As a backer, I can safely say this game isn't coming out.

-250$ out of my account.

Progression is @ a snail like pace, and with the revelations that they bought art assets for the first example dungeons/videos and have spent the past 1-2 years going back and fixing up their poor coding really shot this game in the foot for most people.

I have 5% expectations this game will make it to beta, and 2.5% it will make it to launch.

They keep bringing out streams of artwork placements this, plans of that, were gunna do this and that...and so far they have....what? 1 zone to show for 7 years of development?? Half their first streams were based on the same dungeon over and over and over.

The last one was 30 minutes of some art dude explaining all the 'what if's' from artwork he had drawn up.

signs up for an only fans site and backs pantheon, See you in thurgadin !

I'd love to see "a day in the development of Pantheon" on Youtube, that'd be good.

If by some miracle this game ever launches (no chance) it will be unplayable garbage for the first 2 years of patches - by that time it will have cemented itself as a toilet bowl and it will have a 50 person player base.

The dream is dead

dunno the niche eq style games should fill is one of thematically gatekeeped creators making elf spaces with elf rules that make sense and arent an ardous treadmill of progressively buying your way into the next expansion, but an adventure in learning u can indeed strafe run, and that flash of light isnt that bad after all. Where if u don't min max, u can still have fun grps. Because gear isn't as important as using snare and fear together, and having a friend who's got your back. And a mage who can summon bandages while u wait for a cleric.

doubt it can come to pass tho like mblake said, everyone is using consoles, and unity certainly isn't the engine to make things deeply interesting, itll be hard to drown because u fell off the bridge

there needs to be places ppl feel like spending hours to explore, remember finding mushroom spawns on the ground in Kaladim at the farms? not just cuz u get a +5 sword aug but because its interesting u can kill the giants, or the farmers, just because theyre green, and u are curious about what faction they are on

all these things that make eq special should be going into pantheon, but i bet u will be able to solo 1-whatever level caps they decide. pvp and everything will be 'fair and balanced'. Speedrunning dungeons will probably matter more than learning the crazy maze of hallways. Traps, and pitfalls. Or shortcuts.

seems like at this point pantheon would have been better off selling graphic novels, they'd have bankrolled themselves a tripple A studio if the artists stuck to what they were good at and churned out stories and characters and art drama

i was looking forward to the slightly evil, maybe redeamable mer people, not sure like i said, any of it will pan out. we should at the very least get one person into a career who churns out some fun books

Still haven't backed it personally, but might just given recent developments.

Jimmy Lane and Kyle Olsen seem up to the task and more than capable. The rate at which that progress can now be accelerated, especially for the environments/zones, is reassuring.

In retrospect, it might have been better releasing an early unpolished game to the public on test servers while making updates along the way. ClassicEQ suffered from that, aiming for perfection and getting almost nowhere, whereas Project1999 accepted certain limitations from the get-go and gradually worked through or around them.

https://youtu.be/Ea2HS8NL4s4

Roughly a dozen or so zones, according to google.

The what ifs weren't merely speculative though, as they pertained to actual content in the works. Showing the connection between one evolving creative process and another as they relate to in-game assets isn't so much "what if" but wherefore. GRRM speaks on the same process in interviews, often mentioning the two approaches to writing (the gardener and the architect) as being complementary to each other. In reality, these dualities exist everywhere. The classicist and the romanticist. The interviewer and the interviewee. All are necessary and good game design accounts for and incorporates them in all aspects of play without favoring one or the other to extremes.

EverQuest did this well, with enough of the lore/rules presented deliberately and discreetly, leaving other aspects open-ended either on purpose or due to time constraints. And two decades later players still debate over the whys and consider the what ifs, finding exploits along the way, all of which keeps an aging niche community intact.

https://imgur.com/a/RITjtYu

Star Wars special edition trilogy did not do this well. All of the whys added in after the fact were either overcomplicated or incompatible with the characters and their story. Game of Thrones Season 7 and 8 also failed in this way. All of the whys were unsubstantiated and the characters conveniently spared or sacrificed for reasons unrelated to their established flaws and redeeming qualities.

These underpinnings aren't valued enough by one-time audiences who simply want to be entertained by the methods they've come to expect. Told when a joke has been made, through canned laughter. Shown when an important NPC is nearby, through a blinking punctuation mark. It's not difficult providing entertainment if following trends—fooling some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time—but appealing to and then holding the attention of critics/aficionados who remember all too well that they were fooled before? Good luck. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice?

https://youtu.be/U8tUiI_cUCg

Even with some of the better non-MMO games, developers still cut corners. Kingdoms of Amalur had a respectable enough storyline, one in which a spear was central to the main storyline, even right down to the cut scenes. But fucked if you, the player, could actually wield one. The exclusion might seem superficial, but it's how an IP can identify itself, through symbolism/branding. In a perfect world, the Kingdoms of Amalur devs would have used that spear as a plot device, with its acquisition leading to an expansion that allowed players to wield spears. An actual achievement unlocked and one that would have remained fixed in the minds of its audience long after moving on to other games.

Star Wars had the lightsaber. EverQuest had the scepter (as seen on the original cover and then again on the expansion with its light extinguished and previous wielder chained). Heavenly Sword had a unique curved blade. World of Warcraft had the massive shoulderpads. Good or bad, they're immediately recognizable and distinct. But the visual still has to be supported by well-thought-out lore, otherwise it's just as forgettable as the plot of every porno film ever. That was the point of the artwork video imo. If devs skipped over or hurried through the finer details, than all the easier it would be to sell the project off to the highest bidder and make compromises from top to bottom.

EQ went from concept to market in 4 years. Are graphics the cause of new games taking so long to develop?

Eq was full of weekly, sometimes daily patches to fix their crap code. I think some of you forget what it was like sitting on the chat server for hours waiting for servers to come up.

Things were tough for EQ in the beginning too. Why does it get a pass when modern mmo's get damned for it? Launched in today's world EQ would be DOA under this intense scrutiny.

Different times and expectations.

Code was far less complex back in the day. We didn't have to worry about ragdoll physics, or strange and unique shaders, or multithreading, or a host of other wierd network encyrption things. The ollld EQ just spewed its guts out over TCP/IP and netbios and it was glooriously simple.

Now-adays the new games all interface with proprietary databases which are very different from the ones of old, with sharding, and load balancing etc... its not the same as having discreate servers even if the authentication server still sorta says so.

I can't imagine trying to make a game working with modern tech in a secure way. It'd be a nightmare, I'm sure someone will be up to the task, or unity will eventually become a versatile enough API.