's most successful MMORPG of its day. Jeff Butler, one of the original architects of that success, seemed particularly determined to ensure none of That Kind Of Thing ever happened on his watch again.

When Pantheon eventually becomes something we can buy and play (and it looks more likely now than ever before that that's a thing that could happen) I will almost certainly give it a try. Curiosity, nostalgia, and the knowledge that, for all his multifarious shortcomings, Brad has been the visionary force behind two of my all-time favorite imaginary worlds, make that much a certainty.

With the heavy emphasis on all group play, all the time, and the very unattractive lore, it's extremely unlikely that I'll make Pantheon my new MMO home but I wish Brad and his team all the best in making it happen. Just don't screw it up again, this time, okay?

Backwards Into The Future With Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen !

Brad McQuaid, probably better known to almost no-one outside his old gaming group as Aradune Mithara, is back. You may remember him from previous MMOs such as Everquest and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Brad's sure hoping you do. His new Kickstarter campaign's counting on it.

Just how much he's relying on both the recognition factor and good old-fashioned nostalgia to enthuse potential backers of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen becomes almost painfully clear as you peruse his proposal and pick your way through the pledges and stretch goals. There came a point last night as I was scrolling down the increasingly unfeasible list of financial milestones when I wondered if I was in fact reading the design brief for EQ3.

You have to wonder, just how happy are Sony's lawyers to see Brad promoting his new Druid class (ours for just $1.8 million dollars) with the pithy tagline "Got SOW?", for example. That seems to go a step further than the typical, industry-wide "common influence" of "Halfling: Hairy feet, Outrageous appetite" or "Ranger: The guardian of the woods. The stalker of the forest". I suppose they have bigger things to worry about. Let's hope so, for Brad's sake.

Wilhelm and Keen both have discussions up and running and the topic of these stretch goals is a hot one. It certainly does raise an eyebrow when you see an MMO staple like crafting included only as the eighth stretch goal (a steal at $2.5 million) and one has to wonder at the designer's commitment to PvP when it doesn't appear on the list until 13th place, just behind a mobile app. Although come to think of it, having PvP only as a half-hearted afterthought would be very much in keeping with EQ tradition...

Kickstarter proposals often invite more questions than they answer. The fundraiser runs for a month and continual engagement with potential backers is part of the process. Expect to see many explanations, clarifications and amendments over the next few weeks. Even so, opening with a list of stretch goals most of which would appear to be things that anyone interested in the game in the first place might reasonably consider to be core components does seem to be offering up a whole bunch of hostages to fortune.

One doesn't want to harp on about it (especially not with the Bard class coming in at a cool $3.2m) but the longer you study these stretch goals the less inspiring (some might say the less palatable) they become. $1.4m gets us "New Content: Adventure Area. An amazing new area unique to the world of Terminus. Offering more content and things to discover." Come again? You're offering a zone as a stretch goal? With content and things? Let me get my wallet!


Backing cautiously away from the stretch goals, the basic premise has a certain appeal. In a long list of bullet points Brad describes something that resembles a cross between Everquest and Vanguard with a nod to Rift's back-story. How did that get in there? Of all the MMOs you could have looked to for inspiration when it comes to lore I wouldn't have thought Rift would even be on the list, let alone at the top, but :

"The player is a legendary hero, stripped of his or her powerful relics and left to explore the dramatically diverse and epic regions of Terminus with hopes of reclaiming their relics and those of lost heroes." Pantheon

"As an Ascended, you can draw on the Souls (and powers) of champions from Telara’s past." Rift

Perhaps not exactly separated at birth but can you deny there's a certain family resemblance?

Moving swiftly on (again) a few things stand out as warnings, at least to me. The tedious adherence to the new orthodoxy demands "Reactive combat where you can determine what the NPC is doing and react to it. (move, counter, deflect, etc.). Sadly it's an approach that seems likely to infest all MMO combat forevermore but it will probably bother few and attract many.

The strong emphasis on "Group-focused social gameplay" will be lauded now but early Everquest and Vanguard were both very enjoyable to explore solo, especially if you chose the appropriate class. Enforced grouping may turn out to be more controversial than Brad would like, when the game actually arrives, should people find themselves flagged LFG for lengthy periods with not much else to do (especially if they can't pass the time crafting because they failed to stump up enough dollars for tradeskills to make an appearance).

