Pantheon: Scam of the Fallen

[Xenich]

Well, I had completely forgot about this game for a long time, pretty much gave up on it and never looked at it until recently. What I apparently missed was this:








I remember having concerns about this years ago, got into several discussions about it with various people on the forums in different places and was attacked with typical fanboy BS.

What is sad is that they severely screwed the ones who put the most money in it. That is all of the major supporters from the beginning were EQ (Vanguard to an extent with some) people who just wanted something akin to it, nothing special, fancy, etc... just make that game again in a new world, same concepts, same play, little bit better updated graphics/controls.

They took the money, asked for more, asked for more, etc... then started dumping on them chasing gimmick development. They wasted so much time on redesigning stuff (design paralysis retardation, like Agile dip shits). Anyone who questioned them was attacked, even banned on the official forums (regardless of how civil they were in their discourse).

Well, yeah... scam bait and switch. The game isn't even an MMO, it is some weird hybrid gimmick crap.

I am laughing because there were people I knew who when I showed concern, they went off on me, and were some of the BIG dollar supporters. It is funny, because it isn't like there weren't signs.

I mean, fine... ok... sure... have some hope, but don't be an idiot. Well... welcome to suckerville, hope that koolaid was worth it!

[junior]

It's a shame to what happened to it, at least Monsters & Memories looks promising.

[Xenich]

It's a shame to what happened to it, at least Monsters & Memories looks promising.

Hmm, haven't seen that one, will look into it. Thanks!

[Anon]

Such is the cycle of a lot of scam MMOs, they get a lot of kickstarter money from suckers then keep underdelivering for decades so they can't face scam charges.

Though I also believe often developers underestimate the scope of an MMO. A lot of people seem to think that with limited budget and good will you can deliver an MMO with an Everquest scale, even in this forum I find such specimen roaming around. Well, you cannot, and these developers get heavily fucked by underestimating how costly and hard it is to produce an MMO nowadays.

[Xenich]

Such is the cycle of a lot of scam MMOs, they get a lot of kickstarter money from suckers then keep underdelivering for decades so they can't face scam charges.

Though I also believe often developers underestimate the scope of an MMO. A lot of people seem to think that with limited budget and good will you can deliver an MMO with an Everquest scale, even in this forum I find such specimen roaming around. Well, you cannot, and these developers get heavily fucked by underestimating how costly and hard it is to produce an MMO nowadays.

Thing is, they tried to make an MMO to the scale of one that was released for several years rather than releasing a base product within the scope of what the original one that it was trying to fill the shoes of.

EQ took 11 people 3 years and I think it was 1-3 million budget (as per Brad McQuaid) to make and they did it by having to build not only the game, but all of the tools to make it as well on top of having to innovate to make it work (developing specialized code/tools for networking and servers).

Zones implemented at release:

► Show Spoiler

Befallen
Blackburrow
Cazic-Thule
Clan RunnyEye
Commonlands
East Commonlands
East Freeport
East Karana
Erud's Crossing
Everfrost Peaks
Freeport Sewers
Gorge of King Xorbb (Beholder's Maze)
Grobb
Halas
High Keep
Highpass Hold
Infected Paw
Innothule Swamp
Kithicor Forest
Lake Rathetear
Lavastorm Mountains
Lower Guk
Misty Thicket
Nagafen's Lair
Najena
Nektulos Forest
Neriak Commons
Neriak Foreign Quarter
Neriak Third Gate
North Freeport
North Karana
North Qeynos
North Ro
Oasis of Marr
Ocean of Tears
Oggok
Permafrost Keep
Qeynos Catacombs
Qeynos Hills
Rivervale
Solusek A
Solusek B
South Karana
South Qeynos
South Ro
Surefall Glade
Temple of Solusek Ro
The Arena
The Feerrott
The Rathe Mountains
Upper Guk
West Commonlands
West Freeport
West Karana
Erudin
Erudin Palace
Kerra Isle
Toxxulia Forest
Ak'Anon
Butcherblock Mountains
Castle Mistmoore
Crushbone
Dagnor's Cauldron
Estate of Unrest
Greater Faydark
Kedge Keep
Lesser Faydark
North Kaladim
Northern Felwithe
South Kaladim
Southern Felwithe
Steamfont Mountains

This team had a pre-set development tool to work with (Unity) and they had a functioning mock engine with play within the first 6 months after their failed Kickstarter showing various elements of play in a couple of zones (very rough, but it was a core start). All they had to do was develop the engines mechanics and features, work on asset creation and level design and flesh out the basics of classes/races, etc..

They already had two of Brad's previous projects to pull from in terms of "what to do" in the basic core aspects of play and design to which all of the supporters were specifically asking for (and what they originally marketed it as). They did run into some problems with Unity in terms of networking limitations, but the Unity team specifically assisted them in dealing with this (developing new enhancements and features with their engine).

Because the team was small, volunteered a lot of their time, etc... the scope should have reflected it (ie EQ original release size, basic features, and core play).

