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

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Trakanon Raider
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Animations look a little better but are still far from great and the game looks dated already. This game has zero personality stamped on it by VR, they just seem to be trying to be generic MMO/RPG 1001 and adding no visual flair/unique design from their artists.

It's all very unoriginal, really they need to be taking some risks to stand out from the crowd.

Always interesting to me that with 15 years of WoW clones behind us, that an open-world group-based social MMO is unoriginal, generic, and not standing out from the crowd. Ok.

Also graphics - what is missing - does it not have enough cat-suits, shoulderpads, and overly gratuitous particles on every bit of trash gear? I mean, we're talking a crowd-funded indie MMO built on a tight budget, not an AAA title from a major publisher with a marketing budget alone the size of Texas pushing it to the masses and a team of engineers from Nvidia working to optimize their shaders/etc for a tie-in. Frankly, the graphics are better than expected for a pre-alpha indie open world mmorpg.
 
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KoahLei

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Always interesting to me that with 15 years of WoW clones behind us, that an open-world group-based social MMO is unoriginal, generic, and not standing out from the crowd. Ok.

Also graphics - what is missing - does it not have enough cat-suits, shoulderpads, and overly gratuitous particles on every bit of trash gear? I mean, we're talking a crowd-funded indie MMO built on a tight budget, not an AAA title from a major publisher with a marketing budget alone the size of Texas pushing it to the masses and a team of engineers from Nvidia working to optimize their shaders/etc for a tie-in. Frankly, the graphics are better than expected for a pre-alpha indie open world mmorpg.
Woah man, calm down. Reason isnt allowed here.
 
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Nirgon

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We're going to turn this from the largest World of Warcraft community into the largest Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen community.
 
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dizzie

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Always interesting to me that with 15 years of WoW clones behind us, that an open-world group-based social MMO is unoriginal, generic, and not standing out from the crowd. Ok.

Also graphics - what is missing - does it not have enough cat-suits, shoulderpads, and overly gratuitous particles on every bit of trash gear? I mean, we're talking a crowd-funded indie MMO built on a tight budget, not an AAA title from a major publisher with a marketing budget alone the size of Texas pushing it to the masses and a team of engineers from Nvidia working to optimize their shaders/etc for a tie-in. Frankly, the graphics are better than expected for a pre-alpha indie open world mmorpg.

You don't need a massive budget to be creative, just talent. Nobody here is expecting a photorealistic next gen MMO from VR, but what they have done is pretty unimaginative and dull so far. They were probably forced into this corner because they decided on using shitty Unity assets from the get go and when you use those generic shitty assets you have to build the rest of the art direction around them making the rest of your game look like a generic shitty game. You must have had an incredibly low bar to begin with if "the graphics are better than expected" in 2021.

They've had nearly 8 years and millions of dollars to work on this type of thing, yet here we are. This is nothing more than a few people grifting retards for dollars to keep them employed at this point.
 
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Metalhead

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Always interesting to me that with 15 years of WoW clones behind us, that an open-world group-based social MMO is unoriginal, generic, and not standing out from the crowd. Ok.

Also graphics - what is missing - does it not have enough cat-suits, shoulderpads, and overly gratuitous particles on every bit of trash gear? I mean, we're talking a crowd-funded indie MMO built on a tight budget, not an AAA title from a major publisher with a marketing budget alone the size of Texas pushing it to the masses and a team of engineers from Nvidia working to optimize their shaders/etc for a tie-in. Frankly, the graphics are better than expected for a pre-alpha indie open world mmorpg.
5cax7r.jpg
 
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First

Trakanon Raider
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You don't need a massive budget to be creative, just talent. Nobody here is expecting a photorealistic next gen MMO from VR, but what they have done is pretty unimaginative and dull so far. They were probably forced into this corner because they decided on using shitty Unity assets from the get go and when you use those generic shitty assets you have to build the rest of the art direction around them making the rest of your game look like a generic shitty game. You must have had an incredibly low bar to begin with if "the graphics are better than expected" in 2021.