Then again, Brad believes that patient waiting is good for the soul. Here's his philosophy on that: "Designed Downtime should be a part of the game to ensure players have time to form important social bonds." Call me cynical if you like but I'd guess that "designed downtime" in 2017 will mean tabbing out to play another game, web browse or watch streaming video. In 1999, when we all sat for several minutes after every fight while our mana and hit points restored themselves (oh so slowly) you couldn't even run Everquest in a window, legally at least.

We didn't talk to each other and form social bonds because we were better people back then - we did it because the choice was that or sit in silence. The moment we got the opportunity to do something other than make small talk with strangers we jumped at the chance. Remember when they added Gems? You didn't hear a word from anyone for weeks!

It's very far from all bad news, though. Most of the proposal makes Terminus sound very appealing, with its "open", "non-linear", "huge" "constantly expanding and evolving" world, where you can "Travel where and when you want" to "explore, trade, and adventure". Taken as a whole it does sound very much like a game I'd at the very least want to try, which brings us to the Pledges.

Unlike the stretch goals, the pledges seem well-thought out and rather inviting. A mere $20 gets you a beta invite with $45 letting you in for the alpha. Not only is that very reasonable by current industry norms but I would be amazed, assuming Pantheon ever does launch, if six months later people weren't claiming it was so much better in beta. They always do and in my experience they're usually right.

Even if that's not the case, that $45 dollars also includes a digital copy of the game plus the first 30 days of game-time. That's not so much a pledge as a pre-order. $100 gets you all that plus a pet and a mount and a second copy of the game "for a friend". I can't help comparing that with the $200 plus tax Landmark is going to cost Mrs Bhagpuss and I for approximately the same deal for a supposedly free-to-play game.

Those pledges, in fact, are so attractively priced that I may well grab either the $100 or two of the $45 packs before the month ends. Only two things are holding me back. Firstly, I'll be surprised if Pantheon meets even its base Kickstarter target. Brad's counting on support from a niche that's already been heavily mined by recent Kickstarters and I'm not convinced there's enough ore left in that seam. Secondly, 2017...

All the pledges have January 2017 as the estimated date of delivery. Even if that happens, and these dates have a tendency to slip, three years is a long time not only to defer gratification but to predict what both my and the industry's circumstances might be. I don't plan anything on that kind of timescale, not even still being around, let alone what MMO I might want to play.

That, however, is a problem with funding Kickstarter projects in general rather than this one in particular. I'd far rather decide in January 2017 whether I want in, not try to guess now how I'll be feeling then. But if we all took that view no Kickstarter would ever fund. Oh the responsibility...

Oh well. If nothing else it's going to give us all something to talk about until Landmark.

Running For Home

At some point in the recent past Mad Otter, the company behind A Mystical Land, must have decided having the blandest name in MMOdom did them no favors in the 'getting attention' stakes so they changed it to Villagers and Heroes, which frankly isn't that much of a zinger either. I played A Mystical Land a few times when it first appeared. I quite liked it, with its jaunty oompah music, cheerily crazed NPCs and lightly ironic humor but there are just far too many MMOs around and cute, quirky offerings don't get much of a look in. It didn't stick.

It must be incredibly hard for MMOs to build traction nowadays. There are just so many of them, mostly there and thereabouts of reasonable quality. You can try out new ones as you find them but whatever curiosity you might have had is easily satisfied in a few sessions, after which you realize you're never going to devote the time to the game that it deserves because, well, it's an MMORPG and even the lightest will eat up most of your life if you let it. So I forgot about A Mystical Land and being a browser-based game it didn't even leave an icon on my desktop to remind me it existed.

Mad Otter hadn't forgotten me, though. Last week they sent one of those "Hey! We're still here! Where are you?" emails so beloved of marketing departments the world over. And it worked, to a degree. I logged in, anyway, just to see what, if anything, had changed along with the name.

See? Germans do have a sense of humor.

