Pantheon and MMOs like it are bringing our dream future one step closer (or at least, Lt. Barclay’s dream future), Brad McQuaid suggests in a new interview this week. MMORPG veterans know McQuaid as a pioneer of the genre, first with EverQuest, then with the stalled and now sunsetted Vanguard, and now with the upcoming MMO Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.
“I want to be immersed, I want to escape into a fantasy or sci-fi world. [MMO developers are] making the very, very early foundations of the Holodeck. Letting people recreate the 1930s or build new virtual worlds – that’s what MMOs are, they’re the genesis of that. Because they involve real people and that social aspect, because they’re so immersive – and will be even more so in the future, with VR coming – I lose myself in them. I don’t sit there thinking I’m playing a game; I’m really there. And that’s what interests me.”
McQuaid says the MMO is not dead and that he’s working to change that perception by catering to an “underserved” audience of virtual world gamers and “abandoned MMO fans.”
“People think the RTS is dead, old-style MMOs are dead, that everyone wants an easy game, that no one has an attention span anymore and wants to just hop around,” he notes. “That may be true now that the games space has grown an order of magnitude since EverQuest, but that doesn’t mean the group of players that do want a more involved, social, challenging game don’t exist. Maybe since the pie is bigger, they don’t occupy as big a space. But they’re still there, and they feel orphaned right now, they feel left out.”
Definitely worth a full read over on GI.biz, as there’s more on business models, community matchmaking, and the changing gaming landscape.
Only heard about his today when some of my Secret World cabal started talking about it . Looked up a bit of information on it must admit it sounds like something I would want to play .
What an incredible stretch. I bet this guy loves patting himself on his back.
No Brad. You are not creating early foundations of the Holodeck. Not even a little.
“Spock?”
“Yes, Kirk?”
“Kill ten rats.”
“That is illogical, captain.”
*eyeroll*
I feel this way. :(
Dat stream today tho. Wow. Pantheon has made HUGE strides towards becoming a real contender in the MMO space. Very impressed.
Do you mean stream linked 2 posts above? Because graphics they shown looks pretty bad for todays standarts.
Maybe compared to BDO or something but other than that It is looking good.
It looks like Oblivion. Oblivion was made 11 years ago. rofl
I can see it now!
It will be glorious
KICKAZZ! The Son of God liked my hastily slapped together snarky picture!
I find it highly amusing that he wants to feel “immersed” yet his current game project (Pantheon or whatever its name is) has the graphical fidelity of 10-year-old game…
I guess you haven’t watched the stream which has just ended on CohhCarnage Twitch channel.Then you know nothing John Snow :)
He had another visually good looking game called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes that he sold to SOE because of a lack of faith by Microsoft, I’ll say I know more than some.
Vanguard was never a visually good looking game. Even amongst it’s fans, they game was always considered fugly. Game world was ok, but avatars were atrocious. That said, many of the mechanics of the game were remarkable. Which is why people still talk about the game.
By the time it was free to play, sure. But it offered character customization that was well ahead of it’s day and was pretty by everyone I talked to when it released.
McQuaid can do neat things, it’s if they actually get made and finished that I have a problem with, especially when it isn’t a big studio helping him finish.
There are other things at play to create immersion. For example modern mmos use half their budget on visuals, which could have been used to create a better game with more immersive systems.
By leaving nothing to the imagination and in turn targeting the hop around short attention span players, you also remove some of what creates immersion, which is filling the holes with your own imagination. To get more immersion you only need to get the player to believe in the setting and what is happening to the character they play (suspension of disbelief), for example to have minimal gamey concepts that take the players mind out of the game setting.
On edge visuals that eats half your budget brings very little immersion per $ while at the same time moves the audience demographic towards short attention span players.. instead you could use those resources to create a deeper and more immersive game experience.
Which is what Pantheon is doing and so visually “good enough” in exchange of better game mechanics is exactly what the target audience wants.
And last, they have hardly begun doing visuals as that is late in the process, so much can change till launch.
Go watch today’s stream and see the visual overhaul.
I did watch the stream (just like previous streams). It still looks terribly outdated and absolutely not what I’d call “immersive”. That’s just my personal opinion, of course.
Well then you need your eyes checked because it looked pretty damn good.
Need to add another “very” or two (or twelve), but otherwise agree.
Exactly. Word by word exactly. MMORPGs are VR predecessors and heralds.
Also agree that hardcore players did not disappear, just overall number of players is much higher now.
What saddens me is that this conversation has to be brought to light (again) in 2017 when the feeling of an early true VR fantasy world was better captured in the late 90’s early 2000’s.
It went so wrong, so fast.
Alas! It is the truth. And reign of WoW did not help. Every second developer tried to mimic gameplay model and squeeze money out of it.
On the other hand – we WILL see those holodecks. Crowdfunding gave a new start to things impossible before.
I agree with his assessment as well. I also like his quote because that is the same way I feel about MMOs. Though I’ve yet to buy any of the current generation equipment, I’m very excited for VR and AR future.
For me it was question of time, really. And VR…
In Everquest it was there. No helmets, graphics just ctawled out of the woods into 3D (I remember a guy saying that isometric engines is all we need – everything else is overkill, ha!), bandwith was laughable compared to the speed we have now. And yet people had total immersion expereince. Human mind is most powerful engine, truly – books and tabletop prove it.
And that’s where the problem is. It’s not players, it’s not hardware. It’s games. For a decade we had that blasted themepark idea reigning over everything – a railroaded expereince inside static decorations. Now it is different – people try to build worlds again. I hoped for EQNext to break into next generation, but that obviously will not happen. Well, we have a number of games that clearly threw themepark model out of the window yet still maintaing sense and purpose (not fan of ‘true sandbox expereince’ either – world should live, not just be a static playground).
We’re getting there. Not this decade, but next – most assuredly.