patheonmmo-interview-youtube-transcript-oct11-2020-theoryforge

hello and welcome to theory forge i am phantom x joined as always by diggs and the legendary neurotoxin thank you for joining us on the end of your weekend here on a sunday
we are joined by a guest a special guest chris joppa perkins creative director of pantheon has kind of came to join us to just talk about development
i think in general but also a pantheon of where we are and i try to convince some of the group on my or some of my members here to dig specifically of why we should play pantheon
chris thank you for uh joining us
yeah it's my pleasure been five years since last time i was here
yeah i was about to say that this is sort of unusual
yeah we we sort of have had um kind of i want to say one-off discussions we've had other developers on a few times but for you yeah it was for those who haven't watched us just a quick background we've been doing this since 2014.
um you know it's about six years now um started with everquest next but along the way have sort of branched out and done other things and it was april of 2015 uh that joppa was with us and actually talked more so about i think music and mmrpgs but also pantheon so this is very different uh because we get to see you five years later and pantheon five years later which is kind of cool actually
so one i just have to say i was not prepared for how pretty bunch this feels [Laughter]
even just him looking down as he said his cut sets his cup down it makes it serious just look into the camera nice i'll also say we're a little unusual for those who don't haven't watched this before this isn't necessarily going to be some question by question interview tough you know questions we'd like to just have conversation basically so i think there will be some tough questions but i think there will actually be some interesting answers and um uh yeah

i'm surprised by uh getting prepping uh for this discussion i started watching um some more recent gameplay and uh i was a skeptic i've been a skeptic pretty hard skeptic for five years which is why it's like why even do a show cause i'm probably not gonna play this game um and primarily because it's too close to uh vanilla everquest
it feels like it when i look at the combat um but um yeah looking at recent gameplay there's some interesting concepts um i'm not sure that i still want to do the combat but there's other stuff that i'm interested in that we'll get into and
actually i really did like the um the pantheon rise of the fallen logo this uh background that you had up phantom x that was uh pretty cool looking so even the the branding is is pretty cool yup suddenly had quite a bit of a facelift and that's that's kind of a you know a good just kind of general way to talk about um the project is that you know a lot of people forget that uh pantheon started even before i was here as a um a crowdfunded project that didn't meet its original goal and therefore from the very beginning you know we talk about like funding you talk about um you know the what we've had to work with resource wise and it's very iterative very very iterative and
we can get into more detail of that as we go along but you wouldn't you wouldn't think of something like branding or logo to be part of that but it very much is and you know recently been able to to see a nice facelift on that but we can get into that more detail later but glad glad to hear that you've been able to catch out catch more yeah so actually

i'd love to know more about your kind of history with rpgs like what were you what first got you into rpgs what uh you know way back and um kind of your rpg philosophy and i don't know how you um got connected with with with pantheon so i'd love to hear some of your background
sure yeah so for me it was uh my love for rpgs began with some of the original console games i guess you could put in that uh category so um and i would say just my love for games in general came from um just feasting on games like um legend of zelda super metroid mega man final fantasy secret of mana um these games that i would spend just hours and hours and hours and hours of my childhood not only playing but then in the backyard pretending and you know getting friends together and drawing them in school and you know coming up with new mega man characters and like that whole world um and my childhood too apparently yeah yeah man and it's still very fast my childhood that's depressing um but then i guess like rpg wise you know a little bit of pen and paper stuff like came into that i know my my brother was was big into d and got me my first monster manual and you know introduced the whole world of miniatures and you know kind of things like that i still remember out there with the black primer spray primer you know getting my miniatures ready to paint and um so that that kind of was introduced but really it all came to a head um with everquest whenever quest launched and i think it was the it was it was the i mean the first of its kind for me in terms of this idea of being able to create a character and become a character i mean i have these in kind of embarrassing memories of like you know a yardstick that i like taped up the bottom of it and made like a sword out of it and i remember literally just listening to everquest music and like becoming you know in my basement like the paladin that i had created um and that sense of being able to like take ownership of this character and lead this character and guide this character and be this character in this virtual world with so many other different people and the way that you know you just drank like adventure in you drank knowledge and experiences and discoveries and at that point in time because it was all so new and so fresh and that first sense of this kind of unbridled virtual world um it just had it had a an unbelievably deep like mark on me and resonated with me very much
um i'm gonna interrupt you real quick um one of the things that i loved about everquest so i was working at um activision when that came out and jens anderson uh who's the creative director for dcuo was working there at the time and he was the one who told me diggs you have to play every request everybody was playing uh ultima online at the time and i wouldn't play it because i'm not a i'm a care bear and there's way too much pvp and you can imagine game devs and pvp and how that that was going going down um uh but what i loved about jumping into everquest initially uh where i was the early mobs were cobalt pups and i was running just running past and one of them just clobbered me while while i ran past the temple ogling a temple or something like that and so i was like kill on site for kobold pups and cobalts for years after that but what i loved about it was the the cobalt pups would um howl and i would literally orient where they are by sound so i'd run through an area and hear it hear them yelling and like pan around and go ah i'm going over there and just that added element of um the auditory and being able to do that kind of sensory um navigation was so completely new for an rpg like it really version like that immersion really felt real with vanilla everquest of all things which seems crazy now looking back 20 and 20 years later but at the time and the graphics at the time were pretty stunning um oh yeah i mean
for what was available so it really did feel like i was you know navigating through a dnd world at the time maybe you should have been there for our first show and music and sounds well it's funny too because the other piece of that you're what you're describing there was the the statement you made about not only was it was it new and and exciting and interesting and immersive to be able to to orient yourself and another entity based on the sound but it's just your comment of okay i'm going over there so this i think what made everquest so uniquely impactful was also the the maybe more so than before because to go back to like um you know probably in dnd campaigns you would have these experiences quite a bit the fear of death the fear of consequence you know the fear of a wrong decision um but you know in in all the games at least for me that i described leading up to this point you know the game over was not fun and in some cases a game over was frustrating but everquest was the first time it introduced this idea of like like being gripped almost by fear of either either like a deep respect for something like i'm i'm going over there because i don't want to get anywhere near this thing first time you see a hill giant you know and hear those footsteps it has a big effect because you don't want to die and you recognize your your weakness in your place in relation to this massive entity that lives in this world that's much bigger than you are that is untamed um and i think that's the other key too with everquest is it is it introduced this idea and i think it's it's held true and

it's certainly one of our major kind of defining tenants is that that that that tension that level of tension is so necessary to creating a world that is exciting to inhabit um i think when you as a player we talk about player agency a lot and there's lots of different facets you can discuss that topic with but um the more you give players a um thicker and thicker buffer between this this world as a whole whether it's the npcs or the environments or whatever it may be um the thicker you make that buffer between like death and consequence and risk um i think you start losing a tremendous amount of the heart and the spirit of the game in the soul of the game and that's one of the things we're really excited to bring back and not just bring back but really you know kind of almost in this kind of renaissance type spirit like say like this this this kind of game this kind of metric um deserves a a prominent place in in the genre it deserves a prominent place in like game experience um so i can go on that for a long long time you know i i actually wanted to get your opinion on something then um yeah