It started out as such, but over time... they started back tracking, claiming they aren't making another EQ/Vanguard, that they wanted to innovate something new, etc... they wasted a crap load of time on graphics when the bulk of the supporters were telling them that crap wasn't important, work on that later after you had a solid game to present.

They went away from a lot of the core mechanics of EQ, pushing newer trend design and style with complex new systems (carvans, etc...) and trying to modernize for the casual WoW player and the like.

They expanded their target audience to people who thought the game was a joke, which is why graphics/animations became more and more and stupid agile approach resulted in numerous redesigns and increasing the scope to levels where it became larger and larger, more features, etc...

Like I said, if they had retained their original design scope and designed the game for release based on the original ideal that the supporters who ponied up the money wanted, they would have been released already and pushing expansion after expansion slowly improving the game, adding content, etc...

Yes, games are difficult, especially if your goal is to produce a "next gen" modern MMO with the content of most MMOs that have been out for 20 years, but it is stupid to set that as the goal and this would have been filtered out if they applied proper traditional development methodology in their design/risk analysis phase, but because most modern development applies ridiculous full scale iteration development approaches and no cut offs, they continued to revisit the design phase and ended up cycling right into failure.

They would have been better off designing their engine to accept later development additions in scope for flexibility and then stuck to a core expectation of their release making a solid base game that was simplistic, but had a sufficient amount of very difficult long term progression content designed around older principals of play and then added over time their overall goals, but... if they did that, the game would have been niche (which they advertised for in the first place) and the "mainstream" crowd would likely have ignored it.

The costs, development time, etc... would have been greatly reduced, but they shot for the sky and ended up with nothing, like most unruly development projects end up as.

[Anon]

Yes that's an issue that plagues MMO developers. They have grandiose plans for their games and they are frequently beginners with no experience, so they can't manage their budget well, which frequently ends up in disaster.

But on the other hand, MMORPG demographic is very picky and demanding. If you make an MMORPG with a small scale, people will soon finish the game and go away, so it needs a larger scale naturally, which often leads to the former problem.

About monetization, if you use microtransactions or any other predatory model, the community will protest and leave, then it becomes harder to grow and your MMORPG gets blacklisted by many people. If you adopt a sub-model, if you don't have enough players paying you can't cover the costs and grow.

Plus you need to always do a lot of maintenance work, bug fixing and developing more, new content to keep the playerbase invested, it's way more work than any other genre in the market.

Also there are a lot of established MMORPGs in the market already, you need to convince people that your game is better and they should play and give money to your game instead of just playing some other MMO.

Developing an MMORPG is hard and risky as fuck, no wonder the scene is basically ded. Even a company like Riot has been afraid of opening this can of worms.

[Nooneatall]

Such is the cycle of a lot of scam MMOs, they get a lot of kickstarter money from suckers then keep underdelivering for decades so they can't face scam charges.

Though I also believe often developers underestimate the scope of an MMO. A lot of people seem to think that with limited budget and good will you can deliver an MMO with an Everquest scale, even in this forum I find such specimen roaming around. Well, you cannot, and these developers get heavily fucked by underestimating how costly and hard it is to produce an MMO nowadays.

It really shouldn't be that hard in theory. You just need a fast db + cache + mq server infrastructure and client.
I think what probably happens is the usual tech cycle where every developer is obsessed with things that don't really matter and get bored doing the boring work of just wiring up good existing solutions. I bet if I cared to look I could find an open source extensive generic mmo server out there that you could deploy via docker image.
Of course, things like godot and unreal exist today so writing the actual game isn't a huge mountain to climb either.
I suspect if you set your sites reasonably enough and set server limits to hundreds of concurrent players you could roll out an mmo alone in 2 - 5 years depending on experience and if you are working another job or not.

[Anon]

Such is the cycle of a lot of scam MMOs, they get a lot of kickstarter money from suckers then keep underdelivering for decades so they can't face scam charges.

Though I also believe often developers underestimate the scope of an MMO. A lot of people seem to think that with limited budget and good will you can deliver an MMO with an Everquest scale, even in this forum I find such specimen roaming around. Well, you cannot, and these developers get heavily fucked by underestimating how costly and hard it is to produce an MMO nowadays.

It really shouldn't be that hard in theory. You just need a fast db + cache + mq server infrastructure and client.
I think what probably happens is the usual tech cycle where every developer is obsessed with things that don't really matter and get bored doing the boring work of just wiring up good existing solutions. I bet if I cared to look I could find an open source extensive generic mmo server out there that you could deploy via docker image.
Of course, things like godot and unreal exist today so writing the actual game isn't a huge mountain to climb either.
I suspect if you set your sites reasonably enough and set server limits to hundreds of concurrent players you could roll out an mmo alone in 2 - 5 years depending on experience and if you are working another job or not.

It sounds easy in theory, but you still need a healthy number of people willing to play your game for a long period of time and feed you cash constantly to maintain all expenses, and that's where all troubles begin appearing (I elaborated a bit more in my previous comment).

