Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Pantheon/news?
Zajjar
Member UncommonPosts: 116
Pantheon probably need alot of things, but so do we players, that want to stay hyped, it seems to me, that new info on pantheon is comming out way to slowly, is it because you "developers" only work on it in ur spare time? Or is it, that u dont want to build to much hype, being afraid that it will die out before launch?
Personal i think giving us atleast some screenshots a video, or an interview once a week will do a huge difference, actually comming up to the suffice and show ur selves, and say, "Hey, we are still in progress, we still excist, dont lose hope.
Personal i think giving us atleast some screenshots a video, or an interview once a week will do a huge difference, actually comming up to the suffice and show ur selves, and say, "Hey, we are still in progress, we still excist, dont lose hope.
Comments
The game is being built upon a heavy foundation in lore and revealing anything reveals a lot. I give them props for this approach because is shows they have a vision and are not willing to corrupt it. High risk yes, but that is how anything really good comes about and is important to a game targeting a niche audience imo. Sink or swim and we shall see soon enough.
You stay sassy!
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I fail to see why they cant get a big investor into this, with a clause giving them absolute freedom to make the game they want, games like this will be the new development direction mmorpgs are taking, and Asian mmos are helping that course tremendously with their shitty gameplay and carebear modules, theres alot of money in this shit, but MAYBE the developers want to be the big share holders themselves and are tired of sharing, (i understand that logic) BUT, not if it restrains them from building a very good mmorpg with not just unit-5 (wich is a kinda indie free to use engine, with a cost if u make over 100k or something) but with an actual build from scratch engine or unreal-4, to really create worlds than doesnt lag the shit out of u. Unity-5 is a bad composition for shitty pcs imo. Its gonna be another clunkycluster fuck i think.
Look at the Kickstarter market where many small studios are seeking investment AWAY from the big investors because they are a cancer to game play. The reason is because "Big Investors" only care about HUGE ROI and they play lots of "do this or we will pull our backing" type of demands on the games development. They make mainstream gimmicks, market to fads, and push for all the same crap we see today in the market because they want to get the most people to play the game as possible. So, big investors are VERY BAD if you want to make a game like Pantheon which is not being designed for mainstream, is not being designed for "everyone", but rather is being designed specifically for a type of player who wishes to see a return to many of the features of EQ and Vanguard while using modern technology and lessons learned in the current market.
Go read why this game is being made, look up what EQ and Vanguard were about and then ask yourself if this game is best served with Big investors and lots of hype? Do you think it will do well for them to excite the masses out there who tend to act ignorant and sheepish with unfinished products or do you think it would be best for them to work on the game as they have been, seeking specific investors as they need while they develop a game specifically to their goals?
This is not the next ToR, or WoW, or any other mainstream game out there. It is not designed for that group, it does not serve that expectation of play. That is not to say that some of those people won't find Pantheon a fun game, but if Pantheon is to succeed, it has to succeed on its terms, not at the whim and advice of those who currently expect mainstream.
Audio of the Cloud Gaming Summit has been made available, where John Diasparra and I spoke about making an MMO in Unity. Click the link to download the mp3 of the panel.
http://bit.ly/1PBMxZL
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Brad McQuaid
CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc.
www.pantheonmmo.com
--------------------------------------------------------------
Because what do "big investors" do ?
Look what EA did to Bioware. First they rip apart Dragon Age: Origins so you have to buy half the game as DLCs - after you bought the actual game. Also it was a PC game originally, with a multiplayer option. EA made it come out on consoles and have a pretty bad interface on PC - with no multiplayer either.
Then they make a cheap ripoff for full price called Dragon Age 2.
THAT is what big investors do.
If a "big investor" picked up Pantheon, the same thing would happen. The game would be streamlined so more people will be attracted to it, there will be a console option, there will be a shop, etc etc etc.
And I frankly dont care about graphics. The current state of graphics already looks more than good enough for me, the final game will look even better, thats great - really nothing more needed on my end.
And "free" doesnt equal "bad".
Very interesting paper if you'd like to read it on the psychology of "free"
http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/zero.pdf
Some interesting quotes:
"In this work, we extend research on the psychology of zero to pricing and examine the psychology of “free.” Intuition and anecdotal evidence suggest that in some sense, people value free things too much. When Ben and Jerry’s offer free ice-cream cones, or Starbucks offers free coffee, many people spend hours in line waiting to get the free item, which they could buy on a different day for two to three dollars. At first glance, it might not be surprising that the demand for a good is very high when the price is very low (zero), but the extent of the effect is intuitively too large to be explained by this simple economic argument. The goal of this paper is to examine the validity of this intuition, and to establish the causes of the phenomenon."
"In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that when people are faced with a choice between two products, one of which is free, they overreact to the free product as if zero price meant not only a low cost of buying the product but also its increased valuation."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I havent finished listening to McQuaids link, but I havent heard that specific statement in what I heard so far, so you clearly confused me and McQuaid.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
You could add appearance items, but this robs another element of game play with requiring people to actually earn their look in game.
