Pantheon Interview-Old school MMORPG by Brad McQuaid
It’s a period of upheaval within the MMORPG genre. Many upcoming titles have at least a few sandbox features, in an effort to go back to the genre’s roots as they were originally proposed by Ultima Online; simultaneously, there is also a certain trend to reject the comfort provided by the latest games, with many users yearning for an “old-school” experience, such as the one provided by Everquest for example.
Pantheon follows this road, mainly thanks to Chief Creative Officer Brad McQuaid, who also created Everquest back in 1999. His studio, called Visionary Realms Inc. and based in San Diego, recently tried to fund Pantheon through Kickstarter, but only $460K of the $800K requested were raised. Still, the team is going forward with the development and has already setup a crowdfunding system through their official website, so you can pledge right now if the following conversation with Director of Communications Benjamin de la Durantaye sparks your interest.
Q: First of all, welcome to Worlds Factory! Please, introduce yourself and your game to our readers.
A: Hi, I’m Ben de la Durantaye, Director of Communications at Visionary Realms, Inc. for the upcoming MMO Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. With Pantheon we aim to bring back some of those core elements from early MMOs that made for memorable experiences - stuff like a heavy focus on group content, challenging encounters, and meaningful progression. If you’ve ever played some of the early games, you’ll know what we mean by that. If not, think of it like your current favorite MMO with less focus on soloing, and more focus on meeting people and working as a team to overcome obstacles. You’ll need friends and allies and plenty of them. Your reputation will make or break your character’s advancement.
Q: Reading your Kickstarter description, I was particularly struck by the “Game Tenets”. For example: “A belief that an immersive world requires intelligent inhabitants”; now, this sentence makes me hopeful in regards to Pantheon’s Artificial Intelligence, which I believe to be the Achille’s heel of contemporary games, especially MMORPGs. What are you planning to introduce in your game to change this unfortunate situation?
A: One of the fundamental areas of combat and NPC AI is the challenge it presents. We don’t want mass amounts of low hit-point, quick kill mobs that you have to barrel through. Instead we want encounters to be more meaningful and require thought and preparation. These NPCs will have a hand-tailored design, and not simply be randomized with some generic abilities from a class. Instead, they’ll have more thought put into them by giving them a specific purpose in the world. For instance, if you enter a dungeon and encounter three trolls at the entrance, they’re not likely going to be quickly dispatched and moved on from quickly. Instead you may see one as a healer, one as a ranged fighter, and one who’ll try to keep your attention. You’ll need to figure out how to deal with this encounter as simply rotating through a memorized spell rotation won’t cut it. You’ll need to consider how you want to engage all three trolls — maybe that means mezzing the tank and healer while you focus on the ranged fighter, or maybe it means spreading your group out to deal with each troll separately. It’s almost like a boss script you see in some of today’s MMOs, but this is just a standard fight in Pantheon.
Q: I’ll tackle two at once now - “An understanding that a truly challenging game is truly rewarding” and “An understanding that player involvement is required for progression. All actions (or lack thereof) should have consequences. Positive actions should be rewarded. Apathy or lack of action should not be rewarded with bonuses”. This is music to my ears, as I have been looking for an MMORPG with a true risk versus reward implementation for a long time. However, I also believe that risk versus reward should include the chance to actually lose something - if players can’t ever lose stuff, then the only question is how fast they can win. Will Pantheon address this longstanding issue?
A: The risk has to be very real for any accomplishment to be memorable. There will be layers of risk. The overall risk is the very real danger of death. If you die, you’ll have to strategize on how to get your gear back, as it stays on your corpse. Of course, we don’t want to be too frustrating with this either, so there will always be a way to get your gear back, but it will come at great cost and will be much more appealing to make the trek with friends to recover your corpse.
Another layer is basic logistic progression. If you fight your way into the depths of a dungeon, you’ll eventually have to find a way out. You may be lucky enough to have a porting class with you, but if not, you’re going to need to preplan your escape route too. The end result is that you can go as far down the rabbit hole as you want - and the more you’re willing to risk, the greater the potential reward.
Q: This one seems very challenging to implement, at least at a first glance: “An expectation that the path of least resistance should also be the most entertaining”. How do you plan to make it so?
A: It’s actually something that’s easier to do than it sounds. If it’s not fun to just invis through an entire dungeon to get to the end fight, then simply don’t make it possible to do that. Or at least make it more dangerous, and thus higher risk. The same sort of thought goes into travel. Salim, our Director of Development, and I have had lengthy discussions about travel specifically. The path of least resistance with travel in many of today’s MMOs is simply to teleport using a means of fast travel available to all in major cities, and the like. However that’s not necessarily something we consider fun. That being said, being forced to run great distances of terrain can be pretty boring too. So what we need to do is make both fast travel and traveling by foot entertaining. “Fast” travel will have huge risks - there’s a real possibility you could get killed doing it. And we want to make the alternative, foot travel, more entertaining, so maybe that means there’s more chances of you running across something more interesting and random every time you travel a specific route.