They've had nearly 8 years and millions of dollars to work on this type of thing, yet here we are. This is nothing more than a few people grifting retards for dollars to keep them employed at this point.

The first part of your response is pretty reasonable to me - you don't like the art direction (or apparently lack-there-of) that they've shown so far. That's an opinion - nothing wrong with having a different one, and I'll agree that parts can come across as bland. I guess I am of mixed feelings on that being consequential. For one, RL can be pretty bland - I mean, the actual medieval times most fantasy rpgs are based on were pretty drab and boring - so maybe that influences my own evaluation. Even in a fantasy world I don't expect every area to be totally alien and amazing. I just sorta expect different biomes and cultures. Epic gear to be epic. I hate cosmetic shops since it takes away from all of that. The elf area is pretty decent looking, and yeah, the human area just comes across as stock fantasy. The actual character races don't look too bad though, and they've actually done a pretty decent job IMO of having some more unique races without making them utterly silly (ie cat people or pandas) or alien. Out of curiosity though, do you have a few example indie/non-AAA MMO's with art direction that you think is imaginative and non-dull? What pops in my mind for categories is usually older/retro (Project Gorgon is one of the more modern examples of this), Japanese/Korean fantastical RPGish, more realistic, or cartoonish (WoW, Wildstar, etc).

I disagree somewhat on the Unity asset comment but I can see how you could come to that conclusion. Brad did apparently originally think when starting VR & Pantheon that you could build a mmo faster & cheaper based on the unity store in part. That isn't necessarily as unreasonable of a thought then as it appears to be now - after all, there are plenty of games, including a few smaller mmo's (more hobbyist I'll admit) built using these assets - and the idea is pretty tantalizing given the usual amount of resources it takes to build a MMO. I mean, it's not like all of the assets are bad in the store - some are pretty decent. I don't think that really influenced their art design necessarily though. They have a TON of concept art out there - even as far back as the Kickstarter - that concept art is instructive. The art direction comes across as actually really just a continuation of the lineage of MMO's they've worked on in the past - EQ, Vanguard, etc. It's pretty much the same style. Which fits in the more realistic fantasy category I mentioned up above. That matched much of the Unity assets we've seen in the game - largely from the human area of the game and is within the realistic graphics category - so it makes sense they'd use them heavily in that area. There are other areas of the game shown that don't come across as human realm-boring, but are still realistic in style. The raid zone from the video, the elf area, the halfling area, etc for example.

I'm a MMORPG player - I probably do have a low bar for MMO's - and Indie studios in general. I'd rather the gameplay be there and while better graphics is always nice, they just need to be serviceable. I've enjoyed playing Project Gorgon and EQ TLP servers and can enjoy them just fine without QQing over the eye candy. I also enjoy great graphics - I've finally picked up Cyberpunk on sale and just started playing it - definitely some nice stuff, especially when RT is on. I've played plenty of games with great graphics that were shitty games, and I've played plenty of games with bad-mediocre graphics that were great games. I mean, I can make all sorts of RL analogies too, so why should I shit all over an indie mmo - or any game - just based on looks?

I also take issue with your last comment in part. It's been 7 years since the failed Kickstarter - I mean, it was a game concept that was drafted around a table in a garage, was shut down, restarted as a volunteer hobbyist MMO, then started picking up funding and then hires, etc to where it is now. No denying the tortured history of it or that there's controversy around Brad's management/ownership in certain aspects, but how do you get to outright "grifting retards for dollars"? They need money to make the game, and they've clearly built a MMO game client capable of supporting testers in 30hr sessions at least. What are you either basing that conclusion on or comparing it the game to in order to reach that conclusion? I mean, the history of non-AAA indie crowdfunded MMO's is pretty wretched. They're hardly unique in having tortured development histories, missing goals, controversies, etc. Here's some examples -

Crowfall has been in development for 8 years also - it's had almost $40million dumped into it, and it's worth noting that the payroll (per their covid loan filing) is like $5-7 million a year alone. Their beta timeline said Beta2 was due 5 years ago with a launch in late 2016. It had raised $13million as of 2017. It's launching next month, minus a ton of promised content, and their own announcement on their forums has alot of concern posts in it from their own testers.