i feel like uh what was the project gorgon i don't know if they changed the name at some point but uh that one had kind of an interesting sort of thing where everything you did you'd get experience for even if you failed and got turned into a cow you could level up as a cow if you died constantly you'd get better at dying you'd be able to do more stuff as a ghost so i felt like that was kind of like the inverse it was you know instead of there being a penalty for exploration a penalty for failure it's that you open up a different avenue of gameplay for a moment until you kind of restore yourself one way or another or settle on whatever form you've kind of come back in and just kind of play with that for a while so that's that's kind of one of the things that i wonder about is on one hand to be able to make the experiences where there's a lot of tension and there's a lot of you know danger to it but unlike a dnd campaign that's being curated by a dungeon master they have the agency to say when and where monsters occur and they could be rolling dice to determine whether there's an encounter or not but even in that you know it could be whether they're ready to ambush you whether you ambush them you stumble upon them you know both notice each other at the same time there's an opportunity to just sneak by you know there's there's a lot more consequences that they can apply you know even if they just kind of trust the dire roles for what the encounters are going to be so i feel like that's one of the elements that you know it's it's almost impossible to uh replicate in an mmo sort of environment unless you actually have something where uh i don't know i guess the world is somewhat responsive to players in an area trying to you know complete an objective of some sort but

what do you what do you kind of think about all of that in terms of like players being able to explore more and try things and it's okay to die versus you know definitely you've gotta you gotta be very very cautious with what you do because there isn't someone watching you over your shoulder to make sure like you know the encounters are fair for for your level or whatever
it's a good question i think one way you can respond to that is one way i could respond to that rather is if you take that too far and i don't mean too far in a negative sense i just mean once you've taken that beyond a certain point i think you're really starting to potentially shift into a almost a different style of game um you think of something like a roguelite type game where there's actually impetus there's encouragement there's incentive to die even though you're trying to get as far as you can and i love those games um hades is a great example it's a wonderful game if you haven't played it yet um but uh so and that's what i mean by not saying it's not a negative like that's a very powerful game experience um but i do think that invariably it it's going to whittle away it's going to cause you to to see death in a completely different way and so the question really becomes is that the way that you want death to be seen is death an opportunity is death uh a pathway to greater advancement and i i think you could we i mean it's funny this actually we're talking about this because this came up not too long ago in that um you know i'm i've i've been for some time intrigued by the idea of of you know if you take something like world of warcraft's death penalty or even you know what i've seen in pro falls where you kind of have this different form that you take on and you come back to your body that way but it's very passive it's very disconnected you know you're just traveling but if if death actually if death was something that there was another i can't remember it was it a conan game where you had to like fight your way out or there's some game i think it was a conan game um where you if you died you had to fight your way out to like kind of get back to your body and the thought was just you know be actually kind of cool if if when you died you had to fight your way out but not just as this punitive like tedious exercise every time but there was actually like a unique kind of experience you could get in that state and unique equipment and unique things that you could actually progress in advance to where that became easier and easier but also that opens the door to later content releases even expansions all themed around whatever this realm would be where now actually like that's how you access that realm and then whatever you're accumulating item wise ability wise level power wise whatever it may be that it becomes this whole new point of content so um but again i i would say the the and i'm not saying that's something we're planning on doing i'm saying it's it's an idea but uh the more you take something in that direction the more you embrace that then i do think that it it it can it can risk um having a negative effect on the overall sense of danger and sense of risk and tension but you bring up a good point too because the the higher you crank that knob then you know you you and this is where we're trying to look at our death penalty carefully because pantheon is so deeply about exploration it's so deeply about discovery and if if the game is tuned in such a way and death is is so severe that you can't actually do that then we're kind of working against ourselves and so that's i'm calling that something that is just a part of the development process as we get further along and um something we're watching carefully but it's a really interesting discussion yeah

i think i think uh this is kind of getting into who's playing uh who who the specific audience is because the mmorpg audience is so massive um and um i'm a i'm a casual player what do i say i'm casual challenge hardcore time um so i'm primarily playing for the story the exploration uh and and and hanging out with other people who are other characters other players who are playing characters in this world with me i want to see what they're wearing and the decisions that they're making in and hanging out with them to put two of the things you spoke about recently together one of my favorite memories in um vanilla everquest was playing a halfling druid um i was out adventuring and i'd come back to town well i was coming out of town i think and right at the gates were a party sitting down uh metting and um and i healed them i healed them up to full and uh said good job of the dead did my good deed now i can go back out and explore some more and i turn around and i bump into a pair of something knees and i look up up up up and it's an ogre or a hill giant or something and it one shot kills me with one slam but just even the mechanics of that just tilting up to say what the hell is this thing um was awesome but that's an awesome story it's an awesome memory it's one of my favorite memories in an mmrpg and the risk of that wasn't really a factor and the um penalty of that was not really the um the factor that is gripping me um but again i'm in it really for the story not for the game aspects of it

um and so that's really and i would will say that i jumped from eq to wow because uh world of warcraft in so many different ways was just easier to play um um i uh i mean graphics wise uh exploration wise like uh moving from zone to zone was much more fluid um so many ways so that ease of gameplay um for me as a casual challenge player is kind of what i'm looking for um but again that's the audience so if you're going back to an eq audience or a uo audience then they're probably going to like having death penalties that are stronger and more meaningful and more risk versus reward word type stuff um yeah there's a lot to there's a lot i could unpack with that too um but i don't want to just keep getting on these long places that's why we're here no we ran we have as long as you have yeah um yeah and so so but

you said that that pantheon is about exploration so in what ways and we should at some point bring in the perception system which i just uh our perception can i real quick can you hold that thought
i just just won this death penalty uh just my own two cents we did a show about this couple actually i think that's what you you saw chris was talking about that yeah because i was kind of comparing pantheon's community versus ash's community and how they see death penalties um you know for people and i assume everyone that's taken the time to watch us and you have also watched this video on youtube but there's a you did a panel at pax it was i think the future was the future of mmrpgs or something and so i've always been in this point of you know i don't mind death penalties but then i get i get internally worried about well how you know how do we keep us a game population up right that always becomes my point of view as well if it's too rough do you drive people away you know i've listened to that that pax show actually a couple of times now and you kind of made some really good points about and digs what you just said about the size of the community of mmorpg players how many there are that listening to that panel and you talk about well there's it really is room for everyone and every little you know we have so many different types of mmorpgs right now that are on the horizon and going to come here that that sort of after watching that panel it's like it kind of calmed me a little bit in this idea but you know it's actually okay to not target i don't want to say everyone because that's not my idea but you know to make things a little bit more tough and i know with challenge what was it