You could sell non-game items such as T-shrits and the like, but is that enough to make up for the lack of montly sub?
You could sell in game fluff collectibles, but is it enough and seriously, do we need thousands of "beany baby" pets tagging along cluttering up the game, doesn't that kind of cheapen the experience?
The reason free works for some games is because they are selling in game cheats through various potions that bypass content or give the player a boost that they could not obtain without playing the game (ie from someone else, buying it from a vendor, etc...).
On top of that, you then have to have an enormous sub base, or a very spendy one or the whole thing fails. This leads to designing content to get people to spend in the store. Some games do this "subtly" while others do it blatantly, but make no mistake ALL games with stores have developer meeting where this method of marketing in the games design is brought up. It is the bread and butter of FTP games, just like product shots and in-movie commercials are. It is big business.
With free, the customer is the one who sacrifices, not the business because in a PTP game, the businesses sole focus is to keep the player subbing, which means providing quality content releases in a timely manner. That means no gimmicks in game play because gimmicks do not serve the best interest of the company. That player should constantly be busy playing the game in a manner that is productive (not pointless grinds for rewards that have no meaning, aka end game WoW).
FTP games focus is to get you to the store to spend cash. That means they create gimmicks in the game (long grinds with poor risk/reward and mundane play, pay walls, or cleverly placed annoyances) so that you feel the need to spend money in the store to be productive.
Free is always bad, because free is never free.
I rest my case.
Linux requires extensive knowledge to use to any extent past casual user. That knowledge is time spent learning it far beyond the laymen OSs out there. You can muddle through windows with little knowledge and still be able to function with some advanced setups, but in Linux, this not the case.
Free is never free, there is always a cost.
By the way, you didn't answer any of the questions I posed? How do you implement "free" without having an effect on content as I mentioned, without allowing PTW or removing game play elements?
One more thing, this discussion is in the context of FTP games, so your point is not valid as it concerns this specific topic.
Yes you can also get a commandline Linux instead which still runs over consoles. But nobody forces you to.
The only reason nobody does so is because computers come with Windows preinstalled and yes, Linux has different programs and most importantly most games dont have a Linux version and sadly often Linux drivers for hardware are slower to get.
As an operating system, however, Linux is far better. The graphic interface is far better. The stability is a hell of a lot better, though Windows has improved massively in the past decade now.
The whole "its free" was a hyperbole. Its cheaper than other alternatives.
And as explained in the link from McQuaid, the engine has a couple quite crucial practical advantages.
The context of my discussion was about FTP games, not OSs, or other unrelated topics.
I specifically stated that FTP is always bad, and is never free. I explained why, even asked questions about how it could be otherwise. That was the discussion, not the derail you went off with.
I'm not too fond of using C# in a computer game, though. Thats when I personally would consider using a lot of C instead of C++ to save the runtime overhead of having exceptions. C# adds on top of that a garbage collector. Computer games are always on the bleeding edge of performance.
Later, C compilers became really good, and the need for assembly started going away. This was a good thing, and it allowed for the creation of more complex games. Likewise, C++ allowed us to start coding really complex games (like MMOs) because of the innate organization of OOP. And a good C++ compiler usually translated your code to C first, and then compiled it, so there wasn't much of a performance hit.
But let's fast forward a decade or two. PCs are really fast now. If you look at what takes the most horsepower in a modern game, it's like 90%+ the graphics. Same with memory. So games rely heavily on good graphics cards that are fast and have a decent amount of graphics memory.
The actual processing of gameplay related functionality, and the actual memory needed to store, say, all of the items or NPCs in an MMO in RAM, doesn't really come up to much. Even complex NPC AI doesn't use a lot of CPU. Even loading in a ton of items, NPCs, quests, etc. into memory only comes up to megabytes -- nothing like the gigabytes used by textures and other graphics assets.
So while C# is indeed slower than C or C++, the advantages it offers in terms of fast development, the built in data constructs like DataTables, Lists, Dictionaries, the garbage collection, not having to worry about pointers, how easy it is to read in and parse data from a database, etc. etc., more than make up for it not being as fast. Especially when it comes to MMOs. MMOs read in a bunch of content from databases (an MMO really has to be data driven), parses it into Lists/Dictionaries, and then you are querying that data all of the time. As an example, I can just do this:
Item myItem = GetItem("FieryAvenger");
Debug.Log(myItem.DisplayName + " : damage = " + myItem.damage + " speed = " + myItem.speed;
Where GetItem uses the item ID as a key in a Dictionary of Item objects (which came from reading in all of the items from the database and then parsing them into a Dictionary).
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but C# allows us to develop rapidly, to read and access game data very easily, and you have all of the .NET functionality as well as easy access to Unity. It's really the way to go. The hit you take in speed is more than worth it.
Plus, there are efforts underway to create tools that would take your C# code and translate it to C/C++ and then compile it. If this is truly realized, it would eliminate the only real negative of C# (the speed).
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Brad McQuaid
CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc.
www.pantheonmmo.com
--------------------------------------------------------------