Albion - They had a pre-existing company with shipped titles and an office (that alone is huge), a team of 12 (presumably FT) at the start (18 it looks like heading into alpha, and 60 by launch). Wasn't even their idea for the game - they won the bid for the game's concept along with the investor's large seed funding that went along with the concept in 2012. As a timeline, it entered early alpha in like Spring 2014, closed beta in Nov 2015, final (open) beta in Aug 2016, launched July 2017, and launched on steam in May 2018. Of note, on 4/13/15 they were aiming for a "early-mid 2016" release. They missed goals and took awhile to ship the game despite their startup advantages. They didn't buy DDoS protection for launch - lulz. Worth noting there's some good arguments to be made that it was still really in beta or at least not polished like a released title until the Lancelot update in March of 2018. It didn't get a tutorial until March of 2019 fwiw.

AoC - They're approaching 6 years of working on the game. The owner has a history that includes MLMs & Real Estate - of some mild concern in the crowdfunded MMO world potentially, but at least they had a pretty massive initial bit of funding. They've currently got about the same headcount as ArtCraft does, so presumably around the same payroll (although they're planning to double in size). They're literally cranking out monthly cosmetic sets (ala Star Citizen ships) for purchase. They just lost their lead dev, they delayed their NDA unmasking, they started a full combat revamp (that is way behind schedule) in March after years of showing off their combat, their Alpha1 list is somewhat thin if you drill down. They're also promising the world, but hey, the graphics I see do look pretty good. Did I mention tons of delays? Noticing a pattern here? Well I guess they did launch a poorly received no-population stand-alone game as a side detour.

Project Gorgon - Now 8 years in development. They do have more people working on it now than just the H&W team, but had a small KS/Indiegogo and other low level funding - probably closer to Pantheon than Albion/AoC/Crowfall in terms of funding/start-up profile. Fairly fun game with some neat skill & crafting mechanics, totally group-based, apparently total crap if you like eye candy though? No real ETA on launch to my knowledge, but they keep adding stuff slowly and patching.

CoE - In development for about 6.5yrs. Actually doesn't look like a pure scam to me, more just complete incompetence with no real clue about how hard it is to actually make a MMO. At least up until the land rush cash grab & the studio "closing". Since then it could be bad, or it could just be the guy taking his lawyer's advice? Who knows, for all practical purposes, this was actual vaporware. They hoovered up almost $10million in gaming dollars and produced a single player parkour room as their only bit of player-accessible alpha content.

Star Citizen - For fun, let's toss this one in. Development started 11 years ago. They've raised over $350 million. There's an arms length list of controversies, including a full engine change, lawsuits, and sooo many missed deadlines & feature bloats. We might be getting the single player a-la Wing Commander Squadron 42 though sometime soon?

Pantheon - A failed Kickstarter and low levels of crowdfunding after that for a long time. Apparently put enough together (in terms of game presentation & employees) in the 2016 & 2017 timeframe to start earning more crowdfunding. Languished in Pre-Alpha since, but apparently pretty much recoded the entire game in the last 18 months. Unlike CoE they have had actual testers in the game, had public streams - including with community streamers doing their own thing in pre-alpha. They are clearly not vaporware and development, however slow, continues to demonstrate actual progress from time to time. I mean, they do have a ton of pre-alpha donors and there's not really been an evidence of mass revolts there, so take from that what you will about what players with a closer perspective think. They haven't discussed it, but there's also good reason to believe their funding has been lower than almost every other game on this list other than Project Gorgon (potentially in the same realm as CoE). Why is that important? Well, if games with 4x+ better funding are having the same issues, then why is Pantheon some sort of special shit unicorn? No, they're pretty much on-par with the rest of the crowdfunded MMO scene, but it is notable that they aren't selling armor sets every month like AoC (or ships like Star Citizen), selling land & titles in game like CoE did, selling VIP subs while in testing like Project Gorgon, etc. I mean, if Pantheon was some sort of grift - why aren't they at least doing the same sort of (fairly normal) fundraising as the rest? The cognitive dissonance on this fact alone amazes me at times.