But certainly bad budget management plays a significant part in disasters that we keep seeing happening in the scene.

[Anon]

It's a shame to what happened to it, at least Monsters & Memories looks promising.

It's a shame to what happened to it, at least Monsters & Memories looks promising.

Hmm, haven't seen that one, will look into it. Thanks!

I recommend looking forward to Eternal Tombs as well.

[Nooneatall]

Such is the cycle of a lot of scam MMOs, they get a lot of kickstarter money from suckers then keep underdelivering for decades so they can't face scam charges.

Though I also believe often developers underestimate the scope of an MMO. A lot of people seem to think that with limited budget and good will you can deliver an MMO with an Everquest scale, even in this forum I find such specimen roaming around. Well, you cannot, and these developers get heavily fucked by underestimating how costly and hard it is to produce an MMO nowadays.

It really shouldn't be that hard in theory. You just need a fast db + cache + mq server infrastructure and client.
I think what probably happens is the usual tech cycle where every developer is obsessed with things that don't really matter and get bored doing the boring work of just wiring up good existing solutions. I bet if I cared to look I could find an open source extensive generic mmo server out there that you could deploy via docker image.
Of course, things like godot and unreal exist today so writing the actual game isn't a huge mountain to climb either.
I suspect if you set your sites reasonably enough and set server limits to hundreds of concurrent players you could roll out an mmo alone in 2 - 5 years depending on experience and if you are working another job or not.

It sounds easy in theory, but you still need a healthy number of people willing to play your game for a long period of time and feed you cash constantly to maintain all expenses, and that's where all troubles begin appearing (I elaborated a bit more in my previous comment).

But certainly bad budget management plays a significant part in disasters that we keep seeing happening in the scene.

You could keep your costs low enough to make a small profit the way I just said but you are right, you won't get a large player base and it won't pay your bills. Better to make another amogus and make really money for far less effort.

[Xenich]

Yes that's an issue that plagues MMO developers. They have grandiose plans for their games and they are frequently beginners with no experience, so they can't manage their budget well, which frequently ends up in disaster.

But on the other hand, MMORPG demographic is very picky and demanding. If you make an MMORPG with a small scale, people will soon finish the game and go away, so it needs a larger scale naturally, which often leads to the former problem.

About monetization, if you use microtransactions or any other predatory model, the community will protest and leave, then it becomes harder to grow and your MMORPG gets blacklisted by many people. If you adopt a sub-model, if you don't have enough players paying you can't cover the costs and grow.

Plus you need to always do a lot of maintenance work, bug fixing and developing more, new content to keep the playerbase invested, it's way more work than any other genre in the market.

Also there are a lot of established MMORPGs in the market already, you need to convince people that your game is better and they should play and give money to your game instead of just playing some other MMO.

Developing an MMORPG is hard and risky as fuck, no wonder the scene is basically ded. Even a company like Riot has been afraid of opening this can of worms.

You could release a game like EQ today with the same level of scope and all of the massive time sinks and difficulties and it would do fine for a niche crowd. EQ released with its scope and provided expansions every 6 months for a long time.

Modern convenience is what screws things. Faster leveling, easier content, less mobs, fast travel, etc... are the cancers that kill them and that wasn't the crowd that funded Pantheon. They didn't want the modern MMO, they wanted something along the lines that EQ was.

Heck, I played a lot during release and I was only around 40ish by the time Kunark came out and a good portion of the players weren't even at cap. EQ was slow leveling, slow traveling, slow progression, slow everything until it got to higher expansions and changed focus.

This game failed because they changed their focus and audience and did what failed mmos do, they chased modern mainstream players and those people aren't steady, they are gimmicky, finicky and throw tantrums if they don't get what they want. They want fast leveling, fast fights, fast travel, fast everything AND they want a massive amount of content constantly being released to fit that playstyle. They want all of that and they don't want to pay a sub or buy expansions, etc... but somehow the company just fails... and we don't know why?

Like I said, make an EQ clone in its style, design, function, play difficulty, yet using a little bit more modern graphics and controls. Doesn't have to be flashy, just focus on the core aspects that kept people playing it. No easy travel, large worlds, packed dungeons, deaths constantly, long corpse runs, rare mobs, rare drops, long fights, down time, group based (no designed solo content, if you can solo it, its because you worked your rear off and figured out some way to do it, and it was extremely slow to), etc... All of those things slowed the game play, that is why people weren't blowing through to cap and somehow people loved it, and still look back to it as something they would like to play again.

Yet all those things have been removed from modern MMOs, because apparently its not good design, and yet modern mmos don't have them are pure garbage that can't retain a player base.

[Xenich]

It really shouldn't be that hard in theory. You just need a fast db + cache + mq server infrastructure and client.
I think what probably happens is the usual tech cycle where every developer is obsessed with things that don't really matter and get bored doing the boring work of just wiring up good existing solutions. I bet if I cared to look I could find an open source extensive generic mmo server out there that you could deploy via docker image.
Of course, things like godot and unreal exist today so writing the actual game isn't a huge mountain to climb either.
I suspect if you set your sites reasonably enough and set server limits to hundreds of concurrent players you could roll out an mmo alone in 2 - 5 years depending on experience and if you are working another job or not.