challenge is one of the three kind of things you guys talk about immersion challenge and community but anyways i just wanted to throw that out that that panel kind of changed my viewpoint a little bit so if you haven't watched it i'll link it in the uh youtube and stuff games and development that's not games retaining players where it changed my viewpoint and what what chris had said it's just is that there is opportunity well you know they're the communities are so large and they i guess there just is this opportunity now to extend out and try so many different things and and not you don't have to worry so much necessarily about that you know you have to retain those players and like i said uh in the last show about um shadowbane they were trying to go for get uh we played to crush that was their slogan i think and they were trying to go for this hardcore pvp crowd and they didn't last very long because they couldn't retain enough players to do so so you do have to figure out what your your niche is and it's fine to develop towards certain things but we have to actually get them out and see if we can retain the players to know um if these audiences can sustain the actual concept um but you know because i hear all the time uh complaints from the hardcore pvp crowd that there aren't any games really that are there for them and there's a reason for that nwo tried to you know cater to that crowd but they have to change um so i'm just saying there's you know there's a lot in development but we have we have to see what happens once they release yeah yeah

and i think that i think that really is one of the main points to make is that you know the the toe dipping syndrome where you're trying to like you're trying to please every single demographic because you want to maximize the amount of players that you you know appeal to um that is that is not a wrong mentality like at the heart you know i don't know of anyone who's genuinely creating something who is it would genuinely be able to say like i i don't want everyone who would enjoy this to enjoy this and i want as many people who would genuinely enjoy this for what it is to enjoy it um but you know yeah that's that's that is
the danger is when you start you you start trying to compromise certain things that make what you're making what it is to [Music] try and get as many people over the hump as you can because inevitably you chip away at enough things and all of a sudden you have a you don't have a clear shape you just have a you know a smooth over you know just kind of blob that um is honestly what drives me a lot is um how jaded i had become with mmos uh by i guess 2012 2013 because they there was so much sameness so much repetitive sameness in the experience and the process you know in the one to ten one to fifty end game like it was all so similar different settings you know a few differences here and there but um the question is really like what

what's it gonna take to make something that actually feels fresh and i do think there are a handful of games in development right now that that are seem to be driving towards that same place of like okay we have so many years now of experience behind us games that have come out like how do you actually take these things and not only make it fresh but but really like how what's the path of evolving the things that were actually successful into an experience that is good it's fun it's better um and so uh to back to the point though um the i think there are certain things that are more or less alienating um certain decisions that you can make to be distinct and that are distinctive to your game that are more and less alienating depending on what it is um and i think the handful of games that i reference all have kind of their things that walk that line of this could be significantly alienating to a large portion of people um i think for for and what's funny for example you know one of the things that i actually respect about ashes and um one of the tenants you know that they have a death penalty because again to me the death penalty doesn't have to be like the point of the death penalty is not to be like overly punitive the point of the death penalty is to get you to respect the world and respect the things that are happening to you and um it's it's just amazing like when even in our internal testing you know or some of our pre-alpha tests when we whenever we have turned death penalty off for testing's sake it it's so different you know how people play because you just make totally different decisions um when you're not concerned and so while i think that how far you turn that knob of severity can get into some seriously alienating uh area

i think i do think that death penalty having a death penalty is one of those things that i i believe can can come to be embraced and and valued by a player base even by those that didn't necessarily know that they valued it before um and i think about that you know when you look at some of these console games like um even something like dark souls and how much of an imprint that has had and how that validified like insane challenge um and granted like we're talking about you know a console game and there's there's a limit to kind of i guess the penalty or the the damage that that the personal damage you can take when you know if you've if a boss kills you for the 10th 15th time but at the same time it's it's that willingness to keep throwing yourself back at the same challenge this is this insatiable desire to overcome um that's part of really what we want to capture and that and that's why i say like the death penalty is something you know consider the death penalty something that that has several knobs attached to it that dialing the severity dialing you know um it it's uh if if we see it becoming something that is when you consider the tapestry of pantheon something that's starting to detract from the other pillars and tenants like exploration discovery like you know characters being able to players being able to more easily find one another don't hear dungeon or raid finder in that statement but ways to facilitate um not diminishing the meaningfulness of travel and you know a world that needs to be navigated and needs to be respected but there are several knobs that you know i think are very reasonable to tune um that maintain risk maintain tension but don't don't alienate beyond the purpose is not to alienate yeah there comes a point where uh because for me um again i'm i'm talking as a casual challenge player um with hardcore time so i'm willing to throw my head at the challenge and defeat the challenge as long as it's not too debilitating so at some point it's gonna become so debilitating that i'm gonna get pissed off and say [ __ ] the challenge i don't i'm gonna go do something else and it might be [ __ ] the challenge i'm gonna go play some other game it might be i'm going to play wow instead of this because it's not it's just easier to play um so yeah i mean i would say for me death penalty have one it's part of the challenge or whatever and then it's it's a matter of degree but definitely there's going to come a point where um because as it's like like with um experience debt or something where you're adding time to my allotted of gameplay or what i want to get out of this gameplay session that's going to start to bug me because i usually go in thinking you know i want to gain x amount of experience or really i want to get this skill in x amount of time that's probably what i'm ramping up to but um

i have not heard what your pillars are so how many pillars do you have what are they and then i'd like to get into some of the concepts of exploration and discovery as it pertains to pantheon because i'm primarily an explorer so yeah
what are the pillars um all right so the main pillars are as got referenced those are going to be our immersion challenge and community those are kind of the the main three pillars and from those three flow you know kind of our tenants and our actual game systems and kind of the design the different design goals and and systems um you started by saying exploration and discovery were your pillars but those weren't in the three that you just listed exploration discovery so this probably is going to sound convoluted because i'm saying this verbally instead of like looking at more of a visual depiction but
when i think of pillars i think of three and that would be immersion challenge and community
our tenants or kind of our um our constitution if you will is what ultimately flows from those pillars so if you think of the three pillars you would have multiple tenants on each pillar that kind of flow from that and then as that serves as our overall game design philosophy and the philosophy that's driving the game that we're making
you should be able to look at a system a gameplay mechanic a feature and like follow that back to one of those tenants on one of those pillars that's kind of the idea um would love for us to eventually have you know on the new site a nice visual depiction of that because i believe it's very important and it's just a lot easier to see it um than than explain it out loud but um so [Music] i'm it'll be a little messy as we talk through this because i don't i don't yet have you know at all kind of right in front of me uh in my in my mind but i'm gonna try to i'm gonna try to help you out because i have some uh