Take all the issues you want with the tortured development and glacial progress - because that is 100% valid. You're also entitled to your own opinion on the graphics being bland or such, but the rest just seems inaccurate to me. I mean, game development can be a real tortured shit-show - that's why most games aren't really talked about until a studio is good and ready. There's a real history of issues with MMO development even before all of these games - I mean, several had the plug pulled before the public got much of a glimpse - anyone remember the history behind Titan, Wish, or The Agency? Crowdfunded indie MMO's give people a much closer seat to how messy game development can be - combined with the pressures & issues involving crowdfunding cash raising & cash flows in general. All of the games I listed have a very lengthy development history, majorly missed dates, most have plenty of controversies (some have lawsuits), etc. Pantheon is hardly unique with it's history or issues. Always interesting to me that it has a 2k+ page thread here, but those other games' threads have barely a nod to those sort of issues. The gifs are hilarious, and this thread is a pretty epic repository of them, but still quite the disparity of angst on this forum.
 
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Blitz

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The first part of your response is pretty reasonable to me - you don't like the art direction (or apparently lack-there-of) that they've shown so far. That's an opinion - nothing wrong with having a different one, and I'll agree that parts can come across as bland. I guess I am of mixed feelings on that being consequential. For one, RL can be pretty bland - I mean, the actual medieval times most fantasy rpgs are based on were pretty drab and boring - so maybe that influences my own evaluation. Even in a fantasy world I don't expect every area to be totally alien and amazing. I just sorta expect different biomes and cultures. Epic gear to be epic. I hate cosmetic shops since it takes away from all of that. The elf area is pretty decent looking, and yeah, the human area just comes across as stock fantasy. The actual character races don't look too bad though, and they've actually done a pretty decent job IMO of having some more unique races without making them utterly silly (ie cat people or pandas) or alien. Out of curiosity though, do you have a few example indie/non-AAA MMO's with art direction that you think is imaginative and non-dull? What pops in my mind for categories is usually older/retro (Project Gorgon is one of the more modern examples of this), Japanese/Korean fantastical RPGish, more realistic, or cartoonish (WoW, Wildstar, etc).

I disagree somewhat on the Unity asset comment but I can see how you could come to that conclusion. Brad did apparently originally think when starting VR & Pantheon that you could build a mmo faster & cheaper based on the unity store in part. That isn't necessarily as unreasonable of a thought then as it appears to be now - after all, there are plenty of games, including a few smaller mmo's (more hobbyist I'll admit) built using these assets - and the idea is pretty tantalizing given the usual amount of resources it takes to build a MMO. I mean, it's not like all of the assets are bad in the store - some are pretty decent. I don't think that really influenced their art design necessarily though. They have a TON of concept art out there - even as far back as the Kickstarter - that concept art is instructive. The art direction comes across as actually really just a continuation of the lineage of MMO's they've worked on in the past - EQ, Vanguard, etc. It's pretty much the same style. Which fits in the more realistic fantasy category I mentioned up above. That matched much of the Unity assets we've seen in the game - largely from the human area of the game and is within the realistic graphics category - so it makes sense they'd use them heavily in that area. There are other areas of the game shown that don't come across as human realm-boring, but are still realistic in style. The raid zone from the video, the elf area, the halfling area, etc for example.

I'm a MMORPG player - I probably do have a low bar for MMO's - and Indie studios in general. I'd rather the gameplay be there and while better graphics is always nice, they just need to be serviceable. I've enjoyed playing Project Gorgon and EQ TLP servers and can enjoy them just fine without QQing over the eye candy. I also enjoy great graphics - I've finally picked up Cyberpunk on sale and just started playing it - definitely some nice stuff, especially when RT is on. I've played plenty of games with great graphics that were shitty games, and I've played plenty of games with bad-mediocre graphics that were great games. I mean, I can make all sorts of RL analogies too, so why should I shit all over an indie mmo - or any game - just based on looks?

