Now… I’m gonna try to create this post while letting only very, very little of my TITANIC rant about the death of immersion in MMORPGs leak out.
I hadn’t heard of this game until today, I saw it on Steam, saw that it was an MMORPG, saw that it actually had really good reviews, and that peaked my interest. I’m an old school WoW player, by which I mean I played Vanilla WoW when it was current (though I started playing in 2005/2006 when I was not yet an adult), but I am unlike quite a lot of other WoW players in that what I miss the most about the early round of MMORPGs is that the key ingredient of those games, of the whole genre, was that they were meant to be a much more immersive kind of video game.
These days you can’t even say the word around most MMO players without them mocking you for it.
So then I see this game Pantheon, and it’s obviously inspired by early MMOs, but it seems like most of the focus is on its tactical, social combat system. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing of course, but an MMORPG should be radiating personality, it should be inviting to lose yourself in the depths of its setting. Meanwhile, this game seems seriously lacking in any kind of distinct atmosphere; almost the models, monsters, buildings, environments I saw look stiff, bland, and entirely lacking their own character. The list of playable races: 
is almost entirely stale as fuck cookie cutter fantasy shit (I’m so goddamn tired of “human, human with pointy ears, short human, even shorter human”) and so these things are a pretty big turn off for me.
Basically I’m trying to find out if anyone here plays it, likes it, and could sell me on it, because if it actually is good, it would be nice to have something good to play. Especially while being in need of distraction right now.
Oh a fellow oldschool WOW player. I started playing WOW a couple of months after release and kept playing it on and off till Burning Crusade. I more or less stopped completely around Wrath of the Lichking. I did play a couple others over the years back then , biggest besides WOW was probably Guildwars 1.
Honestly I fucking LOVE MMOs on paper. Its just I would rather spend my time playing many different games these days instead of putting all my time into One MMO (Which is what would probably happen).
I dont even know what / which one I would want to play though in the year of our lord 2025 . I think I would prefer something else than modern WOW.
I have never heard of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
EDIT: Im making a thread.
Ok. I might give Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen a closer look. Not saying im gonna pick it up but im curious now. Steam reviews are positive so thats a good sign for a MMO- still early access though.
Mind talking a bit about the death of immersion in MMORPGs ? Seems to be something you care about
But I cant really comment on that topic since I havent played MMOs since like 2008 (which is ages ago). Im not really in contact with modern MMO culture or MMORPGs
I might start a new MMO this year though.
Well, I really don’t want to get too into it because it’s one of those things that I have a lot of strong feelings towards, and that means that working through those feelings to get to the actual core of what I want to express is a long, arduous process, which is also taxing on me.
But, basically, the original primary appeal of MMORPGs in the pre-WoW era was that you were meant to lose yourself in the world that the developers presented to you. I remember this being a HUGE part of advertising for MMOs back in the day, and a huge part of their development. It wasn’t just about grinding for rewards, flashy weapons and armor and mounts and what-have-you, and it CERTAINLY wasn’t about being the “best competitive player” - all that stuff is a toxic development that came out later as a consequence of the
assholespeople calling the shots at Blizzard/Activision, contrary to what the popular “Why it’s Rude to be Bad at World of Warcraft” video essay has convinced so many people of - that it was just a natural social consequence of the genre - the elements that turned WoW (and by extension all MMORPGs) into toxic, competitive grindfests didn’t just sprout up from player behaviors, but rather were engineered by the people with the power to literally control everything in the world they were building.Yeah, see, I’m already rambling but I don’t want to put the time in to clarify myself, haha.
Just as an example of what I’m saying though, Star Wars Galaxies predated WoW, and it had not only player housing which players had tons of freedom to decorate and stylize for themselves, but you could also have a spaceship which you could also decorate to your own tastes, and go on space cruises with your friends. On the flipside, players have been begging Blizzard for player housing for more than 1.5 decades at this point, but it’s never been properly implemented, because the developers would rather perpetuate the toxic, competitive grindfest than build an immersive, social world for players to sink themselves into.
I mean I really could go on forever, but I’m gonna drop it there.
I can’t say much on pantheon, I’ve heard of it but it didn’t grab me enough to follow it like other projects. I’ve been following Evercraft which is a blocky EverQuest in progress (played during one of their alpha test weekends and it seemed promising) and legends of old; a free EverQuest clone in progress.
Ascension wow has a server in testing right now for a number of custom classes which has been interesting so far. (Other than that there’s project 1999 wish is just old EQ for all the good and bad of that. When I did play it I was able to get pick up groups in zones for leveling)
If pantheon rise of the fallen is the project that was formerly pantheon then it’s trying to recapture and expand on evercrack. A game before your time with locked first person, no maps, a skill to know if you were pointing north, and doors you had to click on.
I actually love evercrack and have been meaning to see if pantheon recovered from a design lead dying.
One of the primary things evercrack players miss is how outside of a couple of classes you pretty much couldn’t do anything alone and it was a sloooow game. Consequently you would chat a lot, RP servers were common and often awesome. A different era, when that there was a digital avatar standing there and animating it was like another whole human being on the other side of the world was just radicool.
edit: I can’t comment on the specifics but sometimes highly stylised and basic graphics actually invite imagination to take over. It’s like ASCII based games, a green ‘D’ is so obviously not a dragon that you fill it on to your satisfaction, but a detailed one can’t be imagined over so easily. It’s hard to explain, but I find myself more drawn into something like runescape or everquest than wow just because they’re so obviously primitive representations of something I can imagine the thing being more fantastic. Whereas e.g. the barrens can only ever really be what was shown.
