Heya,
This is part 2 of my blog series on my impressions of where Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is right now. The first is here: https://www.pantheonrotf.com/blogs/1453/95/the-mistakes-pantheon-made
Like the last time, I organized my thoughts on this using a word document. Here's a link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9KW0-YiNVWqSkN3N2Y3UUdIUWs/edit?usp=sharing
Now, on to what I feel Pantheon did right:
1. Brad started looking for support in the right place.
a. Say what you want about Rerolled.org, when Brad first showed up there, they were very supportive
b. Brad was able to find a core group of individuals at Rerolled that really took up the slack later on
2. Brad did not run from his past
a. He acknowledged things the old unpleasantries and took responsibility. That’s all you can ask.
3. The dev team created a lot of buzz about Pantheon
a. The members of VRI were everywhere on the Internet and they worked hard
b. The dev team even reached out beyond traditional MMO outlets to inform people about PRotF
i. This is really important for expanding the audience for the game
4. Brad knew his target audience’s needs as far as game mechanics go
a. He knows we’re mostly adults with only 1-4 hours to game a night
b. He knows we are mature enough to handle challenges, real death penalties, and long term quests
c. He knows we are bored with trivialities such as daily quests
d. He knows we love lore, we love exploration, and we love freedom in our games
5. The Lore Team was fantastic!
a. Big props to the Lore4, they are certainly a shining example of how do interact w/ the audience
6. The PantheonRotF website is actually really good
a. The website is well organized and visually attractive without being overdone or cluttered
b. I love all the social media features of the official Pantheon Website
c. The website gave people multiple ways to interact with each other
d. The competition for points and whatnot encourages people to be active, that’s very smart
7. The subscribe to the developer website idea worked
a. Of all the things to come out of this, I think subscribing to a message board is the most controversial and potentially the most game-changing for future MMO development.
i. Brad proved that it could work, at least to a minor degree.
ii. If competent people were in charge and the game design hadn’t sputtered and the Kickstarter hadn’t been such a fiasco, then this model for development could have become the new industry standard.
1. We will have to see if future development companies attempt it.
8. The weekly developers round table podcast/video cast was a good idea
a. It was great to have something visual to look forward to each weak, it’s just a shame it was so light on details
9. The language for the Ogres was mind-blowing
a. Grad students in college studying linguistics create languages all the time, it’s been popular even before Tolkien created his elvish language back in the 1950’s.
b. Why gaming companies never took advantage of promoting this sort of in-depth language development before is beyond my reckoning.
i. It is so easy to get volunteers to do this, that it should become standard operating procedure from now on.
10. The dev team made hard decisions about what should be in the core game and what shouldn’t.
a. I’m not complimenting the specific choices they made, leaving out crafting and monks was a bad idea IMO
b. But I will compliment them on having the guts to be realistic about what they could accomplish on a limited budget.
i. Future indie MMO developers would do well to examine their process of decision making on this issue since low-funded games can’t have everything
11. The high level design document on climate was the best, most detailed information we ever got
a. It is a shame this sort of thing didn’t also exist for things like character creation, spell casting, combat, advancement, questing, itemization, raid encounters, etc. etc. etc.
If Pantheon is to go forward, these are some positive things we can build on.
