I feel like I can't post this on the Pantheon forum. It hits to close to home and there are to many "yes men" over there...though there are "no men" too hah.
Brad made another post recently that really worries me. I discussed something similar a few weeks ago about a different post by Brad.
Maybe it's because when it comes from Brad directly it seems to hold more weight? I never get the same worried feeling when other devs/mods post things about game design. Maybe it's because Brad doesn't explain himself well?...though he can be long winded.
The recent one that worries me is about pets and how they want to have pets for all, or close to all, classes. They wouldn't be all combat pets like many of us are used to. They could be pets that buff or have extra storage etc. The idea was a lot of pets usable situationally in combat or in non-combat.
This just seems like one of those things new games try to do to lure in new players, but it ends up repelling more players than it attracts. Especially because of who Pantheon is targeting as its demographic.
Honestly, between this pet thing, and the whole progeny system, and some past blog posts, I'm starting to think I shouldn't have donated.
Why can't they...as the saying goes...keep it simple stupid?
The niche they are targeting wants a challenging game similar to the first gen mmos. This fluff is a waste of development time that isn't necessary to build the game that is being advertised. It has a very good chance of driving away the people who would normally stick with the game for 5-10 years if they just kept it simple.
Comments
I tend to agree with the OP about the pets, but his post does exclude a lot of information / discussion including examples from Brad.
WAR and ESO are two notable examples, but there are others.
Sticking to the vision seems to be beyond most devs, they just want to keep adding to the games audience by throwing in features that frequently turn away more folks than they gained.
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Good idea but made me laugh. Why not a Kangaroo? they have pouches and stuff.
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For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
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Pets are notorious for having issues. Pathing issues, controlability issues, response delay issues, lag issues, visibility issues etc.
It seems there are better ways to implement these.
Everyone having pets out sounds horrible.
They could always ensure the need for other storage items such as bags, by allowing the use of only one pet at a time (the rest would be stored somewhere back in town). Having bags would still be ideal in that case.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
A pet system won't ruin the combat feel of the game, if it did it won't make it to launch.
Brad keeps telling people this game isn't going to just be EQ with better graphics, and that there will be some new/different things.
It seems odd to donate money to a game, and gain special access to be able to speak to the Devs on their forums, and then post here instead out of fear of [I don't know what]. /shrug
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Just look at BDO's pet system. Everyone agrees that you don't need them, but everyone seems to buy them anyway for some reason...