I also take issue with your last comment in part. It's been 7 years since the failed Kickstarter - I mean, it was a game concept that was drafted around a table in a garage, was shut down, restarted as a volunteer hobbyist MMO, then started picking up funding and then hires, etc to where it is now. No denying the tortured history of it or that there's controversy around Brad's management/ownership in certain aspects, but how do you get to outright "grifting retards for dollars"? They need money to make the game, and they've clearly built a MMO game client capable of supporting testers in 30hr sessions at least. What are you either basing that conclusion on or comparing it the game to in order to reach that conclusion? I mean, the history of non-AAA indie crowdfunded MMO's is pretty wretched. They're hardly unique in having tortured development histories, missing goals, controversies, etc. Here's some examples -

Crowfall has been in development for 8 years also - it's had almost $40million dumped into it, and it's worth noting that the payroll (per their covid loan filing) is like $5-7 million a year alone. Their beta timeline said Beta2 was due 5 years ago with a launch in late 2016. It had raised $13million as of 2017. It's launching next month, minus a ton of promised content, and their own announcement on their forums has alot of concern posts in it from their own testers.

Albion - They had a pre-existing company with shipped titles and an office (that alone is huge), a team of 12 (presumably FT) at the start (18 it looks like heading into alpha, and 60 by launch). Wasn't even their idea for the game - they won the bid for the game's concept along with the investor's large seed funding that went along with the concept in 2012. As a timeline, it entered early alpha in like Spring 2014, closed beta in Nov 2015, final (open) beta in Aug 2016, launched July 2017, and launched on steam in May 2018. Of note, on 4/13/15 they were aiming for a "early-mid 2016" release. They missed goals and took awhile to ship the game despite their startup advantages. They didn't buy DDoS protection for launch - lulz. Worth noting there's some good arguments to be made that it was still really in beta or at least not polished like a released title until the Lancelot update in March of 2018. It didn't get a tutorial until March of 2019 fwiw.

AoC - They're approaching 6 years of working on the game. The owner has a history that includes MLMs & Real Estate - of some mild concern in the crowdfunded MMO world potentially, but at least they had a pretty massive initial bit of funding. They've currently got about the same headcount as ArtCraft does, so presumably around the same payroll (although they're planning to double in size). They're literally cranking out monthly cosmetic sets (ala Star Citizen ships) for purchase. They just lost their lead dev, they delayed their NDA unmasking, they started a full combat revamp (that is way behind schedule) in March after years of showing off their combat, their Alpha1 list is somewhat thin if you drill down. They're also promising the world, but hey, the graphics I see do look pretty good. Did I mention tons of delays? Noticing a pattern here? Well I guess they did launch a poorly received no-population stand-alone game as a side detour.

Project Gorgon - Now 8 years in development. They do have more people working on it now than just the H&W team, but had a small KS/Indiegogo and other low level funding - probably closer to Pantheon than Albion/AoC/Crowfall in terms of funding/start-up profile. Fairly fun game with some neat skill & crafting mechanics, totally group-based, apparently total crap if you like eye candy though? No real ETA on launch to my knowledge, but they keep adding stuff slowly and patching.

CoE - Actually doesn't look like a pure scam to me, more just complete incompetence with no real clue about how hard it is to actually make a MMO. At least up until the studio "closing". Since then it could be bad, or it could just be the guy taking his lawyer's advice? Who knows, for all practical purposes, this was actual vaporware. They hoovered up almost $10million in gaming dollars and produced a single player parkour room as their only bit of player-accessible alpha content.

Star Citizen - For fun, let's toss this one in. Development started 11 years ago. They've raised over $350 million. There's an arms length list of controversies, including a full engine change, lawsuits, and sooo many missed deadlines & feature bloats. We might be getting the single player a-la Wing Commander Squadron 42 though sometime soon?

