Oh really? Wow. Well I guess that means the game must be coming out now for sure!! For realsies this time!!

killed brad, brad was a good dude, just got reemed by toxic ppl in the industry :( such is life

9 years of development and still in pre-alpha, I used to joke it would come out in 2025 but that seems way to optimistic now

This game was dead in the water when they failed to meet their kickstarter pledge back in early 2014.
I seen people elsewhere point to Brad's death being the reason that Pantheon is failing, but I'll never forget how catastrophic Vanguard's development was or how lighten up the Sigil forums were post-launch in 2007. Plus it's not like this game was going anywhere for almost 6 years by the time he died...
A great refresher down memory lane for those who did forget

Unfortunately, 'actual work' MMO is a party of one, and here we are. Pantheon was a great idea, but it seems like it ain't going to make it to production.

The kids (adults or otherwise) want instant gratification.

Also, a lot of the hardcore EQ players are rather...off-putting, so nobody wants that in decent society. Looking at you, multi-thousand-post people.

Ideas are dime a dozen, its all about execution. And Pantheon already existed, it was called Vanguard. What they should've done is bought the rights to V:SOH from SoE in 2014 since it was being scheduled to be shutdown and worth nothing to them, retool it to w/e Brad initially wanted or felt was missing from its conception and then try to lure people into something akin to what Square did to FFXIV 2.0. And as much as I rip that game and Brad, I really wanted it to succeed back then, I bought that Collectors Edition box and hoped for the best despite all the warning signs, but damn was I burned by the final janky unoptimized mess and thats an understatement. Anyone remember how horrendous the January 2007 open beta was?
And regarding "instant gratification", the only reason why EQ was able to get away with its jank and dripfeed grind is because it was the first truly 3D game in an emerging genre, which in turn, has declined drastically in the last 12 years. There's a reason why all of the most popular MMO's are ones that came out 10-14 years ago excluding WoW and EVE Online. Nobody is making them anymore since they're redundant and their novelty wore off. And nobody sure has hell wants go back to the days of paying $15 a month to "work"

I remember brad posted on somethingawful for a while about pantheon early on and basically everybody just invaded his thread and shit on him and ran him out of the forum, which sucked cause he was like right there to talk to but everyone had to be an angry cynical nerd at him.

Shame what that place turned into. This off-topic forum and r&f are at least like a small sliver of when the SA forums were entertaining.

To me the biggest pitfall developers fall into is focusing on graphics and animations more than gameplay.

Minecraft is actually the ultimate case-in-point. Minecraft graphics aren’t very good, and the animations are hilariously bad, but the gameplay makes up for it.

Monsters and Memories is actually exactly what developers should be doing. It’s about the only MMO/RPG I am looking forward to. I just put 40 hours into Diablo 4 and I feel sick of how bad it sucks. They missed the mark in so many ways. Diablo 2 resurrected is actually way better.

Which does bring me to my last point. The company that reskinned Diablo 2 for D2 resurrected used a lot of AI to redraw all the textures. I think game developers would be better off to grab old titles like Diablo, gothic, Baldurs Gate, EQ etc and just update the graphics. The gameplay for those games is already solid.

Yeah EQ:Next would have probably done decently well if it had just been a reskinned EQ1 in a modern engine. They went mental with absract design concepts about npc factions organically taking over one another and all this crap, and never had a single thing to show for any of it outside of some totally canned scripted in-engine scenes they showed at SOE live or something.

Everyone has to reinvent the wheel and it almost always fails.

Maybe the player base is just as much to blame though. All the pay to win, micro transactions, easy mode, everyone gets to top level in a week - it just doesn’t breed an environment for developers to focus on quality content.

Classic EverQuest, even with the best graphics may not work today, and certainly wouldn’t garner a million sales. I’d still play the hell out of it.

Honestly the one thing I am looking forward to with AI over the next 20 years is being able to have it build me video game code for any game I want.