EQ suffers from what every other MMO suffers from. Unnecessary complexity.

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that those ideas (as well as the graphics) are the reason why the video was slamming Pantheon and calling it the worst game ever. You can justify it all you want but that style of gameplay is the reason why some people are calling the game bad because they don't see players wanting that style of game anymore.

Not sure what it being a last round from an Everquest developer and them wanting to remain faithful has to do with a YouTube streamer calling the game bad because of what they have announced and shown so far. The reasons behind their design don't matter or change how people will see the results of their work.

In the end people don't want the game that Everquest used to be and they want to get rid of a lot of that style of game which should be evident by the style of all the popular MMO's these days.

Pantheon does look like a mix of EQ + WoW + Diablo. The arcade style might bring success on the mass market but the game has already lost its nimbus of being unique. It will be just one of dozens similar games and has to share the market niche with those. I don't see many reasons why players would want to play such a game for more than a few months as most of them have played something like Pantheon already many times before including offline games. A new game that isn't innovative or having outstanding features like uber graphics or deep lore does not have much success today. I cannot see anything like this in Pantheon. It could be a spiritual EQ and Vanguard successor but without the same fascination like in 1999-2005.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PantheonMM...eon_rise_of_the_fallen_is_the_worst_mmo_ever/

"And for context his #2 worst MMO ever is Everquest..."

There is a very small subset of the total MMO gamer community that wants a game as EQ was in 1999 (or anything pre-Luclin) "just with better graphics". They're a vocal minority who declare all other play styles as irrelevant or invalid, no matter how many gamers prefer other styles and choose to play games that are not the frozen in amber game play of EQ of the past. Yes, some of those who prefer that game play do have money and have backed a kickstarter, etc., but that doesn't mean it would be a "good" game in the opinions of a wider number of gamers who prefer a different type of play style. Is there enough who want the EQ of the past game play to sustain a game like that to an actual launch and beyond? I personally doubt it. Some of those mechanics of the past drove some players out of the game when they had options (including me). If EQ hadn't changed over the years since I left, I likely wouldn't have stayed this time. EQ2, too, is far from a total failure as some of the vocal minority would like to believe. EQ Next and the other EQ-related games that were in development didn't make it to full release not because they weren't the game play of EQ of the past. They would have been even less likely to make it to full release or sustainability if they had been.

As for the actual topic of this thread, a game without complexity doesn't allow for different varieties of game play. It doesn't allow a player to "get better" by focusing on deeper mechanics while still being able to play well and effectively in a more casual way. Allowing for both casual and intense game styles to coexist. In EQ, if you don't go into all the little complexities, yes, you're character won't be optimised for a current expansion raiding in a ranked guild with maximum DPS or whatever, but if that's not the game play you want, you don't need to go into all the complexity to still have a usable character for a lot of different kinds of game play.

I've been back playing EQ for a couple years now and have delved into more optimisation for my character(s) as I have wanted to get deeper into a bit of min/maxing, but probably not quite to the extent I have in the past (in a game that's not EQ). I'm not raiding and really have no desire to go back into that type of rat-race game play this round. Because of work commitments and other hobbies/interests, I choose not to have EQ dominate my life completely.

Asmongold is your typical WoW lover, they prefer immediacy over tactics, content they can blast through in 10-20 minutes over stuff that can take an hour.

His comments on graphics are entirely risible given WoW picked stylistic on purpose because it was low poly & would age less slowly than any psuedo-realism would since the pseudo-realistic is the one area of graphics that sees the most progress while stylistic sees next to none as it simply doesn't need it, it side-steps it almost entirely.

The fact he also pretty much despises EQ shows he is absolutely a gamer of the WoW generation & absolutely not interested in what inspired it or what other games were & will be.

The above is what I would suggest is a result of a "generational divide" at this point, but Pantheon seeks to revisit much, not all, of what made EQ the game it was & then take it forward with some of those those old values & add in something new.

One of the topics from that video that I remember is talking about how much time it is going to travel from place to place which not something that most people will be wanting to do in a modern game. There appear to be many things in Pantheon that appear to be time sinks for the purpose of time sinks rather then something to add challenge to the game. There is a reason that a lot of multiplayer games have gone away from those types of time sinks and longer time to get things done. Heck I hear plenty of complaints about how long modern raids take to complete.

Yes they may be a small Group of Gamers who want the old ways back Take Cohh He drop a lot of money on Pantheon. But really if you get why there is two groups There a Group that says EverQuest didn't start the MMORPG World of Warcraft did and there was never a MMORPG before it. So you can see the Divide between the Groups. Like it or not Even Embers Adrift is in the old school MMORPG like EverQuest .

Travel-time is an issue where designers will often clash with certain players.

But the players that clash with travel time are of the most goal oriented type, they aren't interested in pretty vistas, in a world being explored, the majority ofthem just want to hit their personal milestones & anything that causes a delay to them doing that is seen as a friction-point.The players who prefer this would be just as happy with a lobby game.

For other players having a world to explore is a fundamental part of them playing, a zone feeling like a place in a world not merely a staging point. They want to get that tingle from finding a hidden out of the way point of interest and taking in a sight maybe few get to see.

