LuckyCat posted:

Vanguard suffered greatly in my opinion when they instituted the newbie island. I understand that they had to because of the low population but having separate and distinct racial starting areas was so good. I remember starting a half giant shaman and getting really immersed in the lore via the quests and diplomacy.

Groovelord Neato posted:

I jumped into actual EverQuest for a hot minute with a couple friends a year or so ago before I tried P1999 and EQ also did something lame like that.

LuckyCat posted:

The newbie garden I think of most often is Misty Thicket, while I feel most nostalgic for Innothule Swamp. In 1999 as a 12 year old I was blown away by EQ and I’ve not felt the immersion I felt after making my troll Shadowknight ever again. I think that’s most people’s experience with MMOs though. We look back with rose tinted glasses and want to feel what we felt again, but we never will.

LuckyCat posted:

Ah yes the gloomingdeep mines or w/e they’re called. I miss the days of newbie gardens being chock full of new players and old players making alts.

The newbie garden I think of most often is Misty Thicket, while I feel most nostalgic for Innothule Swamp. In 1999 as a 12 year old I was blown away by EQ and I’ve not felt the immersion I felt after making my troll Shadowknight ever again. I think that’s most people’s experience with MMOs though. We look back with rose tinted glasses and want to feel what we felt again, but we never will.

Vomik posted:

I don’t think speed of implementation has any bearing on the quality of the pantheon product. Purely imo

retpocileh posted:

retpocileh posted:

Too bad raiding loving blows, and outside of that you end up without much to do at level 60 aside from farming high end items given that there will never be another expansion.

quote:

The big word around the office lately is “Alpha One.” Today we are going to dive into what Alpha One means, why it’s important and what we are doing to get there. We will list items still needing work prior to Alpha to give you an idea of what remains to be done. This is not a date for Alpha, but a high level scope of work.

You no doubt noticed the subtle “One” succeeding the word “Alpha.” A more traditional Alpha would serve function over form and some of the unessential bells and whistles would be excluded. But Pantheon Alpha will be different. Thousands of people will experience Pantheon for the first time in Alpha. We are in an era where certain expectations are set when it comes to a first hands-on look at a game. For better or worse, we do need to consider form as well. If resources are going into form and function, then we need to be judicious about which features are included at the start of alpha, which are introduced later in alpha, and which, if any, are left for beta. Let me also be clear that the goal is not for Alpha to be representative of launch-ready, but Alpha needs to be much more polished than a traditional Alpha would otherwise require. Do not consider it early access. Unlike early access titles, only a small portion of the game’s content will be available for Alpha One, and several of its systems will only be available as a first iteration.

That is where the “One” comes in. Alpha will have several phases like Pre-Alpha. The sessions will be longer than the 3-5 hour sessions that have been the established norm for Pre-Alpha. In terms of planning, we have now scoped what we feel is essential for Day One of Alpha. These Day One essentials are all part of Alpha One.

The list of essentials is a big one. We know with our current team size that this would take some time to complete. So a big part of this year is exploring options on how to finish Alpha One in a reasonable timeframe. Our current options are to add more resources or to descope some of the features for A1. A little of both will be done before the year is over. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the features that are targeted for Alpha One. This is not a complete list.

1. Classes. We want to add the remaining classes. The groundwork is done for most classes and they are ready to start receiving their ability sets, but there are a couple unique functionality class abilities that require extra consideration. I’m looking at you, Ranger and Summoner. It is still possible that A1 will not launch with all classes, but will have at least 9 of the 12.
2. Pets. This goes hand-in-hand with Classes. Pets need to come back into the game in a scalable, sustainable way.
3. NPC Combat Awareness. Short description: better AI.
4. URP and Networking. Big asterisk on this one. Let’s come back to it after the list.
5. Basic Guild functionality.
6. Perception System fleshed out. We’ve seen the basics. Time to add in the skill framework, Tome of Keeping and path(s) of progression.
7. Harvesting and Crafting needs to be fleshed out.
8. Banks to keep all your loots.
9. Further refine Acclimation. More climates and atmospheres to be added as well as more functionality for them.
10. More work needs to be done on climbing. It needs skill-based functionality so you can improve in climbing. Some other considerations are being tweaked along with it.
11. More dispositions need to be added. We’ve seen pyrophobic. Many more are coming.
12. We would like to add the capability to load ability/spell sets so you don’t have to spend a ton of time manually selecting spells & abilities you have already saved to a loadout.
13. The return of swimming.
14. We need an LFG tool for people to find or fill groups.
15. More factions are being worked on and implemented as we speak.
16. There needs to be some sort of onboarding for new players. We don’t want to hold anyone’s hand, but we do need a way to show players how to play, particularly with systems like crafting.
17. More player and NPC models needed.
18. More animations needed.
19. More audio, better audio.
20. We are shooting for complete, non-grayboxed zones for Alpha One to represent a level 1-30 experience. The full zone list will be available closer to A1 launch. Alpha One will not be all of Kingsreach as we had previously set as an early goal. More zones will be added in later Alpha phases, some of which you have already seen in early forms, others will be all-new.

