Before I dig into this mornings topic I feel like I need to preface it a bit. I really want Pantheon Rise of the Fallen to succeed. The release of new Western MMORPGs that are not highly focused on becoming pvp kill boxes is an extreme rarity. The Everquestian and Warcraftian dynasties are barren. It is a fevered dream for me to someday tuck into a brand new game that doesn’t involve playing k-pop idols in heavy armor. What I actually want is something more akin to a World of Warcraft or a Lord of the Rings Online that takes advantage of all of the niceties of everything we have learned in the last twenty years of gaming. However what I am apparently getting instead is a love song to the pain filled days of Everquest.
That is not to say I didn’t know this going into following Pantheon. This is a game created by the late Brad McQuaid. I also feel like I should preface once again that I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I should have known with crystal clarity what I was in for. Brad has effectively developed the same game three times, each time trying to realize his original vision with a higher level of fidelity. You have the original Everquest that was severely limited by technological constraints. Next up was Vanguard that appeared to go through some severe development time constraints of needing to push forward to market in an incomplete state. Lastly you have Pantheon which seemed like a final attempt to make good on what he was seeing inside of his head but never quite capable of realizing in digital form.
I feel like another important statement is that both Everquest and Vanguard ultimately eased up on the harsh restrictions that were originally placed on the player on both games. Everquest made itself considerably more casual friendly with the introduction of graveyards that summon bodies, a massive teleportation network that allows players to move around more quickly and freely, and even the introduction of instanced content that was more casual friendly. In an effort to find an audience, Vanguard went through a lot of more casual player friendly changes as it struggled to stay afloat. I remember playing it launch and deeming it just not very fun, when I was used to World of Warcraft at the time. I went back considerably later towards the end of its life cycle and had a blast running around and exploring Telon.
Coin weight should matter, and we’ve decided to go that direction
Joppa – Pantheon Creative Director
However all of the above doesn’t exactly explain why I am writing about Pantheon this morning. Yesterday while casually browsing the interwebs I stumbled onto a blurb from MassivelyOp talking about the decision to add coin weight into the game. For those who were not from that era of gaming, back during the Everquest days, the coin you were carrying had weight to it and you regularly needed to dump coin in the bank to keep from being encumbered. For those poor monk players they were constantly fighting a losing battle trying to keep their total item carry down below a specific weight number in order to keep from being debuffed. It was a bad idea then and it is a bad idea now. By the time of Dark Age of Camleot, the immediate successor to Everquest, coin weight had been abandoned and effectively has been gone from the genre ever sense.
The fact that this community wants coin weight back in the game tells me that they have a deeply masochistic streak. I think more than anything it also sets a tone for the type of game that Pantheon is trying to be. If you have coin weight then you are likely probably also going to have full item loss on death and corpse recovery, and on top of that the ability to lose levels. Essentially it sets a tone for a game that I really don’t want to personally play, because I would never freely return to a game that put me in the sort of negative positions that Everquest did. I don’t want to get those real world calls on a Sunday afternoon begging me to log in and resurrect a corpse because they had lost their level and needed the experience back and it was just about to rot. I also have no nostalgia for twelve hour long runs in Fear, Hate or the Plane of Sky.
They’re looking for people with the time and dedication of college students but appealing to the nostalgia of middle-aged gamers who no longer have that kind of time.
Tipa – via Tweet
I think last night Tipa hit the nail on the head and phrased my thoughts in a much more concise manner. Pantheon is being built for an imaginary demographic, that has the tastes of a 40 something but the free time and real world constraints of a teenager. I also wonder if this is the video game equivalent of a midlife crisis… the desire to recapture the glory of our past adventures in a modern game without having the logic to understand that is a bygone era. We put up with a lot of these punishing design patterns, not because we loved them… but because there was no other game out there for us to be playing that offered the same kind of experience. The critical thing we have now that we lacked then is the freedom of choice and a wealth of options that we could be playing that asks significantly less of our time.
What I want is a game that feels like Everquest felt like, without actually making me re-live the trauma of the past. I also want that game to be delivered with all of the knowledge we have learned in the two decades worth of online gaming that have happened between now and then. I am somewhat saddened by the fact that Pantheon won’t be that game. However I am more saddened by the fact that Pantheon is effectively being built for an audience that I question actually existing. Sure there is a community of backers and folks like Cohh Carnage fueling this fire, but I have also experienced this all a number of times as games launched. Players will absolutely tell you with utter conviction that they want this thing today, and then post launch tell you how it didn’t end up feeling as good as they thought it would. Players ultimately don’t know what they want.
