Yes, it’s been a while. What with rebuilding a laptop, lost more managers at work, busy summer at a tourist destination, I’ve had to contend with everything short of an astronomical event. Oh wait, the eclipse was last week.
One of my old Everquest friends recently tagged the whole gang for a link to a new game called Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen that’s in development. It looks exiting, with gameplay being a real throwback to the early EQ days. As someone who was part of the beta for EQ, I remember the early days.
It looks like it’s a crowdfunded effort, with some big names from the original EQ team including Brad McQuaid. So it’s got a good pedigree, and online footage looks great. Only a few things worry me about it.
First of all are the specs for the PC to run the beast. I can’t find them. On the other hand, it’s almost a lock that my current machine will NOT be able to run them (one of the reasons I’ve stuck with console gaming for the last several years). Then again, turned way down I can still two-box EQ in its current form, so I’ve got a shot at it.
But the second thing that concerns me is the gameplay. In my opinion, Everquest became a victim of its own expansions. When EQ first came out, it wasn’t about beating the game, it was about the journey. I was one of the first of my friends to run solo across from Quynos to Freeport. Friends would gather from all over just to get past the first couple of locked doors in a dungeon. Even during the Kunark days, I spent weeks gathering bone chips to give to some lizardman so that my poor human monk could semi safely use the bank in his city.
As the expansions continued to hit, they did two things – they added content solely for the endgame and in an effort to get people to those spots, they dumbed down the game to advance players to those spots. Gone were the days of sneaking around to find someone to bind you near an unfriendly town. Now you had a central plane of existence where you could easily teleport to any of the cities in a flash. Once people had spent days on ‘Epic’ quests to gain awesome items, and they expanded to the point where these same items sit unwanted in the bank. Rather than search the shops in each town for that last spell, just pop into the library and pick up a copy. You didn’t even need to recruit a healer for a quick quest, just hire and NPC to follow you around. He didn’t even want a cut of the loot!
Right now Pantheon is crowdfunding, and promising beta access to those who fund early. It’s got me interested enough that I’m ALMOST going to do it.
Will this be a return to the roots of games like Everquest? I hope so, but we’ll see.
I promise I’ll write about anime next time. No really! While I’ve been less than impressed with the last few seasons, there are a couple of second seasons of shows I’m looking forward to including one that’s seen to it that I can’t get a tune by Aimi Tanaka out of my head.
Old Anime Guy 