Pantheon - A failed Kickstarter and low levels of crowdfunding after that for a long time. Apparently put enough together (in terms of game presentation & employees) in the 2016 & 2017 timeframe to start earning more crowdfunding. Languished in Pre-Alpha since, but apparently pretty much recoded the entire game 18 months ago. Unlike CoE they have had actual testers in the game, had public streams - including with community streamers doing their own thing in pre-alpha. They are clearly not vaporware and development, however slow, continues to demonstrate actual progress from time to time. I mean, they do have a ton of pre-alpha donors and there's not really been an evidence of mass revolts there, so take from that what you will about what players with a closer perspective think. They haven't discussed it, but there's also good reason to believe their funding has been lower than almost every other game on this list other than Project Gorgon.

Take all the issues you want with the tortured development and glacial progress - because that is 100% valid. You're also entitled to your own opinion on the graphics being bland or such, but the rest just seems inaccurate to me. I mean, game development can be a real tortured shit-show - that's why most games aren't really talked about until a studio is good and ready. There's a real history of issues with MMO development even before all of these games - I mean, several had the plug pulled before the public got much of a glimpse - anyone remember the history behind Titan, Wish, or The Agency? Crowdfunded indie MMO's give people a much closer seat to how messy game development can be - combined with the pressures & issues involving crowdfunding cash raising & cash flows in general. All of the games I listed have a very lengthy development history, majorly missed dates, most have plenty of controversies (some have lawsuits), etc. Pantheon is hardly unique with it's history or issues. Always interesting to me that it has a 2k+ page thread here, but those other games' threads have barely a nod to those sort of issues. The gifs are hilarious, and this thread is a pretty epic repository of them, but still quite the disparity of angst on this forum.
I'm not sure if your goal was to remind everyone that this genre is a pile of shit, but you did a good job while trying to defend Pantheon.

None of these are successes, Pantheon included. It's a disaster of a genre.
 

yerm

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I would wager there are more lines of text in your post than lines of code ever written in one day for pantheon.

They aren't making a product. They are just scraping up things. Someone needs(needed?) to stomp down and force people not to be artistic playarounds and actually commit to and reach goals. That isn't happening. That's why we have given up. The light at the end of the tunnel isn't just far away or dim, it's not even a finished game. It's a pile of concepts started and refurbished and sometimes abandoned like collective adhd.
 
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Lunis

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Wow.

McQuaid used to post walls of text like that on the old site during the vanguard beta.
 
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Hateyou

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The first part of your response is pretty reasonable to me - you don't like the art direction (or apparently lack-there-of) that they've shown so far. That's an opinion - nothing wrong with having a different one, and I'll agree that parts can come across as bland. I guess I am of mixed feelings on that being consequential. For one, RL can be pretty bland - I mean, the actual medieval times most fantasy rpgs are based on were pretty drab and boring - so maybe that influences my own evaluation. Even in a fantasy world I don't expect every area to be totally alien and amazing. I just sorta expect different biomes and cultures. Epic gear to be epic. I hate cosmetic shops since it takes away from all of that. The elf area is pretty decent looking, and yeah, the human area just comes across as stock fantasy. The actual character races don't look too bad though, and they've actually done a pretty decent job IMO of having some more unique races without making them utterly silly (ie cat people or pandas) or alien. Out of curiosity though, do you have a few example indie/non-AAA MMO's with art direction that you think is imaginative and non-dull? What pops in my mind for categories is usually older/retro (Project Gorgon is one of the more modern examples of this), Japanese/Korean fantastical RPGish, more realistic, or cartoonish (WoW, Wildstar, etc).

I disagree somewhat on the Unity asset comment but I can see how you could come to that conclusion. Brad did apparently originally think when starting VR & Pantheon that you could build a mmo faster & cheaper based on the unity store in part. That isn't necessarily as unreasonable of a thought then as it appears to be now - after all, there are plenty of games, including a few smaller mmo's (more hobbyist I'll admit) built using these assets - and the idea is pretty tantalizing given the usual amount of resources it takes to build a MMO. I mean, it's not like all of the assets are bad in the store - some are pretty decent. I don't think that really influenced their art design necessarily though. They have a TON of concept art out there - even as far back as the Kickstarter - that concept art is instructive. The art direction comes across as actually really just a continuation of the lineage of MMO's they've worked on in the past - EQ, Vanguard, etc. It's pretty much the same style. Which fits in the more realistic fantasy category I mentioned up above. That matched much of the Unity assets we've seen in the game - largely from the human area of the game and is within the realistic graphics category - so it makes sense they'd use them heavily in that area. There are other areas of the game shown that don't come across as human realm-boring, but are still realistic in style. The raid zone from the video, the elf area, the halfling area, etc for example.