What I do however know for certain is that I don’t have the room in my life that demands total control of my play time, and the requirement to always be grouped with other players. Sure folks will tell you that you can solo just fine on certain classes… as someone who tried to solo level a Cleric in the original Everquest, I can tell you that really is no life at all. The truth is I didn’t really have the time to play Everquest the first time around. However I was so hungry for that type of experience that I was willing to risk marital strife in order to get that experience. I know more than one marriage that ended over that game and the time constraints placed upon its players. While “coin weight” really isn’t as big of a deal as I am probably making it out to be, for me it is emblematic of a “vision” that I want no part of. I feel like we have probably swung too far in the direction of player convenience to make interesting game decisions. However I feel like this reaction is way too far in the other direction.
Hi, I totally understand your concerns about not having enough time to really enjoy Pantheon. You’re certainly not alone in that. But I feel like you may be drawing too many assumptions based on coin weight alone. I, myself, am not a huge fan of coin weight. But I also know full well that Brad’s design for Pantheon is actually specifically targeted at players like you. It may not seem like it at first glance, but if you read the plans that Brad has laid out that the devs are steadily making progress toward, Pantheon is for those who want to experience a truly social and challenging world, but only have a couple of hours a day to play. Reducing unnecessary time sinks while preserving the challenge is woven into the fabric of every design decision. So there will be no permanent item loss or level loss on death. I’ve been following the game and the devs very closely for 4 years now, and I’d be happy to talk to you about it more.
I mean ultimately the thing that causes me to be leery is that coin weight seems like a superfluous system that adds nothing to the game, and causes needlessly painful interactions on the part of the player. If they are opting for it to be in, what other anti-player systems are they going to resurrect from the long burried past? I will continue to keep my eyes on the game, but I am super cautious.
I absolutely loved Vanguard when I discovered it – but it was much too late already. I think maintenance mode had already been announced and I didn’t want to invest money into a game that could be gone a couple of weeks later. But if I had found it sooner…
Anyway, I think we can use WoW Classic as a loose example here. Obviously not for things like coin weight etc. because WoW has always been a themepark, not a sandbox. But we do have exactly these 30+ players who used to spend their teenager+ years playing in WoW. And we had so many of them return to WoW Classic. A lot of us enjoy it for what it is. But when we think about the early day of WoW, rarely ever do we remember how many hours it took us… well, until now as we’re re-experiencing this.
I definitely agree that the negative aspects of EQ — weight, stamina, super slow XP gain, corpse recovery, experience loss and so on — were what made the game memorable. Everything had stakes. I don’t necessarily think that should have changed. People clung together in groups and guilds, and because your reputation was key to getting groups and guilds, what you did mattered. EQ gameplay was so simple that skills and abilities alone (for most classes) were easy to master.
Once WoW came out and gave EQ PvEers a real option, EQ began to die. When there was no alternative, it was easy to pile on hardships to make the rewards sweeter. Ultima Online, after all, was also super hard.
WoW changed all that. Now most MMOs are assumed to allow solo play, level you quickly, and throw gear at you. As mentioned, if people are really looking for the original, punishing, EQ, it is already available for free. It’s hard to compete with free.
BTW nice header image!
Thanks. One of my co-hosts from AggroChat does all of the artwork these days for my blog. Every so often I comission @AmmosArt to make something new, and then what you are seeing in the header is a composite of a bunch of things she has drawn for me. The header to AggroChat.com also is entirely her handiwork.
I think you should always take all pre-launch plans from game developers not just with a pinch of salt but a barrel. And you can double down on that when you’re looking at comments from before the game in question has even gone into public alpha. Pantheon is, sadly, years away from commercial launch. It will go through countless iterations before any of us get to play it. Just about everything can and much will change.
After that, when it finally does go live, it will be like the famous encounter with the enemy: no plan will survive. Vanguard changed enormously over the few years it was around. Rift changed so radically between open beta and the first expansion it barely deserved to be called the same game. EQII changed from a hardcore group-required even in crafting borefest to a casual-friendly, soloists welcome pleasure in about eighteen months. GW2 has been about six different games in seven years. They all do it.
If Pantheon launches it will either attract an audience sufficient to maintain it as it is, possible but unlikely, or it will change to find one. It may or may not succeeed but whether it had coin weight in pre-alpha isn’t going to have much impact either way.
I actually like coin weight though. I once got stuck in Plane of Knowledge in exactly the way Wilhelm describes and I thought it was hilarious. If i’d been blogging back then I’d have gotten a post out of it for sure.
In describing that PoK scenario, I am describing something that happened to me. I had to have a friend carry coins off of me to the Bazaar until I was light enough to move.
If coin weight was used in some meaningful and consistent way, I would not be totally against it. In TorilMUD I often had to leave mountains of coin behind because I simply couldn’t carry it off. But TorilMUD has had the same level cap and same stats for more than 25 years. If things are going to go the EQII way with stats ballooning out of control within a couple of years, maybe it is best just to work on something more relevant.