you mentioned immersion first and i have questions from well i'm gonna save my uh my uh character creation ones for a little bit later but um uh immersion when you mention immersion and pantheon the first things that i think of now that i've watched some videos over the last week are the perception mechanic and um what's the other one it's dispositions is that a thing that is a thing yeah so those two are the first things that i think about that i'd love to hear more about especially dispositions kind of seems like a uh a kind of story bricks which we are looking forward to for uh eq next um but having npcs having different dispositions is a concept that i think we need to be striving towards more so i'm glad to hear that that's uh i i will probably back pantheon just for that mechanic whether or not i play it or not um but

i would love to hear uh more about uh perceptions and dispositions and how they connect to uh immersion
yeah for sure um yeah and you guys feel free to interrupt me and stop me at any point if you want to add to any of this or whatever but um so we'll talk dispositions first because i think we can we can more quickly just kind of encapsulate that idea um the where it was born what it was born out of was again that the power of hindsight to look back over all the mmos that we've played and the the fact that at some point you are eventually going to have done a an encounter or you know run an instance or move through a dungeon so many times that it's it becomes a groundhog day groundhog day syndrome kind of experience where you just know these are the possible things that can spawn this is the pathing that these things do um this is all you know the loot table of everything and you just learn it now one of the things which i'm sure is going to come up at some point in this conversation but one of the things that naturally uh breaks that up is open world because when you're in an instance you know it is very much just a rote pre-designed curated experience even if there is some variability built into it in terms of like you know the types of spawns or things having different chances to spawn whatnot but
when you introduce other players occupying the same place then you introduce the possibility of unforeseen events like player gets in trouble they start running they run you know somewhere where you don't expect them to be and all of a sudden now there's you know two or three more npcs as part of your overall kind of encounter here that you're dealing with than you anticipated and it automatically changes things but in addition to that because because while that's true it also doesn't account for enough variation or enough potential for variation that you know we were content to say that you know that's probably enough because that it just it's too rare that that happens especially in dungeons that are lower population at even just that time of day for example um so

dispositions was born out of this place of okay how do we how do we more organically change that up where uh you know players are are needing to be aware and constantly aware of the fact that every time they go to a new area there could be uh npcs that spawn with unique not just unique like traits like this one has more strength or this one has more uh resistance but unique behavioral aspects you wait i interrupt real quick because you said new place but it could be old place right any anytime they go anywhere oh yeah that's probably very sad yeah good distinction um it's not a not new place like the first time you go there there's a chance it's like this is kind of woven into the entire world um less or so at lower levels just as as a part of that kind of you know onboarding experience for new players i want to throw too much right out of the gate but um

by level by level 10 certainly and and potentially a little before that certainly the first time you visit your your first dungeon like the first dungeon wherever those kind of dungeons that are designed to be that initial dungeon experience in the different parts of the world that will definitely be a place where you start to see these things but around level 8 9 10 or so as far as the worldwide population you're going to start seeing chances for him to see this dispositions and encounter those um and the unique thing about them is they're it's a behavioral layer for the mpc it is a unique way of the mpc to act or behave or respond that you have to learn and then you have to to contend with and uh one of the examples i like to use is the pyrophobic disposition so um you know helner k for example or um some of the deeper parts of amber fate or some of the other places that um we just haven't talked about or shown yet um especially when you get you know into the deep places of the world and dark places like you're going to encounter a much higher chance of of encountering a pyrophobic disposition which is going to give you certain benefits and advantages towards those npcs but it's also going to cause them to do a few different things you know for example that npc could um cower in fear and that could end up being something you can use to your advantage that npc could also run away in fear and you know very quickly very easily get the attention of some of the other npcs in the area you didn't you didn't want them to um it could even cause them to enrage um and kind of a fight or flight you know uh situation where they end up actually kind of getting stronger and coming at you um and the cool thing about pyrophobic is that it's not just a fireball you know this could be a campfire this could be a torch this could be um you know if you as a player have a burning effect on you and you get you know close to an npc that's pyrophobic it's um it's meant to be very deeply woven into the actual um one of my favorite things that i can't wait for us to to show is as a ranger for example

if you fire an arrow through like a flame and it alights then that's an opportunity to whether you have like fire arrows or not you can use the environment to catch your air on fire stick it into an npc and then boom all of a sudden fire is present and that pyrophobic disposition kick kicks in um present after you stick it into the npc not not before but oh no like as soon as soon as it right it's considered a burning the way you phrased it yeah it's once they ignite no um so anyway that's uh and so you and you'll you'll find something like that that are meant to be more a little bit um just kind of uh maybe the right word for it uh less like combat specific um

we have another disposition uh cunning which uh if something has the cunning disposition then they are very very resistant to um any kind of uh mind-altering effects so charms mesmerize um mind control things like that and then they also are able to kind of snap their allies out of that um if you know an ally is is uh mezzed or charmed then they can break that on their allies um

so several just several examples of different dispositions that are designed to create this unforeseen unpredictable variability um in the experience and then to incentivize players to to deal with those things then um a slightly altered loot table as well so that there's uh or an enhanced loot table we'll say so that you know there's incentive to actually dealing with these and and taking these things out

and are just always negative from a player perspective they're not always negative no in fact uh certain dispositions um thinking for one for example that i don't have we don't have a name nailed down for it yet but the the premise of it is that it's it's an npc that's easily turned essentially to um you know fight for you and so that's that's a less positive disposition on the npc's side but it's one that you can actually much more clearly see and take advantage of as a player um and then certain npcs or certain players even have like the paladin for example have abilities that actually allow you to take advantage of things like that where you can turn an npc into a friendly npc for a short period of time and then actually you know utilize that to your advantage um it's a big big part of how we're building the the combat systems and the gameplay in the class play is to provide as many different secondary and tertiary um again going back very much to a lot of that dnd heart and soul and spirit of like um more unique ways instead of these one-on-one direct combat paths to uh change and alter and experience an encounter to your advantage or deal with a disadvantage um through creative ways it's exciting yeah i'm talking a lot i'm so amazing um is that uh and

this is why i'm saying again that i'll probably back just for that concept itself because i want developers who are actively working on these concepts so that even if this game folds or when people start moving on to new games whatever they have the experience necessary to more quickly implement these in future rpgs um one of the things from story bricks with everquest next that i had been thinking about it was um and i don't know that you can do this in pantheon but again hopefully in later games this stuff like this will happen if you um have aggroed uh these npcs because you've stolen their idol um if you return it they're like okay you return the stolen stuff we're good to go we're not because i'm not a big combat person just for the sake of combat so and i'm looking for ways to get out of combat so i'm going to let these other guys speak but i do wonder if there's a social skills that can get you out of combat and pantheon because that's one of the things i do like about tnd but nero and phantom talk