Some items may be missing from this list for a full alpha experience. Please keep in mind that this is only a list for Alpha One. Day one of alpha is very different from the last day of alpha before heading into beta, which will have the remaining features and content we have outlined in the past, such as all of Kingsreach.

Now, let’s go back to that big asterisk of the URP and Networking. Converting the entire project to a Universal Render Pipeline allows for better performance, more advanced shaders and simplicity in creating shaders. The Networking component is in preparation to support the thousands of players we have coming in. The engine is complete and smashingly performant, but it still needs to be integrated. These are BIG tasks. They are going to take our lead programmer’s attention for several months. So right now Kyle and Rob are getting some tooling in place so that the rest of the team can keep working when he goes heads down into the Universal Render Pipeline and Networking stuff.

This means that much of the progress will be in the code, and not stuff we can show on screen. The other work will still be done in the background, but until the URP and Networking are done it will be difficult to show. This primarily affects PA testers and streams. However, there is a ton of content already prepared that we can show and test during that time. Just don’t expect big zone reveals or anything like that until after the URP and Network updates are done.

We will keep you updated from month to month with the status of the above items and more. Once we are certain of a date, we will publish it. We won’t publish it until we are 100% certain of that date. So please don’t expect to see a solid date soon, but do expect to see the progress as we move forward.

hobocrunch posted:

Will he turn around say- "I had to scrap the entire perception system because of systemic failures in design" ?

quote:

We know with our current team size that this would take some time to complete. So a big part of this year is exploring options on how to finish Alpha One in a reasonable timeframe.

Ehud posted:

Great news, everyone! It sounds like Alpha One is right around the corner!

https://www.pantheonmmo.com/news/producers-letter-march-2021/


lol jk it's not even close

Kaysette posted:

lmao at that “to do” list

Ehud posted:

13. The return of swimming.

hobocrunch posted:

So they're selling JPEGs on their store now?

https://opensea.io/collection/visionary-realms-pantheon-store

I don't get it. You buy the screenshot?

But I have it here?

Zaodai posted:

All we need to do is figure out the rendering, and then start coding the networking for our MMO, and then we can figure out how to tie all these other systems into it, once those are also made, and then bam, game of the year!

How do you have nothing for the networking part of your loving MMO done? Shouldn't that be like, step zero?

Groovelord Neato posted:

Why not change the title to something good now that Brad has shuffled off to the Plane of Tranquility.

quote:

This is not a date for Alpha, but a high level scope of work.

cmdrk posted:

I guess I've been following Star Citizen too long because those notes look reasonably well scoped comparatively. They should start selling sword jpegs like real AAAA titles

milkman dad posted:

So it's not clear to me how contemporary MMO games handle this, but for Everquest emulation there's 3 servers: the login server for authentication, the world server for connecting zones together, and the zone server for handling most of the "game" stuff (interacting with mobs, etc.). It's quite possible they coded the game in such a way so you can interact with a small number of players (<<100) but isn't optimized at all for connecting everything together and interacting.

Freakazoid_ posted:

Thanks for giving them the idea, now we know they read this thread!

milkman dad posted:

So it's not clear to me how contemporary MMO games handle this, but for Everquest emulation there's 3 servers: the login server for authentication, the world server for connecting zones together, and the zone server for handling most of the "game" stuff (interacting with mobs, etc.). It's quite possible they coded the game in such a way so you can interact with a small number of players (<<100) but isn't optimized at all for connecting everything together and interacting.

Groovelord Neato posted:

Why not change the title to something good now that Brad has shuffled off to the Plane of Tranquility.

Kaysette posted:

someone post something funny and i'll change it

Kaysette posted:

someone post something funny and i'll change it

I said come in! posted:

I would be so pissed if ... I was investing a significant amount of money into this.

Kaysette posted:

someone post something funny and i'll change it

retpocileh posted:

"We will be spending the next year thinking about how we're going to do this thing"