Some drama happening over at VR and I thought to myself, "Just how expensive would it be to purchase VR in one of those classic Wall Street stock deals?" And suddenly we would have a potential EQ4. Or would it be EQ5? Fun times!
probably not much, i dont know how much you follow pantheon, but after all this development, they have a basic combat system with a pretty world, anyone with minor skills can slap a world together in a week and i can guarantee it will look just as good, if not better than what pantheon has now.
There's no drama. They ran out of money and have no product to show for the last decade. There's a whole one full time dev left.
I think the hopeful player-base of Pantheon (I was one) were investing in a dream and, unfortunately, they had a wake-up call a week or so back with the introduction of 247. I maintain that the innocence of an MMO; the exploring, the community and they wonder and amazement is mostly gone. We, as a player-base, strive for min-max, we ignore items with poor stats, we want to win (mostly) at the expense of others. None of these 'features' of game-play were a thing when we were all just enjoying the original EQ classic. My first raid of Plane of Fear was an 8 hour corpse retrieval helped out by another guild. Nowadays if we'd have wiped, that other guild would have just moved in and looted the mobs over our dead bodies. Remember when /corpse gave people the ability to loot their stuff as well as drag their corpse? Remember when bear form allowed you to loot the boss mob without showing a loot animation (or the text didn't tell you who had just looted a mob)? Remember when you used to read that the rogue had pickpocketed some coin from the mob you were fighting? Remember when Bards could use their AoE to pull entire zones and kill them with a damage song? Remember when root / dot was a thing because the mob could never reach you? Remember when rogues could only backstab from the back? All of these things, and many more, we complained about and had changed. I just don't think we can be naive enough to think that the 'spiritiual' successor (as Pantheon was rumoured to be) was going to work as it was. Heck, even when we saw videos of 247, they were people complaining about how the warrior just stood their doing nothing between each swing against a snake. They wanted EQ , but didn't actually want EQ.
Visionary Realms is not a gaming studio. It is some kind a scam with nepotism hiring criteria. These people working at Visionary Realms are just incompetent. It has nothing to do with budget, or time, they simply do not know what they are doing. -Animators have no idea what they are doing. All the timings are off, characters are stiff as a board. If they don't know how to do animations, you can literally do motion capture with any camera with a 50mm lens. You don't need a $4,000 / hour motion capture studio. The animations are the worst I have seen in any game. None of the characters are properly rigged, the models stretch like play doh. -Gameplay designers have no idea what they are doing. Players rejected Vanguard's travel timesinks in 2007, and the game had to be adjusted. Yet these designers think people in 2023 will accept EQ classic gameplay, 90% of people who say they want classic EQ gameplay are just nostalgia driven, they have forgotten spending 30 minutes getting to each zone, they have forgotten the 2 hour corpse runs. They have forgotten all the frustration, it's a form of rosy retrospection, they have romanticized the game in their head. These animations are horrendous. This is a $400 set-up with old smartphones. Motion capture can be done for pennies. There is no excuse for bad animations in 2023. A $100 smartphone, a garage, a model, and you can easily get fantastic animations.
That's when we get to see Tholuxe Paells' (The God of Lust) Demi-Plane of Debauchery. I cannot see EG7 buying Visionary Realms though, they aren't in a M&A phase and are looking to leverage existing IP's. EG7 is also not like SoE who had a sympathetic Smedley willing to do Brad McQuaid's crew a good turn. Epstein & Ham are ruthless.
