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.
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)