For an idea of how big the audience might be, I think a good place to look is project 1999. It has all that cruft from launch EQ, and is 100% free for anyone to play. As I am typing this it has 2053 players actually online across three servers. That would mean a total player count in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 20,000 players (right now is not prime-time, it could actually peak as high as 3 or 4 k, peak concurrency x3 -10 is what I use as a rough estimate of total player counts when I have nothing else to go on). That’s a lot more than I would have expected.
In any case, given that P1999 is completely free, I think that gives us a rough upper limit for the potential audience of Pantheon. If Pantheon only needs 5,000 to 10,000 players, it will probably do ok. If it needs even 50,000 steady players, it is probably doomed. Numbers in between that represent various levels of safety.
Inventory management is probably the least fun thing about MMORPGs and RPGs in general. So yeah, let’s make it worse! If I was any good at making games I’d make one that was just inventory management. You walk around and come across stuff that looks like it could be cool and useful, but you can only carry so much so you have to decide what you’re going to keep. But eventually you realize it’s just a walking sim with stuff you can pick up. No mobs. No puzzles. Just a bag full of junk. And then sell add-ons for additional bag space.
My blog title begs to differ! Seriously, inventory management has been one of my favorite aspects of the genre for two decades. I plan my Sundays around it, often as not.
To each their own, I suppose!
I remember having to leave piles of copper, silver, and gold in the old “Gold Box” D&D games…. but since a dupe exploit was really easy to do so you could get the best gear and never need to buy anything anyway it wasn’t a big deal.
I want to say that I remember EQ2 having coin weight, but now I’m not sure if that was true or not. If it did have it, it was gone very quickly, I can say that, at least.
I never played EQ1. I was in the Vanguard beta… and didn’t buy the live game when it released, so I can’t say that Pantheon really holds much appeal for me. If/when it releases I’ll probably give it a look, but I highly doubt that I’ll really think much of it. And decisions like coin weight are a big tun-off for me too, so… yeah.
To really appreciate coin weight you have to know why they got rid of it eventually. Coin weight came from AD&D to TorilMUD to EverQuest (and then EQII). It was a pretty standard RPG thing. Then two things happened.
First, in EQ there were some unintended coin faucets and exploits and suddenly you needed piles of coins to buy things. They had no gravity in the Bazaar, so you could carry that 100K coins to the right seller, but if you forgot to bank it and left the Bazaar, you might find yourself unable to move out on the PoK, agonizing steps from the Bazaar.
Second, stat inflation took over. This was especially true in EQII, which inflates stats with every expansion like no other. Your ability to carry stuff, coins, bank boxes, or whatever, was based on your STR stat, a nod back to AD&D. But when you STR stat is no longer 18 or 100 but 1,280,540, the calculation as to how much you carry is pretty much limitless. So coin weight had no real impact on veteran players, but was still punishing new players. This is a variation of what is called Malcanis’ Law in EVE Online, where all bad things hit new players harder and all good things help veterans more.
My theory is that these two things made SOE decide that coin weight was not worth the effort.
I remember folks griefing beggers by converting coin into copper and handing it to them, and watching them weep as they have to throw coin away until they get under weight.
This is like a nostalgia for something that doesn’t deserve nostalgia, and a lot of plans seem to be angling for it. I immediately thought of Legends of Aria, created by some folks from Ultima Online, which started off as an oPvP game, then went PvE, then hybrid, and is now back to oPvP because they “wanted to bring back the days of UO”. Despite having worked on UO, they seem to have forgotten that people LEFT the game because of rampant oPvP, and their solution was the split the world. I’ve seen statements of “bringing X back” from other games like Crowfall and Age of Camelot and others, but none of these devs seem to take into account the fact that these games changed, or features washed out, for reasons.
One thing I have learned with absolute certainty is that we will say all sorts of shit that we want, but turn out not to want when actually given it. My memory is extremely fallible and nostalgia can make you want some silly things. Maybe not a great idea to design around such fleeting things.
“What I want is a game that feels like Everquest felt like, without actually making me re-live the trauma of the past.”
You will never get that. The reason why the highs felt high, was because the lows felt low. The reason why the world felt alive, is because actions had consequences. Things that happen in most modern MMOs, including current “Live” EQ, are mostly meaningless (and you touched on this). You can never actually lose. You just try again, maybe with a slight inconvenience. Without the possibility of losing, winning will never taste so sweet.
Whether a game with true losing situations is for you is something for you to decide. But you won’t get a game that feels like EQ without them.
On some level I think you are right. A lot of what made Everquest feel real was the deep fear of the unknown, and the risk of potential loss. I am just not sure if that is for me anymore. Being able to log out when things are too frustrating is important to me, and knowing that I didn’t do any permanent damage to my character.
I don’t mind those situations, but I wouldn’t want them to be the “only option”. I think the idea of putting world PvP into a PvE game could be better applied toward putting hardcore PvE in a PvE game (where the deeper levels of dungeons have tougher rules and better risk versus reward).