It sounds easy in theory, but you still need a healthy number of people willing to play your game for a long period of time and feed you cash constantly to maintain all expenses, and that's where all troubles begin appearing (I elaborated a bit more in my previous comment).

But certainly bad budget management plays a significant part in disasters that we keep seeing happening in the scene.

You could keep your costs low enough to make a small profit the way I just said but you are right, you won't get a large player base and it won't pay your bills. Better to make another amogus and make really money for far less effort.

Do the math on subs, server costs, developer costs, etc... you can do just fine if you are willing to accept "not getting mega rich!". This was discussed a lot with Brad on the pantheon forums. You don't need that many people to be profitable and for an EQ like game, you don't even need fancy high tech servers, etc....

[Xenich]

It's a shame to what happened to it, at least Monsters & Memories looks promising.

It's a shame to what happened to it, at least Monsters & Memories looks promising.

Hmm, haven't seen that one, will look into it. Thanks!

I recommend looking forward to Eternal Tombs as well.

Hmm... looks ok, but nothing like EQ that I can see and that is what I am looking for in an MMO.

[Anon]

Yes that's an issue that plagues MMO developers. They have grandiose plans for their games and they are frequently beginners with no experience, so they can't manage their budget well, which frequently ends up in disaster.

But on the other hand, MMORPG demographic is very picky and demanding. If you make an MMORPG with a small scale, people will soon finish the game and go away, so it needs a larger scale naturally, which often leads to the former problem.

About monetization, if you use microtransactions or any other predatory model, the community will protest and leave, then it becomes harder to grow and your MMORPG gets blacklisted by many people. If you adopt a sub-model, if you don't have enough players paying you can't cover the costs and grow.

Plus you need to always do a lot of maintenance work, bug fixing and developing more, new content to keep the playerbase invested, it's way more work than any other genre in the market.

Also there are a lot of established MMORPGs in the market already, you need to convince people that your game is better and they should play and give money to your game instead of just playing some other MMO.

Developing an MMORPG is hard and risky as fuck, no wonder the scene is basically ded. Even a company like Riot has been afraid of opening this can of worms.

You could release a game like EQ today with the same level of scope and all of the massive time sinks and difficulties and it would do fine for a niche crowd. EQ released with its scope and provided expansions every 6 months for a long time.

Modern convenience is what screws things. Faster leveling, easier content, less mobs, fast travel, etc... are the cancers that kill them and that wasn't the crowd that funded Pantheon. They didn't want the modern MMO, they wanted something along the lines that EQ was.

Heck, I played a lot during release and I was only around 40ish by the time Kunark came out and a good portion of the players weren't even at cap. EQ was slow leveling, slow traveling, slow progression, slow everything until it got to higher expansions and changed focus.

This game failed because they changed their focus and audience and did what failed mmos do, they chased modern mainstream players and those people aren't steady, they are gimmicky, finicky and throw tantrums if they don't get what they want. They want fast leveling, fast fights, fast travel, fast everything AND they want a massive amount of content constantly being released to fit that playstyle. They want all of that and they don't want to pay a sub or buy expansions, etc... but somehow the company just fails... and we don't know why?

Like I said, make an EQ clone in its style, design, function, play difficulty, yet using a little bit more modern graphics and controls. Doesn't have to be flashy, just focus on the core aspects that kept people playing it. No easy travel, large worlds, packed dungeons, deaths constantly, long corpse runs, rare mobs, rare drops, long fights, down time, group based (no designed solo content, if you can solo it, its because you worked your rear off and figured out some way to do it, and it was extremely slow to), etc... All of those things slowed the game play, that is why people weren't blowing through to cap and somehow people loved it, and still look back to it as something they would like to play again.

Yet all those things have been removed from modern MMOs, because apparently its not good design, and yet modern mmos don't have them are pure garbage that can't retain a player base.

It sounds easy in theory, but you still need a healthy number of people willing to play your game for a long period of time and feed you cash constantly to maintain all expenses, and that's where all troubles begin appearing (I elaborated a bit more in my previous comment).

But certainly bad budget management plays a significant part in disasters that we keep seeing happening in the scene.

You could keep your costs low enough to make a small profit the way I just said but you are right, you won't get a large player base and it won't pay your bills. Better to make another amogus and make really money for far less effort.

Do the math on subs, server costs, developer costs, etc... you can do just fine if you are willing to accept "not getting mega rich!". This was discussed a lot with Brad on the pantheon forums. You don't need that many people to be profitable and for an EQ like game, you don't even need fancy high tech servers, etc....

It's as I said, in theory the development part sounds relatively easy, but on reality things always get complicated in MMORPGs.

