Pantheon - Interview @ BitPulse

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BitPulse interviews Brad McQuaid to talk about his next MMO Pantheon.



What new and exciting features are you most excited about applying to the game that are different from what modern MMOs are doing currently?

We weren’t expecting that EverQuest would happen the way that it did. I still get very touching emails about how it touched lives, and I’m very humbled by it. Something magical happened there, that’s for sure, and I think most of it came from the players themselves. It’s been inspiring to me, and we want to see if we can’t get some of that magic to happen again with Pantheon.

I think the whole “secret” there is to promote grouping and socializing on a scale not often done. Humans by nature are social beings and giving them the opportunity to work together, solve problems together and help each other out is a very conducive environment to have some of that early day MMO magic come back.

Vanguard had a lot of that, too. Unfortunately, the launch saw some problems that made it so that only a few of the people who started out were able to continue playing the game for long periods of time. That was on us.

We had to ship the game early due to the funding situation, and were grateful that SOE was able to help out to get it launched. But for those that played Vanguard in its later days, they were able to see how much of the magic was still there in that game.

The experience I had with both games will contribute greatly to Pantheon. EverQuest was a success to levels we didn’t expect. And though we tried to have some of that in early Vanguard, a lot of it couldn’t happen at launch. In some ways I think I learned more from that experience than I did with EverQuest.

I learned how to better handle the stress of large projects and how to manage my own expectations and goals. With a smaller team working on Pantheon, that kind of knowledge is going to be valuable as we develop the game.
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Hope they get a final push on kickstarter that gets them funded. I'd really like to see what he can do, though I'm not at all sure the "magic" of EQ and to a lesser extent DAoC can be recreated.
 
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Hope they get a final push on kickstarter that gets them funded. I'd really like to see what he can do, though I'm not at all sure the "magic" of EQ and to a lesser extent DAoC can be recreated.

It can't. Part of the magic of EQ1 was the mystery. Most people that entered the ice caves did so without really knowing what was in there. Nowadays even on day 1, people that were in beta will post all the information including videos and specifics of every mob in the dungeon. Even if you refuse to see that, you will need a group to get there, and more than likely, the others know, so unless it's instanced randomly generated dungeons (the element I loved the most about city of heroes), it won't feel like how things did back then.
 
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Ayep, the internet combined with plugins designed for disassembling every facet of an online game has ruined a lot of the mystique to games these days. While online spoilers can't be helped, I for one hope they take a hard stance against the use of plugins within the game - they only serve to further tilt the game towards powergaming and away from its more whimsical qualities.
 
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Hard to curb quest for power when players want the game to be a quest for power.
 
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