I do agree that time-sinks have to have a purpose and too many time sinks are bad for the health of any game, but not all timesinks will be bad for everyone, travel being a nice example.
That said, fast-travel "options" help to service the desires of more players, those that want to explore can, those that just want a short-cut to the action can. Mounts are fine where zones are purposefully larger, Flying mounts are something that 99% of the time are absolutely pointless except that they allow players to avoid content in most cases and for some players, sure they do want to avoid content.
The only real point of having a Flying mount is if there is "flying mount content" the 3-D space that mounts occupy in flight possesses zero threat, zero content, zero to explore.
Having a zone that has flying hostile npcs in the "air space", floating islands you need a flying mount to reach etc. are things that might give flying mounts some actual point, but then "mounted combat" is a whole other kettle of fish, or can of worms.

One thing that would help the spell gem menu would be if when you clicked on a category, something you can do for... some reason, is that it would stay in that category if you mouseovered something else. Why it is still this way all these years after I quit is beyond me. I started using more spells sets than I ever did back in the day, and use macros to swap to them which I never did back in the day. Part of this has to do with how small parts of the UI are, playing at 1440p ain't the same as 1280x1024 from 14 years ago.

I still have to look up the syntax for how to make and time stuff, and even then I still get it wrong.

It would need to have some ability to lock spells in a spot, there are certain spells exactly where I want them for quick access and not needing more macros. I'd like to be able to select multiple spells to move at once.

God, where's the downvote button? I don't even do anything close to modern group content, let alone raiding, and GINA is invaluable. The game has entirely too many chat filters, no good way of organizing them except one at a time and a terrible UI for doing so.

My brother in Christ, what are you on about? What other games at PoP's time? PoP had such a convoluted way of flagging so you could get into the various zones, not just the top end one. Even when they put in an NPC so you could check your flags, since you couldn't see them, it spat out esoteric gibberish that needed a log parser to convert it to plain english.

Do you not remember what came after PoP? There's one real expansion b/w PoP and what kneecapped EQ in both of its knees, GoD. GoD was a terrible expansion because it was mostly only accessible to raiders because it was grossly untuned for groupers and came out nine months before WoW did.

There is a big difference between having a world to explore and needed to spend large chunks of your playing session traveling to someplace that you can actually play. Not as many players want to spend their limited play time traveling around the world instead of playing the game.

Really That was the main issue GoD was targeted at the high end and you had to be Great to get into the Dungeons or Beg to get into them by standing by the Zone in and spam Chat over and over again.

There is a way to fix this.

It seems to be one of their bigger selling points, not sure if they consider that players don't want to spend time traveling everywhere.

I guess making a in game audio trigger is clearly beyond the majority of EverQuest players. Is what it is, but it is still kind of sad.

It isn't that they can't do it just that having 54+ people have to make multiple audio triggers for each raid along with ensure that there are no typos can be fun. Much easier to have a single person be able to make and share them with the entire raid force.

Of course it is easier to have one person do all the work, but it is not without it owns risks. I disagree with the suggestion that GINA is necessary to play efficiently in the modern game and that there are no in game tools to deal with complex encounters.

And it isn't a matter of people not being able to make audio triggers in game it is that GINA not only makes it easier make and share them but it is much more flexible. When you have emotes that can change and call multiple people it is much harder to make them with the in game system then it is with GINA. For example an event that calls a random number of players with each emote and in a random order each time is simple to make a trigger for in GINA but much more complicated with the in game system.

One thing to remember with GINA you can do regular expressions but you can't do that with the in game system and that makes it useless for a lot of raid emotes.

They seem to want to have players be the solution, i.e. wizards and druids will still have travel spells. But, that isn't a solution for that non-wizard/druid character online for a limited amount of time when they don't have any wizard/druid on speed-dial or none is about. It also makes the entitled players think that the main role of wizard/druid players is to be available when and where they want for that port ignoring that the wizard/druid might want to do other things with their play time. It also makes the greedy wizard/druid players able to amass far more in-game currency just for the porting. It also encourages the acquisition of a second account just to have a porter to go to a location when one has limited game time and the only solo-able place for the character to get XP is too far (timewise) for travel without a porter (that was the reason for my 2nd account in EQ back in the early years). When was the last time in EQ you had players demanding or paying for a port spell from a wizard or druid not in their group? or grouping with one only long enough to get to the location desired but not to have that druid or wizard remain in group though they're level appropriate for the content there? But, for some, that's the desirable "time sinks = challenge" way of game design.

I don't see how people play on progression servers or P99, I just don't get it. Old EQ zones without having a top speed mount or being a bard are just intolerable nowadays. There are so many gigantic zones with basically nothing to do in them that you need to run through to get to anywhere important. Even with a fast mount it feels like such a slog to go through old zones to mess around with stuff.

I used them back in the day when that was the only option in town. Then I used Gam's before I quit, in the time I've played after quitting I went looking for it since I knew that's what I used. Then I found GINA. Being able to TTS stuff and the overlay beats out looking up sound effects and clips of stuff to use like back in the day.