For example, do you have any precedent on a recently developed oldschool MMORPG that went successful? I can't think of any. I know of games like Project Gorgon, Ravendawn and Mortal Online 2, all MMORPGs with a heavy oldschool feeling, directed towards the design that you suggested, that are struggling heavily to keep up player numbers.

It's not only the modern audience that's very demanding btw, oldschool people are very demanding as well, in some aspects even more than the modern audience (oldschool people don't put up with obnoxious monetization easily for example).

In the end it's like Nooneatall said. You can even manage to make the game barely profitable and able to cover all costs (not always, Project Gorgon needed to make a donation campaign recently to keep up server costs after a developer had cancer). But is it worth all the hassle and effort in making an MMORPG?

Also, focus on the massive. When you make an MMO, you dream of making an ambitious project that'll attract massive number of players, obviously nobody wants to settle with something small, otherwise just go make a great single player game, nowadays you can even push microtransactions in them lol.

[Xenich]

Yes that's an issue that plagues MMO developers. They have grandiose plans for their games and they are frequently beginners with no experience, so they can't manage their budget well, which frequently ends up in disaster.

But on the other hand, MMORPG demographic is very picky and demanding. If you make an MMORPG with a small scale, people will soon finish the game and go away, so it needs a larger scale naturally, which often leads to the former problem.

About monetization, if you use microtransactions or any other predatory model, the community will protest and leave, then it becomes harder to grow and your MMORPG gets blacklisted by many people. If you adopt a sub-model, if you don't have enough players paying you can't cover the costs and grow.

Plus you need to always do a lot of maintenance work, bug fixing and developing more, new content to keep the playerbase invested, it's way more work than any other genre in the market.

Also there are a lot of established MMORPGs in the market already, you need to convince people that your game is better and they should play and give money to your game instead of just playing some other MMO.

Developing an MMORPG is hard and risky as fuck, no wonder the scene is basically ded. Even a company like Riot has been afraid of opening this can of worms.

You could release a game like EQ today with the same level of scope and all of the massive time sinks and difficulties and it would do fine for a niche crowd. EQ released with its scope and provided expansions every 6 months for a long time.

Modern convenience is what screws things. Faster leveling, easier content, less mobs, fast travel, etc... are the cancers that kill them and that wasn't the crowd that funded Pantheon. They didn't want the modern MMO, they wanted something along the lines that EQ was.

Heck, I played a lot during release and I was only around 40ish by the time Kunark came out and a good portion of the players weren't even at cap. EQ was slow leveling, slow traveling, slow progression, slow everything until it got to higher expansions and changed focus.

This game failed because they changed their focus and audience and did what failed mmos do, they chased modern mainstream players and those people aren't steady, they are gimmicky, finicky and throw tantrums if they don't get what they want. They want fast leveling, fast fights, fast travel, fast everything AND they want a massive amount of content constantly being released to fit that playstyle. They want all of that and they don't want to pay a sub or buy expansions, etc... but somehow the company just fails... and we don't know why?

Like I said, make an EQ clone in its style, design, function, play difficulty, yet using a little bit more modern graphics and controls. Doesn't have to be flashy, just focus on the core aspects that kept people playing it. No easy travel, large worlds, packed dungeons, deaths constantly, long corpse runs, rare mobs, rare drops, long fights, down time, group based (no designed solo content, if you can solo it, its because you worked your rear off and figured out some way to do it, and it was extremely slow to), etc... All of those things slowed the game play, that is why people weren't blowing through to cap and somehow people loved it, and still look back to it as something they would like to play again.

Yet all those things have been removed from modern MMOs, because apparently its not good design, and yet modern mmos don't have them are pure garbage that can't retain a player base.

You could keep your costs low enough to make a small profit the way I just said but you are right, you won't get a large player base and it won't pay your bills. Better to make another amogus and make really money for far less effort.

Do the math on subs, server costs, developer costs, etc... you can do just fine if you are willing to accept "not getting mega rich!". This was discussed a lot with Brad on the pantheon forums. You don't need that many people to be profitable and for an EQ like game, you don't even need fancy high tech servers, etc....

It's as I said, in theory the development part sounds relatively easy, but on reality things always get complicated in MMORPGs.

For example, do you have any precedent on a recently developed oldschool MMORPG that went successful? I can't think of any. I know of games like Project Gorgon, Ravendawn and Mortal Online 2, all MMORPGs with a heavy oldschool feeling, directed towards the design that you suggested, that are struggling heavily to keep up player numbers.

It's not only the modern audience that's very demanding btw, oldschool people are very demanding as well, in some aspects even more than the modern audience (oldschool people don't put up with obnoxious monetization easily for example).

In the end it's like Nooneatall said. You can even manage to make the game barely profitable and able to cover all costs (not always, Project Gorgon needed to make a donation campaign recently to keep up server costs after a developer had cancer). But is it worth all the hassle and effort in making an MMORPG?

Also, focus on the massive. When you make an MMO, you dream of making an ambitious project that'll attract massive number of players, obviously nobody wants to settle with something small, otherwise just go make a great single player game, nowadays you can even push microtransactions in them lol.