A lot, it seems. There's now a client you can download if you prefer not to play in a browser window. That took just a few minutes to install and patch. My old sign-in details worked and my level seven Hunter was there waiting, glaring out at me with his grizzled, leathery old-man face.

He might have wished he'd stayed forgotten because a couple of minutes later he was dead in the dirt, the first boar he'd pinged with an arrow having killed him with two swipes of its tusks. It's hard to forget how to play a guy who only has a bow, auto-attack and one skill so it wasn't that. It was more that a Level Seven Hunter probably shouldn't be pinging arrows into a Level Twenty-Nine pig in the first place.

I have no memory of where I logged that hunter out all those months (or is it years?) ago. Maybe I was exploring, got out of my depth, camped for the night and never came back. Maybe Mad Otter changed the zones around while I was gone but left the character data alone. Whatever it was, I was at the wrong end of a map crawling with nasties, any one of which could eat me in a couple of bites.

All of which lengthy pre-amble brings me somewhere close to the subject I sat down this morning to discuss, namely how very, very much easier travel in MMOs has become and how that's not just because of instant map-clicking and flying mounts and nor is it necessarily a Good Thing.

You're not kidding!

Let's examine the predicament of that poor old hunter, whose situation turns out to be much worse than than it first appeared, not like that wasn't already bad enough. On respawning after death in Villagers and Heroes you reappear at the point at which you entered the zone. Sounds fantastic! All our Hero (I'm guessing he's not a Villager) needs to do is turn around and go out the way he came in, presumably back to an area that he was able to manage before, otherwise how did he get here in the first place?

Problem is, while he was napping someone put a huge pile of logs in front of the gate he came in by, logs that clearly aren't intended to be jumped or climbed and even when he somehow managed to scramble past them the gate turned out to be firmly locked. If that was ever a zone-out it isn't one any more.

Never mind! A Hero never loses hope. A quick bag search reveals some kind of Hearthstone. Phew! One click and all his troubles will be over. Or they would be if he'd ever bound it anywhere. Which he hadn't.

At this point, when playing MMOs long-past, beads of sweat would begin to form on the brow as you realized the magnitude of the task ahead. Having died and respawned far from where you wanted to be, having neglected to rebind in an appropriate place, the prospects for your next few hours play looked bleak. A session of sneaking, hiding, planning and running; a journey filled with nail-biting tension that could end at any time in a surge of panic and despair followed by the grim realization that now you had to do it all again, possibly in your underwear.

A look at the map suggested that the one and only working exit to the zone was a good way down to the south-east. The only good news (apart from the fact that I had a map) was that there was a path leading all the way there. A winding path across which psychotic wildlife wandered at will sure, but still a path.

So the little Hunter ran down the path, jumped through the portal, arrived in a nice, safe village and that was that.

Anticlimax much? It's a modern MMO, what did you expect? He'd die? Of course he didn't die! He got hit a couple of times, poisoned, his health dropped to about twenty per cent and that was more than I'd bargained for but he just kept going and in the end he was fine. And if he had died on the first run, so what? It took maybe forty-five seconds, tops. He'd just get up, dust himself off and do it again.

What's wrong with that picture? Wilhelm sums it up perfectly in a recent post on his trip back to Deklein in internet spaceship MMO EVE.

"Then in null sec I was back on the jump bridge network and home in Deklein in a few more jumps.  Home again, home again. It is sort of like EverQuest back in the day, running from Qeynos to Freeport or Butcherblock.  It took all evening, I didn’t really gain anything besides a change of location, but it still felt like an accomplishment."

When old-timers talk about fast travel and what was lost this is what they mean. It isn't that anyone hankers for the inconvenience, frustration or mind-numbing boredom that would come from slogging across miles of safe, unthreatening landscape were you to remove Waypoints from GW2 or flying mounts from EQ2.

Thanks for visiting.
Maybe leave it a while next time, hey?

It isn't that most even want every means of fast, safe travel to be eliminated. It isn't that at all. I would not myself want to go back to the days when travel was always slow, difficult or expensive, often all three at once. I love my flying mounts and fast, safe transportation between major population centers and key destinations is always a good option to have. If you choose not to take that option, however, or if carelessness or lack of forethought leaves you with no choice, then isn't it preferable to have an adventure trying to get home than face a dull cross-country jog on which you run as fast as or faster than everything that tries to catch you? No wonder all those wolves give up so quickly.

No, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater last time and throwing out another isn't getting to get us anywhere. We need to get both babies back in the bath where they belong, happily gurgling and splashing soapy water over the sides. Hang on, I've lost control of this metaphor, let's get some help...

SynCaine has an insightful, allusion-free post on bringing the old forward into the new in which he observes

 "That’s not to suggest you can simply copy/paste 1997 UO, release it with updated graphics, and profit. Changes to the formula are needed, but outright abandoning the core is clearly not working. So when MMO fans talk about bringing back the ‘good old days’, it’s not because they want everyone to sit around a mob spawn for 12 hours daily, or because they would love to play a game where they lose everything at the bank all the time."

Talking about what made the older MMOs so memorable and distinctive, Keen points out

"MMOs are the sum of their parts; The good parts add and the bad part detract, but the entire game wouldn’t be the same if any piece went missing."

There. That's telling it straight. I just hope Brad McQuaid isn't the only one listening.

Horsing Around: Vanguard

A couple of things of note happened in Vanguard this week: Brad McQuaid left and Lomshir got a revamp

I've not been playing Vanguard regularly (or at all) since Brad came back but if the forums are to be believed Everquest's gain is not Vanguard's loss. Apparently Brad was channeling Bart Simpson during his return. He didn't do anything, no-one saw him do anything and no-one can prove he did anything. I await his impact on Everquest with barely contained excitement.

Who would win in a fight between a lion and a horse?

The Lomshir revamp did happen. It must have. It's in the patch notes. Lomshir is one of my favorite areas of Vanguard, although "Bhagpuss's favorite areas of Vanguard" would be a very long list. Apparently the area (I keep calling it an "area" because one of the things Brad did back in the days when he was doing stuff you noticed was to tell everyone  Vanguard was a seamless, zoneless world. Just ignore the freezing of your screen as you cross that invisible border. That's a chunk, not a zone. It's entirely different. Look, no loading screen!). 

I won that bet...

Ahem. As I was saying, apparently the area has been adjusted to suit levels 10-20. It also got its own dedicated station on the Riftway, which takes you to what used to be the Varanthari starter area. I never played a Varanthari, what with them being one of Telon's many human variants and there being so many more interesting options. About all I knew about them was that they were the horse people. 

They still are, but now the entry-level quests at the place you used to wake up as a freshly-created Varanthari (an option that no longer exists) start at level 10. My level 18 raki sorceror one-shotted his way through most of them. It was heaven! 

He shook some trees for shiny red apples to feed to the horses and the trees disappeared. Then grew back! Realism? Don't talk to me about realism!  He killed and skinned some lions (There are a lot of lions. Something in the ecology of Telon is deeply warped. I blame the Kurashasa). The local horse-lords seemed pleased so they sent him to the capital.

City? Are you absolutely sure about that?

Lomshir (City) is a place I did recognize. I couldn't see anything new about the quests there. They did seem a lot easier than last time I did them, but then last time I did them was five years ago and I was level 12. Even in the stasis that is, or rather was, Vanguard five years and six levels makes a difference. 

By this time I'd been there a couple of hours and I'd had a wonderful time. Honestly, if all the other MMOs I play closed down tomorrow I could go back to Vanguard and be happy. It's entirely clear to me why it's survived so long with so little attention. It's a true work of art. The only downside was I hadn't found any of the new quest chains nor any of the new overland bosses. 

I'll take the brown one

It's fantastic to see SOE giving this amount of attention to Vanguard after all these troubled years. Revamping secondary starter areas, no less. As I was scanning the forums (which look so much better - they've also been revamped) looking for clues on exactly where to find the new content, I ran across this poignant comment from one of the devs who'd done the work to make it happen:

"Any feedback on the content itself so far? A lot of work was put into modifying those chunks"

He got one reply.  I sometimes wonder how Vanguard devs get out of bed in the morning.

If I can find the new content I'll be happy to report what I think of it. In the meantime, please take it as read that it's appreciated. In principle if not in practice.