Q: You also mentioned a focus on “exploration and adventure”. Aren’t you worried that in time, with databases, users will just be able to find everything with a search, thus voiding that focus?
A: There’s not much that we can do, or necessarily want to do, about fansites and databases eventually popping up. We’re not going to be posting any spoilers, and you’re certainly not going to see big red arrows in game on how to get to the best stuff. People will have to explore on their own. When they discover something cool, it will be up to them if they want to share it or not. This approach is also community-building in that regard. Back in the early days a lot of stuff wasn’t posted in databases for some time until the discovering group decided they were willing to share the information. We want to recreate some of that too. The information that is available and how it’s disseminated is going to be entirely up to the Pantheon community.
Q: There’s some conflicting information between the description and the FAQ about combat. Is it going to be possible to actively dodge, block, deflect or not? Are you going to use a stamina based system?
A: Yes, you will be able to actively dodge, block and deflect, but the interpretation of that is where I think the confusion comes in. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be racing to keep up with twitch controls, but it does mean you’re going to have to consider your actions. If a wizard is about to cast a big nuke, you’re going to want to interrupt him, thus actively bashing or stunning him. Or you may have a way to deflect his spell back to him, or even morph it into a completely different spell. You’ll need to be on your toes and be very selective of the abilities you take into battle with you.
As far as stamina - this may be a resource for some classes, like mana. Those kinds of details are still being fleshed out.
Q: From what I’ve been able to understand, it seems like Terminus is composed of many different fragments of worlds and their civilization/gods. Does this mean that Pantheon will feature mythologies as diverse as Greek, Norse, Chinese, Mayan, Arabian, Hindu, etc.? Can you confirm at least one that will be in the game?
A: There will be hints of real-world civilizations, but mainly in flavor alone. There are no plans to recreate real civilizations and incorporate them into the game. There are multiple Pantheons in the game, and each Pantheon can consist of one, or many gods. It’s going to be quite diverse and each of these Pantheons will be very unique unto itself. Some of the gods will play major roles. Others will be relatively quiet. Some of the gods will have fallen to become god-kings, roaming Terminus. These godkings and their followers will be quite volatile with a thirst and drive to reclaim their divine position.
Q: How large is the world of Terminus going to be, in comparison to World of Warcraft Vanilla (which most players know by now)?
A: Right now we’re focusing on the continent of Celestius. We do have a map plotted out but that hasn’t been completely recreated in the prototype yet, so it’s a bit too early to be able to address this with much accuracy. There will be more layers though, than many other games, meaning more secret caverns and dungeons to be discovered. A world doesn’t need to take a lot of landmass to have a lot of content. That’s something that some of the team learned when they were working on Vanguard.
Q: Recently, many games introduced “dynamic events” of sorts in their PvE component. What do you think of this trend? Are we going to see anything like this in Pantheon?
A: It’s not off the table but it needs to be considered in a way that would make sense in the world. To some, a repeating event that resets every few minutes doesn’t make much sense within the story. We do want some sort of randomness to be present throughout the world, but we also want players to be proud of learning an area and its hazards and cautions well. So, right now, at this stage, dynamic events as defined in other games aren’t the plan, but we do want some events to unfold within the game, so it’s a matter of figuring out how to best implement that.
Q: Since Everquest, theme park MMORPGs have relied on the “Raiding” endgame mechanic for PvE. Can we expect anything new in Pantheon’s endgame?
A: Raiding’s going to be in, for sure, but we’re also looking at a horizontal type of progression, which, if we do it correctly, will sort of blur the line of what “end game” really is. Essentially we want to make every level meaningful, and may end up with far fewer levels than the industry norm. If we go that route, and even if we don’t for that matter, there needs to be plenty of content to stay engaged at all times. This is easier to do when you’re making a game, that by design, is a lot slower paced than many other games. Progression will take longer, and in turn, be more meaningful. So expect a full array of varied content throughout, and not just top heavy.
Q: MMORPGs have promised players that they would be able to influence the storyline progression since forever, but none has delivered so far. Do you think this is feasible, and are you going to try doing it in Pantheon?
A: Well, one easy way can be done right now. We have several tiers available on our site that offer community members a chance to create an item, or influence the lore or even design a dungeon. Additionally we’re taking community involvement in the development process very seriously. Our Apprentice Developer level on the site allows direct communication with the devs to discuss what you want in the game. Obviously we can’t implement all suggestions, but we are working very closely with those who want to be involved to help shape the world and story. And we’re going to continue this all the way throughout. This approach is much more feasible than having a single player change the direction of the game within the game itself.
Q: Finally, the description says the game will be released for PC, Mac, and “possibly other platforms”. Are you also investigating next generation consoles such as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One? Many MMO games are being developed for these platforms.
A: We’re not ruling them out, but not focusing on them either, at least not right now. The Unity engine is pretty powerful and makes having support for multiple platforms much easier to do than it has been in the past.
Thank you for your time!