i actually wanted to know if uh dispositions are something that will sometimes apply to players either for achievement or some of them for a death penalty like if you die to you know a red dragon just incinerating you to death um you'll come back with you yeah for a while yeah exactly so i could see is that the sort of thing that would actually apply or then also i could see cursed items like it's a magic item you don't realize until like you get hit by fire and you start cowering it's like wait a minute am i pyrophobic and you have to go to the squire and they look it's like oh yep you're cursed buddy sorry gotta destroy that sword absolutely and it

so the answer is yes
that is actually planned and
the deeper thing to say about that is um that the reason it's planned is because it's part of an overall goal
which is to make sure that everything that our npcs are capable of and everything that can happen to an npc is also reciprocal to the player um
so that has lots of implications it has implications like what you're describing uh but it also has implications on um you know when you see player abilities that sound really cool and really fun and really deep and complex and then have lots of um synergistic properties that you know can can be uh um capitalized on by other players it's the same with npcs as well and so you're going to see the hope in that is that it's going to be a very deep uh combat system both from the the player side towards the npcs and the encounters with all the different abilities and environmental traversal and um secondary tertiary effects like we were talking about earlier but then also the kind of synergies that players are capable of um
which we talked about just just scratching the surface on the shaman stream we did not too long ago but npcs being able to capitalize on all that as well and being able to sniff for things like that so an npc sniffing for like a uh a burning or a fire effect that they have a a wind base or an air base effect that can fan those flames and you know kind of caused that to get even worse for the player um that

that's the kind of stuff that which is going to get into the combat discussion when you talk about speed of combat and uh you know there there is a a there's a lot of of reason for um this is part of teeing up like some of the the explanation that i'll give you when we get to that point is just the ability to perceive and actually thoughtfully navigate all of these different potential moments and experiences that can happen in combat um when you get more you know certainly in action-based combat but the more um i call it frenetic and i don't mean that as a negative term it just it's just um it's just something fast and kind of a wild and unpredicted way so when you when you get into more action-based combat you get into a little bit more freneticism which is fun but it's it's more difficult the deeper you get into that synergistic and tactical layers of combat to um to notice a lot of those subtleties in those windows and so that's kind of the balance we're striking

um but we'll talk about that a little bit later yeah i mean i like anything you know especially like hearing about the ai and the changes uh disposition things like that anything you know we've got since everquest next and the whole idea of storybrookes that's that's something we have always talked about on our show is how do you advance that forward and so hearing things like this are very you know it's very exciting um you know one of the things there's so many benefits when you start talking about holy trinity and other things and um class even things like class balancing

this is one of the thoughts i have for improvement in ai is that you can also start to maybe one day tune encounters based on party uh composition
you know there's always eventually get six months into a game a year into a game oh you're you're a rope they are useless we're not gonna you know we don't want you in our group they can't do anything if you can start getting ai smart enough to actually adjust the encounter you know on the fly because you have a rogue all of a sudden that changes and so anytime we just start seeing these little steps towards that it's just i think a wonderful thing so yeah and

that kind of thing makes uh an mmorpg something we're more likely to uh talk about because that that's a that's a key point i'm not very much into combat per se but uh character interactions i'm very much into and that includes npcs as much as uh pcs um and uh yeah i mean you know it's just another matter of uh the challenges for the devs and whether we have the tech and the time to add those kinds of things to um the npcs because yeah it would be great if um a disposition could be these people hate uh wizards instead of clerics um or uh hate men instead of women i mean there's all kinds of stuff like that you know a typical strategy is to go for the healer first like down the healer um and then it's easier to take care of the rest of the group but other npcs could have different strategies and if that the more that can be added the better

and it is seeming to me because we're at uh almost the hour mark and we're going to need we're just going to yeah we're just getting started which means i think we're gonna have to have some future shows uh coming up in the next few months so at least talk about it if not uh uh i'm still not sure how much i'll play it but um there's lots of cool concepts that i last week came across that that are really interesting yeah for sure for sure yeah well and i mean just i mean just to quickly say you know we're

we are at the point um where these things are are possible and you know dare i say in some ways kind of trivial in terms of just when you have designed and built um the mpc ai to to be able to sniff for these kinds of things then you have the foundation to to play with that to a great degree um and you know we already have you know for example a mana crazed mana crazed is a disposition that i didn't mention but that is one specifically where you know they will only uh we only think of the terminator essentially like that they will they are immune to taunt and if there's the in the presence of a a mana user they're immune to taunt and they hone in on one and they will absolutely not relent until death um and all the while they're they're draining that that player's mana and every bit of mana they drain is increasing their own power

and you know that's that's a perfect example also just little combat uh mechanics for example like npcs having taunt where if an npc taunts you you you are turned and have to give them your attention and you can't not do that you know because you're taunted and so just even little things like that where npcs can strategize through the tool sets they have even even in their ability to tell whether the a healer and pc is nearby and that healer npc is taking you know health at a certain rate or is has a health that's below a certain threshold then they will know to begin to use certain abilities like taunts like pushbacks like interrupts things that will serve to protect that npc so um we're pushing hard to i mean obviously you can over ramp and overtune that kind of stuff to where combat just becomes too difficult um but it but with with the right amount it it becomes something that i think players will be able to intuitively kind of recognize what's happening and then all of a sudden you're you know you're you're fighting you're just much more intelligent npcs and you have these hosts this host of different ways to deal with what's happening in front of you and uh it's it's really exciting it's really exciting stuff i mean at the most base route like i just would love to have an encounter where you're fighting something that recognizes you have a healer behind you and that that is who i should be trying to kill yeah it's huge it's simple but it's huge uh

you asked about perception how much how long do we have to go tonight like what's our time all right well that's dangerous no yeah we'll we'll stay for yeah my little ones are now in bed so i'm good um what was oh i was gonna bring up uh because you mentioned it earlier too um one of my favorite moments uh to talk about um even immersion and uh feeling uh impacted by the challenges was the first time in eq that somebody um cast blind on me and my screen went black oh man terrifying what just happened oh yeah who unplugged what um yeah those moments and we can't get those back the first time we encountered stuff like that we can't get those moments back um but it sounds like maybe we can maybe maybe that is the thing that you're trying to drive back is i wasn't expecting those npcs to act like that i thought i knew those npcs well and and that gets into some of the um you know there's

there's the capability of npcs to do that kind of stuff but then you know we have our our climates and our atmospheres which you know again another another tenant that flows from both the challenge and the immersion and in some i mean really all three pillars are kind of feeding into our tenants but um

one of the atmospheres that we have is is darkness like supernatural darkness or deep darkness i guess it's probably the better way to put deep darkness which is you know the kind of darkness where you can't pitch blackness you can't see your hand in front of your face and then there's um the reason we've called it supernatural darkness is that there's there's a kind of a a resilience to light it's a kind of darkness that almost has like a thickness to it and so torches and other you know traditional means don't really do much there um and uh and so you know though the opportunities the really fun thing about a system like that is it gives you opportunities to both yes explore difficult combat uh encounters where you know you're relying on sound cues for example to like where is the skittering sound once you fall into like a pit of deep darkness or you climb down into a pity darkness because if you fell you'd probably die but if you climb down then uh you know you can't see you can't see name plates you can't see things down you know in that kind of deep darkness and so you're relying on these visual cues you know really until something is right up on top of you before perhaps you're able to see it um