I'm a MMORPG player - I probably do have a low bar for MMO's - and Indie studios in general. I'd rather the gameplay be there and while better graphics is always nice, they just need to be serviceable. I've enjoyed playing Project Gorgon and EQ TLP servers and can enjoy them just fine without QQing over the eye candy. I also enjoy great graphics - I've finally picked up Cyberpunk on sale and just started playing it - definitely some nice stuff, especially when RT is on. I've played plenty of games with great graphics that were shitty games, and I've played plenty of games with bad-mediocre graphics that were great games. I mean, I can make all sorts of RL analogies too, so why should I shit all over an indie mmo - or any game - just based on looks?

I also take issue with your last comment in part. It's been 7 years since the failed Kickstarter - I mean, it was a game concept that was drafted around a table in a garage, was shut down, restarted as a volunteer hobbyist MMO, then started picking up funding and then hires, etc to where it is now. No denying the tortured history of it or that there's controversy around Brad's management/ownership in certain aspects, but how do you get to outright "grifting retards for dollars"? They need money to make the game, and they've clearly built a MMO game client capable of supporting testers in 30hr sessions at least. What are you either basing that conclusion on or comparing it the game to in order to reach that conclusion? I mean, the history of non-AAA indie crowdfunded MMO's is pretty wretched. They're hardly unique in having tortured development histories, missing goals, controversies, etc. Here's some examples -

Crowfall has been in development for 8 years also - it's had almost $40million dumped into it, and it's worth noting that the payroll (per their covid loan filing) is like $5-7 million a year alone. Their beta timeline said Beta2 was due 5 years ago with a launch in late 2016. It had raised $13million as of 2017. It's launching next month, minus a ton of promised content, and their own announcement on their forums has alot of concern posts in it from their own testers.

Albion - They had a pre-existing company with shipped titles and an office (that alone is huge), a team of 12 (presumably FT) at the start (18 it looks like heading into alpha, and 60 by launch). Wasn't even their idea for the game - they won the bid for the game's concept along with the investor's large seed funding that went along with the concept in 2012. As a timeline, it entered early alpha in like Spring 2014, closed beta in Nov 2015, final (open) beta in Aug 2016, launched July 2017, and launched on steam in May 2018. Of note, on 4/13/15 they were aiming for a "early-mid 2016" release. They missed goals and took awhile to ship the game despite their startup advantages. They didn't buy DDoS protection for launch - lulz. Worth noting there's some good arguments to be made that it was still really in beta or at least not polished like a released title until the Lancelot update in March of 2018. It didn't get a tutorial until March of 2019 fwiw.

AoC - They're approaching 6 years of working on the game. The owner has a history that includes MLMs & Real Estate - of some mild concern in the crowdfunded MMO world potentially, but at least they had a pretty massive initial bit of funding. They've currently got about the same headcount as ArtCraft does, so presumably around the same payroll (although they're planning to double in size). They're literally cranking out monthly cosmetic sets (ala Star Citizen ships) for purchase. They just lost their lead dev, they delayed their NDA unmasking, they started a full combat revamp (that is way behind schedule) in March after years of showing off their combat, their Alpha1 list is somewhat thin if you drill down. They're also promising the world, but hey, the graphics I see do look pretty good. Did I mention tons of delays? Noticing a pattern here? Well I guess they did launch a poorly received no-population stand-alone game as a side detour.

