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.

  • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    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 assholes people 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.