but then there's also non-combat things you can do with that as well where you're you're having to follow the footsteps or you're listening for soft resonances you know in the the gyms or the different you know veins of of energy that are running through the rock or you know there's lots of really neat ways maybe not to capture some of those very first moments but again so much of this is about taking those and evolving them and embracing them more as like interactive points of of immersion and challenge and and then you think of the social aspect where you know i i i uh i'm excited to to play a game and to watch and listen to other people play a game like pantheon where the the conversation is less about like what abilities and and rotations i'm using in my abilities and more about like did you hear that did you see that like how did you get there where do we go you know that kind of again going back to that table top kind of feel where you're you are socializing more in your gameplay experience and it's not like you're in an arcade game mode where it's just you know um anyway um

you know actually you said something in there that i'm kind of interested you talked about climbing into like a uh a sort of dark expanse or something and i wonder what sort of things can we do to actually affect the terrain and the game environment in the interim can we put down you know put down a stake and tie a rope to it can we put down ladders can some sort of spell casters make like a lift to get people from point a to point b what sort of stuff because one of the things i think of is not just the risk of like i'm you know climbing down into the darkness but it's also how am i going to climb back up well you might up into darkness actually in pantheon if i recall correctly from that too one up and down there's so verticality's big for sure and because of that um

to answer your question the um that can be done in a couple of different ways uh there are a handful of classes that have abilities that can assist with that so the rogue for example has an ability called length of rope which will allow them to drop a rope that other classes can climb down the summoner has an ability called and ladder which would allow them to do the same and then those abilities because because this is an rpg those abilities can be improved and so the length of your rope the length and the material of the rope and the ladder can both be improved summoner also has a summon wall you know ability that they can goes from like you know straw to wood to eventually you know a extremely resilient wall that you can place in the environment to actually block npcs and you know control the the flow of of combat two degree but um

climbing is a bigger topic because climbing is is an entire system in the game and so uh before you even get to ropes and ladders and things like that you have a climbing skill that you can learn and then will improve over time as you as you engage in climbing and the higher your climbing skill becomes the longer you'll be able to climb into
you will lose less endurance while climbing the higher your skill and your climbing speed will increase as well um and it will be harder to knock you off so uh npcs because climbing is a dedicated system npcs also need ways to deal with you if you're climbing so if it's an npc that can climb um like a spider or you know uh some kind of of a creature that can climb easily then they would chase you and continue to attack you if it is if it's an npc that can't climb or has a bow and arrow or something like that then they will attack you while you're on the wall um and then other ways you know that that we have to handle to handle that but dude there we want there to be risk to climbing the risk is that kind of like again some of those early eq memories one of the things that made water scary in everquest was um it was it felt much more like real life water which me personally i i wouldn't call it a fear but it's definitely unnerving um

i hated ice ice in that request just i hated that well yeah ice too yeah the slip and slide and uh i'm going right towards an edge i can't stop myself but um when you would go underwater in everquest i remember in lower guck you had to go underwater or kazakhstan would be another good example where you had to swim down like the alligator area to get down and you just didn't know when you were going to find air again and so you made this decision of like okay you know i'm going under and i loved in in larger bodies of water that it was just a big expanse and i'm not even going to get on the topic of water pantheon because it um it's something i'm i'm personally really passionate about and it's a big conversation but um

the we want it to have inherent risks and climbing in the same way and so just like water you're looking at your breath and you're understanding that i have a certain amount of breath and i don't know if i'm gonna make it all the way climb is the same way having a certain amount of endurance i have no idea if i'm climbing down or up into deep darkness i don't know how far i'm gonna have to climb if i run out of endurance and i fall i'm gonna die can i get back yeah can i get back up because when you're falling you als you always have that little bit of you know i can let go when i'm close enough to the bottom but do i have enough to get back out um those are and obviously we want to we wouldn't want a player to be trapped down there but your your more roundabout way back up might be a lot more dangerous um so then you also have climbing equipment that you can find different things that will further enhance your climbing because why have a climbing system if you're not going to be able to eventually climb to some pretty mind-blowing heights and depths and the idea there is to slowly over time give players the ability to build up their skill their repertoire classes having certain abilities and then actual gear that will allow you to get to some really amazing heights and then all the discovery that that provides

so the um very first instant that i loaded into everquest um as i was loading in uh on my screen i could see npcs saying so and so cast this so and so cast this so and so cast this and i was so paranoid that my uh activision buddies were uh trying to gank me before i even loaded into the um game that i immediately started running the second i loaded in and fell off the cliff into water and drowned and so every time i'm logging in yeah this is my first instant yeah yeah and so every time i leveled for the next two years the first thing i would do is increase my swim yeah because i was not gonna drown again far from it um

you mentioned summoning a ladder and there is a summoner with eq next they also had in their concept of summoning an ability call called unsummon and my my wish so i'm an alcoholic so uh one of my alts i was hoping to be the world's uh master unsummoner do you have an unsummon ability for people to negate what summoners do and nothing like that right now no no but now you're talking you're talking like on the npc side i definitely see well you're not maybe talking to npc side but that's where my mind goes is unless we're talking about a pvp situation where you could but that that's what leads me to the npc side so yes like right now when it comes to any kind of summoned item like a ladder or a wall or something like that those things would be targetable and be able to be essentially attacked by npcs so they would break through the wall they would destroy the ladder something like that but that could easily transfer into an actual ability that some npcs might have to just yeah i know i was thinking of a player character because if i could unsummon summon things then um but you know eq next was open world pvp so yeah but i'm just saying pvp server um then and so on a pvp server obviously you're everything that depending on the rule set of the server then those those items would appear to a hostile player the same way they would appear to an npc in the sense that you could attack them and break them and you know stuff like that cool

you know evp family bring your dicks um so i am uh um what's the term i have for it it's like uh it's kind of like casual pvp so um there are so one i'm not even really a combat person on uh in my my my my bartle quiz score my kill rating is zero which isn't actually true but it's the least thing that i'm interested in um so i like indirect pvp so i like defending town so if i see a bunch of players who are attacking a town i like defending a town for a while and i might enjoy doing that for about an hour and then i'll want to spend my next five hours focusing on exploration or farming or harvesting or something else um uninterrupted so i have about an hour of time which i'm kind of willing to pvp and then after that hour of time i am completely anti-pvp for the rest of the game session so being forced into it when i'm absolutely not in the mood for it drives me nuts but um i i think i will say like i'm a pvp sometimes person um and that sometimes is about an hour per day when you do when you do the things that you like like the the keep defense or the the something like that do you like the the one-on-one combat in that setting or do you like doing more of the kind of peripherals so um so i'm a co-op player because i came into this playing d d and when we played tabletop d d you didn't have pvp it was only co-op