Project Gorgon - Now 8 years in development. They do have more people working on it now than just the H&W team, but had a small KS/Indiegogo and other low level funding - probably closer to Pantheon than Albion/AoC/Crowfall in terms of funding/start-up profile. Fairly fun game with some neat skill & crafting mechanics, totally group-based, apparently total crap if you like eye candy though? No real ETA on launch to my knowledge, but they keep adding stuff slowly and patching.

CoE - In development for about 6.5yrs. Actually doesn't look like a pure scam to me, more just complete incompetence with no real clue about how hard it is to actually make a MMO. At least up until the land rush cash grab & the studio "closing". Since then it could be bad, or it could just be the guy taking his lawyer's advice? Who knows, for all practical purposes, this was actual vaporware. They hoovered up almost $10million in gaming dollars and produced a single player parkour room as their only bit of player-accessible alpha content.

Star Citizen - For fun, let's toss this one in. Development started 11 years ago. They've raised over $350 million. There's an arms length list of controversies, including a full engine change, lawsuits, and sooo many missed deadlines & feature bloats. We might be getting the single player a-la Wing Commander Squadron 42 though sometime soon?

Pantheon - A failed Kickstarter and low levels of crowdfunding after that for a long time. Apparently put enough together (in terms of game presentation & employees) in the 2016 & 2017 timeframe to start earning more crowdfunding. Languished in Pre-Alpha since, but apparently pretty much recoded the entire game in the last 18 months. Unlike CoE they have had actual testers in the game, had public streams - including with community streamers doing their own thing in pre-alpha. They are clearly not vaporware and development, however slow, continues to demonstrate actual progress from time to time. I mean, they do have a ton of pre-alpha donors and there's not really been an evidence of mass revolts there, so take from that what you will about what players with a closer perspective think. They haven't discussed it, but there's also good reason to believe their funding has been lower than almost every other game on this list other than Project Gorgon (potentially in the same realm as CoE). Why is that important? Well, if games with 4x+ better funding are having the same issues, then why is Pantheon some sort of special shit unicorn? No, they're pretty much on-par with the rest of the crowdfunded MMO scene, but it is notable that they aren't selling armor sets every month like AoC (or ships like Star Citizen), selling land & titles in game like CoE did, selling VIP subs while in testing like Project Gorgon, etc. I mean, if Pantheon was some sort of grift - why aren't they at least doing the same sort of (fairly normal) fundraising as the rest? The cognitive dissonance on this fact alone amazes me at times.

Take all the issues you want with the tortured development and glacial progress - because that is 100% valid. You're also entitled to your own opinion on the graphics being bland or such, but the rest just seems inaccurate to me. I mean, game development can be a real tortured shit-show - that's why most games aren't really talked about until a studio is good and ready. There's a real history of issues with MMO development even before all of these games - I mean, several had the plug pulled before the public got much of a glimpse - anyone remember the history behind Titan, Wish, or The Agency? Crowdfunded indie MMO's give people a much closer seat to how messy game development can be - combined with the pressures & issues involving crowdfunding cash raising & cash flows in general. All of the games I listed have a very lengthy development history, majorly missed dates, most have plenty of controversies (some have lawsuits), etc. Pantheon is hardly unique with it's history or issues. Always interesting to me that it has a 2k+ page thread here, but those other games' threads have barely a nod to those sort of issues. The gifs are hilarious, and this thread is a pretty epic repository of them, but still quite the disparity of angst on this forum.
 
  • 14Worf
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Grim1

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I'm not sure if your goal was to remind everyone that this genre is a pile of shit, but you did a good job while trying to defend Pantheon.

None of these are successes, Pantheon included. It's a disaster of a genre.

His point is that most of the posters here act like Pantheon is the only mmo (or game) that wasn't finished 10 minutes after it was announced.

The excessive hyperbole from the criers here is kind of pathetic. But it's the internet, so par for the course.
 
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Hateyou

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His point is that most of the posters here act like Pantheon is the only mmo (or game) that wasn't finished 10 minutes after it was announced.

The excessive hyperbole from the criers here is kind of pathetic. But it's the internet, so par for the course.
 
  • 9Worf
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