It's a damn shame a open world MMORPG - that's not a WoW-clone - I liked in many ways could only muster enough population to survive essentially on life support for about 6-7 years. What's wrong with people? If Vanguard can't survive, how the hell does Brad expect Pantheon to be any different, unless it's drastically casualized? Maybe he's convinced Vanguard failed for another reason, but I struggle to see it.
Does Brad want to make Pantheon into a sort of open world WoW-clone and his theory is if it's this way out the door and reasonably bug free then it'll be a success? I can't see any other possible way of doing it. I see zero ways for this game to succeed if it's not mostly bug free and not a WoW-clone. I think these're the two biggest things that killed Vanguard, DESPITE me liking the fact it was not a clone of WoW. See, the sad state of affairs is most gamers just do not share my likes and dislikes and it's a hard fact of life.
Honestly I'd rather see Pantheon be like classic WoW than to be a huge disaster. I pray - for the sake of all the backers, if this thing passes the initial kickstarter - Brad has the insight to be friendly towards casual players and somehow still instill in it a feeling of being old school. Can a game be friendly towards casuals and yet still give the impression it's hardcore or old school? I hope so because its success might hinge on this.
And yet I'm reminded of how Vanguard was supposed to be a game for both casuals and hardcores and yet it failed. Brad has to revisit those days and wonder what went wrong and how it can be corrected.
Look what he says here:
http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles...uaid_mcpherson
Quote:
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With Vanguard specifically, we’ve designed a game more along the lines of ‘traditional’ massively multiplayer games. Vanguard is about escapism, about being able to enter a virtual world and to leave the real world behind to a degree. To that end, we feel that one’s real world financial status should have no bearing on who they are or what they have access to in-game. Indeed, one of the core principles in games like Vanguard is that if you see someone and the items they’ve acquired, you should ideally be able to assume that the person earned them in-game. This way, it really doesn’t matter who you are in real life - your financial status, your race, your gender, your age, your location, etc. should all be irrelevant. And I think this is very important. Virtual worlds of this sort break down all sorts of prejudices and preconceptions that exist in the real world, and I think this is not only a good thing, but an exciting thing. Online relationships have proven to often be as real as traditional relationships.
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He didn't mention time. What if someone doesn't have much time to play in real life? If you're going to say money and race and other things don't matter, shouldn't you also say time doesn't matter? Or what if someone has an on-call sort of life - like they have children, for example - and has to go AFK a lot?
By focusing your game on people who have lots of time, you necessarily limit it to certain people.
Note, oddly, how the questioner asks this next:
Quote:
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EH/EW: Did you expect that EverQuest would become such a total experience for some players (playing 60 hours a week, quitting work, and so on)? How does the attempt to design the game for different kinds of players (weekend, regular, hardcore) structure the game-world?
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I know that's an old link, but I just was having fun googling.