um i mean pvp was extremely rare and i never played with any groups where pvp actually happened um uh and so i prefer indirect pvp so i like king of the hill capture the flag i guess i will stay at the flag and keep capturing the flag and it's more important to me to capture the flag so like death penalty i let people kill me i don't fight for deaths because flags usually get more points so i'm usually at the top of the list for flags pvp when there's a purpose i like indirect and i don't necessarily like the one-on-one combat i like objectives that i'm going towards or focusing on more so objective based pvp that that's probably a good way to okay yeah cool yeah it's a conversation we've had a bit uh actually recently too with with kind of pvp open world pvp kind of went hand in hand with um the death penalty discussion to some uh
i think it was in that same yeah quite a bit it's had a lot of other discussions where uh a lot of the ash's players disagree with me but um you know i don't see i don't know again maybe your your discussion of there's a little bit of room for everyone changes that but i could never get past the idea of open world pvp and an mrpg being a successful long-term game um we don't have to go down that rabbit hole but that's sort of my perspective it's a that's a deep hole yeah i'm a big pvp fan so i'm i'm coming at it from the perspective of i i any time there's a pvp server i play on it um i played on sullen zach eq that was my primary that was the longest stretch that i had and if you remember selling zach's kind of a no rolls no holds bar good versus evil versus neutral oh yeah it was crazy um but yeah i mean that's one of those um you know

i think the kind of game that pantheon is going to be i think could make for some amazing amazing pvp content within a deep deep vibrant rich pvp world with a very deep faction system where you can you know utilize npcs to your advantage um a very there's i mean i'm not even going to get into it because it's uh it is a rabbit hole but i think separating those two things where you have servers that are dedicated for that yeah and servers that are dedicated for the the core pve experience of what pantheon is um i think makes the most sense for us anyway

yeah and i've kind of come around to the idea of a blend right so when you look at other you know objective base so for me the line sort of comes is something forced or not is it force you know is it forced on you pvp or is it you know meaningful objective base you can participate when you want to pvp and i think there's plenty of opportunity for that and and mmorpgs and pantheon like i said there could be a super interesting scenario set up from that um our discussion tends to be not saying anything about it because it's something that i'm i'm so excited about the premise of it that i don't yeah i will certainly you can spill the beans here i mean we're we're we're a quiet group of friends we won't talk about it once we go off the air don't mind the people in chat no i do i i'm not much of a pvp for myself but i do think there are opportunities that enjoy it and have fun so certainly you know i'm not one if if next week there was a you know well we're going to introduce some pvp here there i would not complain about that one bit it's it's more so the open world forced upon you type pvp because the argument that always people i get from tends to be more ashes of creation community than anything as well we've not had one yet we've not had a a game open world pvp that was just put together in a way that would be successful and my
that might be true but you know i tend to think back even to ultima online i mean these things they have been attempts for quite a long while and nothing has stuck yet and i'm not convinced that style of mmorpg will stick but we'll see we'll get to find out with ashes i guess you know something that comes to mind is the idea of um even in a pvp in an open pvp server it's that there still has to be some vector for it for example um they're in territory that you're home to and you know they're from like a a faction that you're at war with that you can you know do as an act of defense or they can engage you as an act of you know the the ongoing war or whatever but it isn't just you know run up and fight each other you actually have to kind of declare i'm fighting this person because of this reason for um something that's an open pvp server you don't have to wait for them to kind of sign the contract to approve but if it's something where

it's a pve server they might instead negotiate rather than engage in combat so it could be something like if you're you know trying to get more resources and someone comes along it's like yeah i want to contest you for those resources if you accept the winner you know gets to take whatever is there if you uh negotiate you can be like all right whatever's coming from you know these two creatures that i just killed and this uh material node here you get a third of it or something just you know buzz off afterward and so something like that could potentially be used to you know allow for an encounter where somebody who is dangerous poses a threat but it isn't automatically going to resolve in combat
yup i think i think how you handle that opt-in is really important if you first of all whether you have an opt-in or if it's you know it is just happens to you whether you like it or not but you do have an opt-in then there's there's some interesting ways that you can handle that to make it compelling i agree be uh be cool

japa i don't know if you watched the video that i posted in our in our um host chat of me playing kingdoms of amalor uh
i didn't i did i didn't know i did yeah
so i'm normally a care bear but in that game i slit everything's throat as much as possible i'm playing a rogue and i love sneaking behind things and eviscerating them and that game is the most i've ever felt like i'm embodying my class or my role of any crpg i've ever i've ever played and it changes it changes my behavior because most rpgs i'm trying to sneak past or uh socialize my pat my way past um combat completely um i do that all the time in the game that the dnd game that i'm playing with legendary neurotox and i i will try and talk our way out of combat if possible um but uh um so there was that and then where was the pvp side oh the everquest next example um they had the scenario that they were working towards where different types of magic would would uh augment um skills so uh uh shadow energy would augment stealth and since i'm a rogue or a druid i usually again stealth my way past obstacles if i can um uh if i were gonna so so the way it worked is is is uh dark elves would siphon the life energy from dryads take the life energy back to their towns and uh trans morgrify that into shadow magic and the shadow magic would then uh power your stealth and i was like yes under those circumstances i would then go to the dryads and siphon their life energy and if druids come and try and stop me from stop it's not because i hate triads and if druids let me do that i will happily do that um but if they try and stop me i might have to kill some druids and it's not because i want a pvp it's because i need to power my stealth and if those kinds of systems are in yeah it's kind of cool because it does change my natural behavior and again i start acting more like a character than who i am normally as a even as a player not even just as a person but both um and so when you can get those kinds of things going on in a game that's that's pretty cool yeah yeah

i would say opt-in opt-in is important how you handle that incentivization like how you incentivize players to attack other players if you incentivize if you do how you do and then how you handle uh consequences as well you know i think that's a that when you don't have any of those things or you have them done poorly then again i've pvp for a long time um there are some there there are combinations that lead to much more toxic behavior and a much more toxic culture than others and um i'm not gonna i'm not gonna prescribe what that is because i i don't pretend to know that but i know that uh you know the opt-in opt-in to me is is pretty important whether that's like more of a holistic opt-in like there is a server dedicated to this so i am playing on the server with the understanding beforehand that this is what i'm getting into and then further up opt-in you know layers should you choose to do so in terms of is it a free-for-all server is it you know a certain objective-based rule set server and then how you handle some of those kind of player player interactions uh you know whether that's by being in certain areas that are dedicated to pvp or whatnot but yeah it's a big topic it's a big topic yep for sure um so it's going to take forever uh