Depends on the game. None of them are like EQ though and no games have been made that come close (aside from Vanguard). I think the closest today is maybe Project Gorgon, but it applies a lot of features from many types of MMOs as well as the conveniences.

See, a lot of the things that people think are bad design, are what made EQ good and they don't exist in these games. Even when Pantheon was being made, people who didn't invest kept coming in and claiming all the things EQ was had to be removed because it was bad design. All of their suggestions existed in the modern games, but they couldn't explain why they weren't off playing those?

Every time I see a new project being made and they say "old school", it really doesn't have much of what made those games "old school". They just look "old", but have a lot of modern style feature conveniences hidden by "old" interfaces and look or its some type of PvP "all" loot fest and its called "old school".

Thing is those "massive" MMOs like EQ were really just a bunch of servers with a certain amount on them. From a players perspective, the concept of 100's of thousands of players was never really a thing. For instance, on EQ Test during release, there was roughly around 800-1k that played, and only part of that was on at a given time. It was fairly sparse, but still had a solid amount of people to group with. Production servers might have 2-5k or so (roughly), again not all on at the same time, and they were fairly crowded with sometimes being way too crowded.

Point is, massive is meaningless. If you had a game with 2-3 servers (or more depending on need) and your population was around 10k total of subs, that would be a pretty successful game and that is not unreasonable to achieve if you hit the right focus of play.

Sub + expansions is the only way to go in this case. Those who complain about a sub aren't going to keep your game going. Mainstream complains, then leaves anyway. LotRO started out well, but then began to cater to the modern WoW crowd in terms of design and then they started to gimmick with modern conveniences and the game died. EQ screwed itself because it catered strictly to raiders from PoP on and it lost the grouping crowd. WoW picked them up, but then started to cater to the convenience and raid crowd, killing the group game (this began with Tigole and Furor pushing large raid design while at the same time Blizzard started making the game "easier" for casuals in terms of leveling, group content, etc...). I played off an on up to WotLK, and while I thought some things were interesting, they had turned the game into speed dungeon runs and a lot of gimmicky play. Old school slow dungeon crawls, long fight encounters, etc... didn't exist.

A lot of what EQ was, no longer exists in really any form out there. It hasn't be tried, because everyone "Claims" it is bad design, yet... people like me who loved the game measures all games to it, and all come up short.

Like I said, even if they released the game on time, they changed their directions so much, went away from what made EQ and games like Vanguard fun to play, so it would have been popular for a bit, then died as well.

Maybe it is just a different era for me, but I do not share the same opinions on game play as many people today as it concerns MMOs and there are a lot out there that think like I do. That is who supported Pantheon, and that is what Pantheon "claimed" it was going to provide... It didn't, not because the concept would fail, but because nobody has ever done it again.

[Anon]

Depends on the game. None of them are like EQ though and no games have been made that come close (aside from Vanguard). I think the closest today is maybe Project Gorgon, but it applies a lot of features from many types of MMOs as well as the conveniences.

You're only reinforcing my point by mentioning Project Gorgon.

You're inversing cause and consequence. At launch Gorgon didn't have any convenience shit, only box price. But this monetization wasn't enough to keep up with expenses so they were forced into more obnoxious methods.

See, a lot of the things that people think are bad design, are what made EQ good and they don't exist in these games. Even when Pantheon was being made, people who didn't invest kept coming in and claiming all the things EQ was had to be removed because it was bad design. All of their suggestions existed in the modern games, but they couldn't explain why they weren't off playing those?

Every time I see a new project being made and they say "old school", it really doesn't have much of what made those games "old school". They just look "old", but have a lot of modern style feature conveniences hidden by "old" interfaces and look or its some type of PvP "all" loot fest and its called "old school".

Thing is those "massive" MMOs like EQ were really just a bunch of servers with a certain amount on them. From a players perspective, the concept of 100's of thousands of players was never really a thing. For instance, on EQ Test during release, there was roughly around 800-1k that played, and only part of that was on at a given time. It was fairly sparse, but still had a solid amount of people to group with. Production servers might have 2-5k or so (roughly), again not all on at the same time, and they were fairly crowded with sometimes being way too crowded.

Point is, massive is meaningless. If you had a game with 2-3 servers (or more depending on need) and your population was around 10k total of subs, that would be a pretty successful game and that is not unreasonable to achieve if you hit the right focus of play.

Your points make sense and are plausible. But again, you fail to mention me a successful game that follows this model you're suggesting nowadays.

It's even like there was a reason for games to "evolve" to modern convenience standards... A lot of people (not saying about you or me) keep talking about how they crave for oldschool RPG and mechanics, but when facing a truly oldschool experience they miss all the convenience and QoL and go back to modern games. The fact is that we are a small minority, so small that nobody would want to invest in our niche to produce an authentic EQ-like MMO.

I have good reason to remain skeptical.

