Quote:
Originally Posted by rekreant
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In my eyes, everything is just Norrath lore with a "twist". Dire lord is just a shadow knight with a twist! Summoner? Mage with a twist. Wizard, but with a spellweaving twist. Cleric, but can make a wall? Twist baby twist! Ill concede that my original percentage was off, maybe about 80% of the lore is lifted from EQ and 20% is the twist. Also changing the names of races and adding twists(emo merfolk that are just underwater dark elves) is not new or innovative.
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Fair enough but then what's wrong with what has been proven to work in the past? The team over at PROTF hasn't promised the gaming community an innovative WoW killer. There's nothing new about games promising to be just that, so why bother falling into the same rut?
Afaik the devs haven't rejected the idea of Pantheon being the spiritual successor to EverQuest, meaning they aren't trying to reinvent the wheel and offer a 100% new experience. They're making a world they themselves want to be immersed in, one that could
renew the genre or at least interest in it.
Innovative is asking and promising too much though, imo. Whenever I hear words like "innovative" or "cutting edge" I think of Avatar which promised to be all of that and then some, except the storyline had been used before and to greater effect. For all of the money it took in, that movie is now largely forgotten and not on anyone's top 10 list. The same will likely happen with Black Panther. What about cult classics though? And some of those barely got made at all because their budgets were almost nonexistent. But for all of their deviations from the norm, most cult classics weren't as innovative for their time as Kurosawa films, and the ones were copied a lot from his techniques.
Traditional races/classes with a twist? In a way. Amphibious dark elves. Cyborg gnomes. Plur raver halflings. In another thread, someone else more or less wrote that Karana was just Zeus with a twist. There is a certain amount of truth to that, but it ignores the finer details.
Ex.: Rather than the standard white knight, the paladin in PROTF is a priest who stepped away from worship, abandoned the faith partially, and traded in prayer beads for a sword. A twist? Okay but what isn't a twist?
Human males are essentially just females with a twist. Christianity is just Judaism with a twist. New Zealand is just Australia with a twist.
This is still ignoring other, more substantial features of PROTF like the progeny system and the in-depth faction-based system that amplifies player/nonplayer character interactions.
The lore? So much of fantasy is rooted in history and mythology, it's hard to name anything that has been innovative. LoTR? Game of Thrones is the War of the Roses with a twist. Historical figures Frankensteined together. Even the wall was inspired by a real world location. Bristlebane is the trickster god with a twist, a god who can be found in many forms and beliefs throughout history, particularly among native American tribes.
The same holds true with Pantheon. "Terminus" is the name of the Roman god of boundary markers and the word for a final point of space/time. But that's the nature of life and art, both imitating each other.
Trends exude a certain kind of artistic innovation but superficially, and as a result often don't age well, not that it matters since they're easily replaced.
The devs at Pantheon seem intent on bucking the trend, but aren't trying to innovate the way EQNext did. Their game also isn't trending the way EQNext had been which is good imo because, for all the many who played the classic trilogy, EverQuest wasn't exactly trendy; most people who gamed were casual and only played console.
But all of this is assuming that 80% of Pantheon's lore has been directly lifted from or inspired by EverQuest's. Maybe that's accurate but percentages also come from lying ass weathermen and unreliable election polls. One could just as easily argue that EverQuest is 80% DnD with a 20% twist. And humans share all of what, 98/99% DNA with chimpanzees? So, in a sense, we are just chimps with a twist. But look at the world of difference that little twist makes.