Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Meaning there will be so many quests you don't have to do them all to quest-grind your way to max level!

gogojira_sl said:

Don't hurt my heart like that!

Click to expand...

Brad does not have - and will not get - the money or man power to build a quest grind game. It's a case of where lack of resources actually helps - kind of like how starving a flat worm increases its life expectancy by 30%.

Neki_sl said:

Hard to get excited over something so far away

Click to expand...

Try and remember being 12 and knowing about pussy.

gogojira_sl said:

I'll say this (and I know being friendly and creating an awesome game are two different things), but the couple of Pantheon devs I've interacted with seem like pretty cool dudes. Eventually we'll see the results of their efforts, but they damn sure have it in mind to create the game I've been crying about for too long.

Click to expand...

They need a lot more people even if they're just aiming for EQ Vanilla sized. Everquest had 50 or so people on the team.

I wish there was a way to crowdsource some of the art or design but there isn't AFAIK. I don't think Player Studio is going to work for a place as small as NewCo.

Drakurii_sl said:

Try and remember being 12 and knowing about pussy.

Click to expand...

I Lol'd.

gogojira_sl said:

I imagine advancements in modern tech could reduce the required workload to recreate a continent that size, but I'm not a programmer so I won't go crazy with that argument. It does feed right into something Brad mentioned in this thread with Unity, however.

Click to expand...

That's what I'm told by the one guy who I know IRL who actually works in the industry. He insists that you could re-create Original EQ for 3 or 4 million today - zones, warts and all. But of course today they've got to have better art, particularly better character art and animation.

zzeris_sl said:

Because a small game funded through crowd support is definitely going to have the resources to have lots of specific classes while having all the time in the world to debug, create content, and make sure to have the exact features wanted on a small fansite....

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure they're crowdsourcing the debugging - thus the 'long beta' comment ;-)

popsicledeath_sl said:

Meaning there will be so many quests you don't have to do them all to quest-grind your way to max level!

Click to expand...

No.

There will be fewer quests. Quality over quantity. Think vanilla EQ not VG where you go from quest hub to quest hub. Probably won't be quest hubs. The fewer quests will be long involved and fun. They should yield a great reward. But you don't have to do them to advance your character.

tad10_sl said:

That's what I'm told by the one guy who I know IRL who actually works in the industry. He insists that you could re-create Original EQ for 3 or 4 million today - zones, warts and all. But of course today they've got to have better art, particularly better character art and animation.

Click to expand...

Quite possible. EQ was done in 3 years for around $8M. March 96 thru March 99. We peaked with about 23 people but most of the time had fewer than that. The tech was primitive by today's standards. The tools probably wouldn't even be called tools today. And the people? We were clueless but determined

Aradune_sl said:

No.

There will be fewer quests. Quality over quantity. Think vanilla EQ not VG where you go from quest hub to quest hub. Probably won't be quest hubs. The fewer quests will be long involved and fun. They should yield a great reward. But you don't have to do them to advance your character.

Click to expand...

Good shit, I'm looking forward to hearing more about progression then. EQ style grinding or do you have something else in mind?

Flobee_sl said:

Good shit, I'm looking forward to hearing more about progression then. EQ style grinding or do you have something else in mind?

Click to expand...

We have some 'modern' ideas, one of which I really like. But I'm not going to get into it until we have it implemented in-game so we can really try it out. If we don't end up liking it, there's plenty of tried and true mechanics we can fall back on.

Furry_sl said:

I think eq style grinding is dead for good. That said, I would rather see that than quest hubs. Theres definitely room for new ideas. GW2 and Rift both had new systems that were cool changes from the quest hub grind. I'd like to see something completely new, but I have no idea what that would even be. The mmo genre has gotten quite stale, so any change is good change imo.

Click to expand...

Agreed, will be interesting to see what direction is taken. Grinding can be fun, but a different system that breadcrumbs you to progression is an interesting thing to speculate on. There is a ton of room for creativity there. An easy example would be the way minecraft does progression. It is never explicitly laid out that you should work towards diamond gear or whatever but the progression is natural, and happens while you pursue whatever goal you are chasing.

Aradune_sl said:

We have some 'modern' ideas, one of which I really like. But I'm not going to get into it until we have it implemented in-game so we can really try it out. If we don't end up liking it, there's plenty of tried and true mechanics we can fall back on.

Click to expand...

Good to hear. Good luck to ya, I'll be keeping an eye on your progress

Aradune_sl said:

No.

There will be fewer quests. Quality over quantity. Think vanilla EQ not VG where you go from quest hub to quest hub. Probably won't be quest hubs. The fewer quests will be long involved and fun. They should yield a great reward. But you don't have to do them to advance your character.

Click to expand...

I'm glad that you're straying away from questing as implemented in vanguard. I'd really like to see a game with no quest trackers and a limited number of seriously complex quests.

However, I was hoping for a system where quests are an important, if not central, part of character advancement. Each class could have a baseline set of skills that requires little effort to obtain (ie, vendor spells in EQ), but character development (and differentiation) is achieved through completing various quests (some of which are class-specific) which provide special skills (or innate attributes or items with clickies, etc).

This achieves two goals:
1) character advancement that is somewhat integrated with the story (rewards players who immerse themselves in the world rather than farming the "game")
2) provides the opportunity for character differentiation. I'm envisioning quests which reward players with skills that substantially alter how they play their class (possibly with disadvantages as well as advantages, a la keystone passives in path of exile).

I really want to emphasize the importance of integrating the systems for gameplay (ie, how a player is encouraged, via advancement, to actually spend his time playing the game) with the world and lore of the game. If you want to create an innovative MMO, this should be your goal. Consider what motivates a player to continue logging on. For pretty much all games, it's typically either character advancement (predominant motivation for most MMORPGs) or theory-crafting the best way to play a class given certain constraints (see path of exile--a lot of the hook for that game is rerolling and trying to come up with builds and combinations of skills you can use to make a good character). A decent game should motivate players with both of these mechanisms. But on their own, these motivations to keep a player going are void and meaningless. Eventually you realize that grinding isn't fun unless it's a means to an end, and typically that end is just more grinding. similarly, eventually you realize that there's no point to developing yet another new and interesting build without each build having it's own gamelore feel.

If you want players to feel like they're becoming their character, it's not enough to have a lore-based class description at the start of the game. You need to actively force players to realize what it means to be a warrior, or a rogue, or a bard, etc through the way they have to play the game in order to advance. Imagine your roll as a game designer is being a dungeon master where you create scenarios appropriate to your characters which provides them opportunities to simultaneously advance their character story and their character's power.

Advancing a character's power needs to be synonymous with advancing the character's story--character advancement shoudl force the player to "think" in the context of game story--"if I destroy the necromancer killing people to use their bodies I can claim his power as my own, but now I too must harvest the corpses of the living". compare with: "if I kill enough mobs then I'll level up and get a new skill point which will allow me to spec into necromancy." Which one of these creates a more enthralling game? Especially if nobody tells you that you can become a necromancer and you only find it out via exploration (compare to: i can see that i can become a necromance because it's right here on my skill tree).

It would take more work to develop a quest-based character advancement system, and you mustn't sacrifice fun combat and deep gameplay for better integration between quests and character advancement. Maybe an approach to implement this system would be to start with "traditional" skill system (with choices) in alpha. as you develop quests for corresponding spells, move them out of the class trainer inventories.

Anyway, think about it. Whatever you do to make a good game, it won't feel like a gameworld unless you try to merge how a player is motivated to play with the lore.