Pantheon - Interview @ BitPulse

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.