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.
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.