Sub + expansions is the only way to go in this case. Those who complain about a sub aren't going to keep your game going. Mainstream complains, then leaves anyway. LotRO started out well, but then began to cater to the modern WoW crowd in terms of design and then they started to gimmick with modern conveniences and the game died. EQ screwed itself because it catered strictly to raiders from PoP on and it lost the grouping crowd. WoW picked them up, but then started to cater to the convenience and raid crowd, killing the group game (this began with Tigole and Furor pushing large raid design while at the same time Blizzard started making the game "easier" for casuals in terms of leveling, group content, etc...). I played off an on up to WotLK, and while I thought some things were interesting, they had turned the game into speed dungeon runs and a lot of gimmicky play. Old school slow dungeon crawls, long fight encounters, etc... didn't exist.

Issue with LOTRO and DDO is that their developers always intended to make the game a pure milking cow. It was all just bait and switch, those games were never meant to be perene authentic oldschool MMORPGs.

[Xenich]

Depends on the game. None of them are like EQ though and no games have been made that come close (aside from Vanguard). I think the closest today is maybe Project Gorgon, but it applies a lot of features from many types of MMOs as well as the conveniences.

You're only reinforcing my point by mentioning Project Gorgon.

You're inversing cause and consequence. At launch Gorgon didn't have any convenience shit, only box price. But this monetization wasn't enough to keep up with expenses so they were forced into more obnoxious methods.

Here is the thing, I haven't played it extensively, only very briefly in beta and I didn't spend enough time to go into the mechanics in detail. It had similar combat to EQ and "appeared" to be as such, but... after looking over the wiki on the game, it is really not "old school" at all currently. All of the concepts and features I am talking about don't exist in it. For instance, dying, they may have changed things, but it has no real naked corpse runs, not even on "hardcore" mode. Did this exist before?

Also, as I said it isn't a single negative mechanic that made EQ what it was, it was the culmination of them. Not only did you have to run naked to recover your corpse, but you had huge zones where it was easy to get lost, that took a long time to travel (and were often dangerous with large agro ranges of wide range of levels of mobs) and your "bind" points were greatly limited (unless you were a caster, which had its own drawbacks as well). Run speed for most classes without the spells would not be enough to escape a mob if it agrod you.

Mobs also took a very long time to kill, and hit very hard which meant tanking mobs without a healer was VERY difficult.

Add in exp loss being significant AND you could actually de-level and the world got very dangerous. It was never a single feature, it was the layers of them that worked together to create that sense of play. No game has ever recreated that because none apply those layers, they always put in various "changes" due to perception that they were bad mechanics while claiming they are applying "old school" play.

So, Project Gorgon doesn't even fit that bill. No game has ever attempted to recreate EQ really looking at WHY it was an addictive game. Most chase features of play they enjoyed, but rarely accept that it was the things they "hated" that actually made the game what it was.

Basically, it is the concept of cheating a game and ruining it for yourself. I learned that lesson a long time ago when I would "modify" a game convincing myself that by doing so, I was tailoring it to be a better game without the stuff that made it a drag, but then... I noticed the game soon lost my interest. This is the point. It is integral to the play, and yes... it is a hardship, a pain in the rear, etc... but it is needed to make the risk real. No games do this anymore.

See, a lot of the things that people think are bad design, are what made EQ good and they don't exist in these games. Even when Pantheon was being made, people who didn't invest kept coming in and claiming all the things EQ was had to be removed because it was bad design. All of their suggestions existed in the modern games, but they couldn't explain why they weren't off playing those?

Every time I see a new project being made and they say "old school", it really doesn't have much of what made those games "old school". They just look "old", but have a lot of modern style feature conveniences hidden by "old" interfaces and look or its some type of PvP "all" loot fest and its called "old school".

Thing is those "massive" MMOs like EQ were really just a bunch of servers with a certain amount on them. From a players perspective, the concept of 100's of thousands of players was never really a thing. For instance, on EQ Test during release, there was roughly around 800-1k that played, and only part of that was on at a given time. It was fairly sparse, but still had a solid amount of people to group with. Production servers might have 2-5k or so (roughly), again not all on at the same time, and they were fairly crowded with sometimes being way too crowded.

Point is, massive is meaningless. If you had a game with 2-3 servers (or more depending on need) and your population was around 10k total of subs, that would be a pretty successful game and that is not unreasonable to achieve if you hit the right focus of play.

Your points make sense and are plausible. But again, you fail to mention me a successful game that follows this model you're suggesting nowadays.

It's even like there was a reason for games to "evolve" to modern convenience standards... A lot of people (not saying about you or me) keep talking about how they crave for oldschool RPG and mechanics, but when facing a truly oldschool experience they miss all the convenience and QoL and go back to modern games. The fact is that we are a small minority, so small that nobody would want to invest in our niche to produce an authentic EQ-like MMO.

I have good reason to remain skeptical.

Of course, people love the convenience in the moment. Nobody says "Man, I really like spending hours wasting my time recovering a corpse, Oh I sooo love doing that" It sucks, it is a pain, but... it makes the world risky, ie Risk vs Reward. It makes you think twice about being stupid. It makes you worry with anticipation as you sneak through an area that you may end up dying and then have a huge amount of time to spend recovering your corpse.

