The problem with streaming a game like the classic EverQuest or FFXI Online, is that most of the stuff you do in a group just isn’t that exciting to watch. I can’t imagine a streamer broadcasting their Karnor’s Castle wall group for six hours of a tank bringing random drolvargs to the group that would then get up from their spell books, nuke and slash a couple of minutes, then sit down again while the tank went out to pull, would have many viewers.
When Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen — a game that at one time hoped to replicate the classic EverQuest experience of camping a spot for hours while someone pulled to the group — decided to focus its playtesting on streamers, I was more than a little dubious. How could they make that camp-centric game play exciting?
I watched a few streams, and the answer was: they can’t, really. Visionary Realms did their job too well.
While VR tried to curry the favor of streamers, behind the scenes they were rewriting the game… I guess it’s been rewritten a couple of times now. Recently, they decided to revamp the art style from their realistic vision to a more casual, less graphically intensive style. A simple lighting system, less realistic characters, basically the style used for mobile and casual games. Palia is a good example. Since I am not an influencer, I haven’t played Pantheon, so these screenshots came from Palia.
So the way I see it, VR decided to make changes to the game that would make it more fun for streamers. Exit camping in one spot for hours. Enter… extraction mode.
I hadn’t heard of extraction mode, before it came to Pantheon. It’s super simple, and my son plays the same mode on Call of Duty. Basically, you start in a lobby, you and your team pick up some missions, and you are dropped into a battlefield. Your team has a limited amount of time to complete the missions and get to an extraction point before it’s game over.
No camping! You can play it solo, so no grouping, unless you want. PvP is optional, but if you want to, it’s full loot! You can keep backup gear right in the mission hub!
The video VR made for extraction mode showed a character doing some harvesting, killing some low level mobs, and then reaching the extraction point. It was exactly like if someone dropped you into EverQuest, told you you only had ten minutes to play, and then you ran around trying to make your time there useful.
Anyway, Visionary Realms, shocked at the negative feedback from non-streamers, backed away from extraction mode and said they were going back to their original vision.
They should have stayed with 247 Extraction Mode!
Here’s the thing. Non-streamers are never going to play Pantheon. The game is effectively dead. They have almost no staff, no money, no artists. They were previously, I guess, using Unity store bought assets, and now they are not, likely because it cost too much to use them in a commercial product. 247 Extraction Mode was a gamble that they could make some gameplay that streamers would enjoy again in order to get them some more money.
The first half decade VR worked on Pantheon, they were just implementing stuff as fast as they could to have more stuff to show to streamers, with no thought to how well the code worked or how well the code could be expanded. So they had to rewrite everything. I guess their plan was to buy as many assets as they could from the Unity store, including, most likely, Unity’s infamously cranky netcode, and then put a Pantheon skin on over it.
I don’t have a problem with that. No sense spending time reinventing the wheel. All that time rewriting and having nothing to show, though, hurt them with their target audience — streamers — and was doing nothing to make the people who’d paid them money feel that they were going to be able to play the game anytime soon.
With 247 Extraction Mode, though, maybe the streamers would have come back and sparked interest in the game again, enough interest to bring investors and player whales into the fold. Maybe Pantheon would be a game I could play at some point.
Sure, the game would have no resemblance to the game they started making, but do we even need the game they were making? I have skin in the game — they have a couple hundred bucks of my money — and for that money, I have got absolutely nothing. I will never get anything from it. I’ve stopped kickstarting MMOs. Lesson learned. But.
An extraction mode game based on fantasy classes would be fun.
But… maybe VR aren’t the ones to make it. The intro video of the character hacking slowly at a mob didn’t make me want to jump in game. EverQuest, after all, still exists. Extraction games like Dark and Darker are fast, exciting, filled with magic and combat, and are very streamer-friendly. If you twist the definition around a little, you could call the FFXIV dungeon instances “extraction mode”. You enter with your own group or get randomly placed into a team. You run through the dungeon and are extracted at the end. I guess World of Warcraft even has that nowadays.
That’s not what Pantheon was meant to be. But, to be honest, what they were building wasn’t what streamers wanted. My YouTube videos on very much EverQuest-like Monsters & Memories have a fraction of the views that I get from even old games like Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis. And M&M is a game I could actually play! And was just pretty much exactly like classic EverQuest! I grouped, made friends I will look for in the next playtest, etc. Still niche. Their company guild is “Niche Worlds Cult”. They know who their audience is. Not streamers.
This is where I stand with Pantheon. If you have something you can release to early access, do it. Even if it is just one zone. Let everyone in. If you can’t… just shut it down. I was excited for Pantheon, once. I’ve seen other teams do the old school EQ model better since. I always felt your love of influencers was misplaced. The actual players were who you should have been courting.
I’d have played 247 Extraction Mode. I would have been happy to get anything for my money.
I’m not a fan of streamers or streaming so my opinion is probably skewed [mind you I watch a lot of gaming-based YouTube videos, but not 2+ hour long sessions of someone playing while attempting to be witty] but it seems nuts to build a game where the whole audience is streamers. Is the idea that you get streamers to play and then the audience thinks “OMG I need to go buy this game?” And assuming this is the plan, does it work? If the audience is entertained by watching someone else play, why do they need to buy the game themselves?
I am probably completely missing the point. But the one time I did get into watching streaming briefly it was a guy (on Mixer!) who played Farm Simulator with a group of friends on a persistent map. I’d put it on while I was at work if I was doing something dumb that didn’t really require much attention or thought. But never once did I think “Oh! I should buy a copy of Farm Simulator” because a) I already had seen what I’d be doing and b) I knew my experience wouldn’t come close to this group’s because they were a group with a tremendous amount of time to devote to the game.
Like I say, I probably have it all wrong and maybe having a game be popular with streamers DOES lead to sales. But I always thought it mostly worked the other way. Streamers glommed onto a game that was super popular in order to pull in an audience, not the other way around.
If they had something playable, they should let players play it. We’d be happy with anything. Not letting a reasonable number of people in just is all kinds of red flags. I played Ship of Heroes a few times, and it was rough, but I was okay dealing with some roughness to get an idea for how it carried the superhero MMO genre forward. Same for Monsters & Memories. I get that it’s early. I can deal with it. Just let me see how you’re doing.
I hadn’t read this before I posted mine so it was complete co-incidence that I also asked the same question today. I mean, what was the problem with 247? Well, apart from the idea they wanted to charge a ridiculous amount of money to play it. That was dumb.
My take is the same as yours: we were getting nothing from the ongoing development of Pantheon and obviously VR wouldn’t even have contemplated making a second game unless they were desperate, so what did the players have to lose? And who knows? It might have been fun.
I’m also of the view that if you really want to play old-school EQ, there’s both EQ itself and Project 99. Given the backlash against the new graphics (Which I prefer, personally.) I don’t think you can even say people want “EQ with better graphics”. What they do want is a time machine or a potion of youth and no game’s giving them that so they’re never going to be satisfied.
Anyway, I think it’s a shame VR allowed themselves to be cowed by the negative response and I hope that, since they backed down, they have a good Plan B up their sleeves. If not, I fear we’ve seen about as much of Pantheon as we’re going to, which for most of us is a few pre-alpha videos on YouTube.
There’s a new video today from a streamer who said he was recently invited to spend six hours in Pantheon. He only had little bits of video, because every clip had to be approved for use by Visionary Realms. I’ll post it on Mastodon.