On the flip side, it makes you jump for joy and get really excited if you beat the odds in a risky gamble (such as invising deep into a dungeon and camping or hours to get a rare mob and by the skin of your teeth, you end up killing it and getting that item you had been trying for months to get).

It may suck to have to run for 45 mins, take a 30 min boat ride, and another 20-30 min run, then head to a dungeon that takes another hour or so to clear of trash just to get to a camp spot and find out that the rare hasn't popped, and you have to wait 1 of many 20-30 min spawn cycles to get the named, and then maybe more to get him to drop the item you want all the while trying to keep a group interested in the same thing so that you can.

On the flip side, if you worked well to find good people to group with, were skilled in playing your class, helpful to others to obtain things they needed, and planned accordingly with your group, you might have setup a time in the future to meet at that spot and work to group that remote area where most people didn't go because it was such a pain to go there, which resulted in you actually getting an item that most didn't have because the zone was hard and unforgiving and out in the middle of nowhere.

Again, nobody says they "want" that stuff itself, but few realize it is those "pains" that provided the rewarding aspect of play. Hence a lot of modern gamers who act like clueless clients asking for something, but never really understanding what it is they truly want because they only calculate their play in simplistic evaluations of "fun/not fun" and think simply removing the "not fun" will result in a great game.

It is the old concept of software design. You don't give your client what they want, you give them what they need (not saying some don't know what they want, but a lot do not, hence the importance of developing proper requirements when you build something that isn't based on what a client says, but what they truly require, what that need translates to). This is why development styles like Agile are such garbage.

Sub + expansions is the only way to go in this case. Those who complain about a sub aren't going to keep your game going. Mainstream complains, then leaves anyway. LotRO started out well, but then began to cater to the modern WoW crowd in terms of design and then they started to gimmick with modern conveniences and the game died. EQ screwed itself because it catered strictly to raiders from PoP on and it lost the grouping crowd. WoW picked them up, but then started to cater to the convenience and raid crowd, killing the group game (this began with Tigole and Furor pushing large raid design while at the same time Blizzard started making the game "easier" for casuals in terms of leveling, group content, etc...). I played off an on up to WotLK, and while I thought some things were interesting, they had turned the game into speed dungeon runs and a lot of gimmicky play. Old school slow dungeon crawls, long fight encounters, etc... didn't exist.

Issue with LOTRO and DDO is that their developers always intended to make the game a pure milking cow. It was all just bait and switch, those games were never meant to be perene authentic oldschool MMORPGs.

Maybe so, but I was in early alpha for it and I can tell you development focus changed around open beta when the WoW crowd came in and started demanding modern convenience changes and features. They slowly began to appeal to them, wasting time on PVP crap when it was never part of the focus and making changes to mechanics because people whined and complained about dungeons being too long, too hard, and classes were not "balanced" in the way like they were in WoW. They complained about skills being "too clunky" because they weren't spam reactive like modern games (Skills fired between combat swings, so you had to pay attention and time your abilities for such). Progression was slow, death was harsh, and exploration was very risky.

The WoW crowd kept throwing tantrums all through open beta, then on release, they all disappeared leaving only the original fans with a game design direction attended to a crowd that had no intentions of playing the game anyway.

Now that was part of it, their business model was stupid as well (life time subs are fast money, but short thinking) and so a lot of the core supporters bought the life subs and the rest moved out, leaving no consistent income for in-between expansion costs.

A lot of their really scam like behavior came much later after the company had issues, got bought out, changed leadership, etc... and then you got the microtransactions, complete clustered development focus, etc... Moria was around that time, and you could tell the game had two different design approaches as the transition took place.

I don't think it was that from the start, I was there, it never had mainstream focus fully until those change of hands.

[Xenich]

What is funny is WoW originally was one of the first attempts at "fixing" the supposed "EQ problems" of play. They were subtle though, slowly removing the risks with each implementation. Corpse runs still required the hassle of running back to your corpse, but the risk of doing it naked and being attacked was removed. Travel time was still fairly long initially, but once you found the flight paths, risk of travel and time were greatly reduced. Mob agro and risk was removed with the tether system and general speed allowances above mob speed easier accessed, leaving people to run risk free through many areas because they knew if they got far enough, there was no danger.

The list goes on, but... initially it removed the hassles people had with EQ, making it more... friendly to the casual player. It kept a fair amount of the group based dungeon difficulties in terms of time to clear and complete, but... over time this even changed focus... where the difficulty in the game was placed strictly on raiding, and not endurance based as early MC and the like were, but "hit your buttons fast, DPS it down, jump this hoop timing quickly, etc..." and eventually that changed as well where dungeons and raids were simply AOE quickly to an end boss, kill it in 10 mins or less and then repeat. I liked WotLK, but for craps sake, it was retarded how you could run near every dungeon in a single night for the expansion.