perception i think you haven't gone into the perception system much yet maybe touched on it yes so
i try to remember like how many times i've told this story i don't know um i haven't heard it so you haven't heard it so there you go so uh the
the idea of the perception system i was playing guild wars 2 and um i was uh in its divinity's reach i think is the name of the main city i believe infinity's reach sounds right um but there's a section of divinity's reach where which is really i mean it's a cool city um but there's a section of it where there's this like uh big like golden or polished bronze brass kind of decorative network of like constellations and stars and planets and and things it looks like a big observatory i'm like feeling it around here um but i remember running to that section of the city and seeing that and being like this it was one of those moments where i was just really impacted by something in the game i was seeing and was instantly like wow this is really cool i wonder what this is and it was it became this very depressing kind of moment because i realized i don't have a quest for this so i'm there's the chances of me finding out anything interesting about it or being able to interact with it anyway or next to none and i just immediately lost all interest and left and

reflecting on that um the the kind of questions that came up is like why why is it that way like why does it have to be why have we just so fully embraced this concept of like you know i have to gather these quests and i have to have a quest log full of stuff and i'm not looking at the world at all really i'm looking at my mini-map with telling me where to go and what to do and the degree of which i have any interest in anything i'm seeing is the degree to which it relates directly to a quest or a task or some kind of thing that i'm trying to finish i lost oh we lost java am i back yep we're back let me uh last interest there's there's no reason to all we're focusing on is quests quests so um so you've got you're following your mini map you're not paying attention to the world and the other problem is that because they're all so fully tied into progression like the leveling progression then i'm not even really concerned with what it is i'm doing most of the time i know there's exceptions and there's some really cool quest lines that that do really grab you but it's just this recipe that creates a a very disconnected it doesn't do a lot for immersion um and the simple i mean the even simpler way to put it and more of just the basic experience is like if i see something interesting i want to be able to find out about it you know like you go to
like the the pen and paper stuff there's another very close line walking with with dnd pen and paper and you've got you know a dm there and you just say like tell me more about what i see you know when you're you walk into a room like i want to search the room what do i what do i see in front of me what what am i noticing like that's that is really the impetus of it is
i want the idea was with pantheon i want if we're going to make this cool stuff and if we're going to make this whole world where there's all these really amazing things to see how tragic would it be to have yet another experience where it doesn't matter how cool it looks once i get over how cool it looks it's like who cares because i don't have a quest for it and maybe i'll care about if i get a quest for it but um and that's where you see so many of our systems kind of converging together from um obviously the perception system because that at its heart

the perception system is built in a way to when you approach something the environment itself is kind of the quest giver and so this idea that i'm going to approach something that i'm interested in and i'm going to be able to gather information about it as i do so and i'm going to be able to you know have that consolation in the sky kind of moment and then by rite of being there i'm gonna be able to engage with it and but you also see things like the climbing system um factoring into that because how do you reach that place well you know it may be that it's it's interesting but it's it's out of reach and so you have you know these other systems that are there designed to kind of um get you up to it but even more so a lot of times you won't be able to know what's up there until you get up to it and see it or get down to it and see it and so it's creating that that impetus of i know i'm going to be rewarded when i discover something i know there are things to discover i know that i can engage those things by right of discovering them and so i'm incentivized to explore and discover

i have tools with which to do that um those things can can come at great cost sometimes if we're talking about you know it's not only is it something that i have to be able to let's say climb to to up up to or down to to discover but there could be you know a harsh climate or there could be you know some kind of an atmospheric um point of content in in my way that i that i have to overcome to get to this um and they all all of these different systems are um and then just the way that we're handling like discoverable items that's something that you know we've our pre-alpha testers have been able to see but it's it's a very it's it's kind of a it's not a cool name or a cool term but

we just call them lootable props just think you know something like um skyrim or you know that that sense of like if i go to an ore camp i might see a sword on the ground and i can pick it up or um our scavenging system where you can you know search through rubble and crates and different things to discover stuff and so um or just something as simple as picking an apple up off the ground and eating it and restoring a little bit of health or um there's uh or climbing a tree and picking picking one um there's uh all of our systems are serving that point of like when you play pantheon have succeeded if you you stand and you look out in front of you and you just see however much you can see translates into possibilities of places that you want to go just to see what's there um so

because i'm an explorer first i intrinsically have that so [Music] give me an example of a of something that i would perceive and use a tool to help me perceive it or interact with it or well
the first thing i would say is another way to phrase this goal for someone like yourself who already has that naturally is to only like inflame that yeah yeah but i don't understand the concept the concept because i i already have that feeling when i go so don't you you have that feeling but but d is it substantiated i guess is the point like you may you may want to go and see the thing but how how often do you feel like it was worth doing that on the level that really kind of resonates because if it's just something interesting and yeah i want to go and see what's over there and then you go and okay there's a tower and there's this and that but ultimately it's just it's just up to sea versus the the idea with the perception system is that as i'm going to this tower

if i'm a keeper so a keeper somebody who's actually like a crafter you can have a crafting system but not engage with it we have a perception system and you become a keeper to actually engage with that system

so as a keeper you're going to be able to discover things that a normal player wouldn't wouldn't have the ability to discover um and so that's going to come in the form number one through these kind of intuition pulses basically where you're going to get a message think of essentially like you know navi from from link from uh legend of zelda

or more fundamentally just that that dm kind of companion where when you become a keeper you are kind of connected to this um internal voice that's really indistinguishable from your own intuition but it's not um and so it's it's guiding you not directively but through cryptic kind of again like how how you would sense your way and feel your way through something um so you're you're following these these clues these kind of cryptic um intuition pulses as you are or just and they could be everything from just a little bit of flavor about something that you're seeing um some things need to be interacted with for that to happen so you actually have to you know come and touch it to kind of get that impulse some things are just based on being in the vicinity and then
some things are what we would call more flavor in that it you're just getting bits and pieces of insight into this particular kind of mushroom or this tree or you know how the the wind feels in this area if it's changing direction or things like that all the way to um what we call storylines which is you're you're stumbling upon something that is is much deeper and actually is kind of a way to embark on a greater story um and that all happens through uh the act of exploration and you know following these impulses um as you see fit there's there's some
there's some abilities and some skills related to keepers um one of them is called part the veil and so you will gain an ability to kind of um the best way i know to describe it is have any of you played um shadows of mordor for any of those games by chance okay yeah so uh maybe you can help me with this but when you when you go into the it's been so long i don't remember but you're playing as the ranger but you can shift into that elven state and you kind of see very differently and different things will kind of you know stand out to you in that state so as a keeper you will have this ability to part the veil that once you have reached you know a certain point in a storyline or a certain kind of prompting you'll know okay there's something there's something more here to see and so you'll part the veil in that sense to kind of uncover you know something that you might not be able to see with the naked eye that would be one tool you also have two skills one is investigate and one is insight and both of those skills kind of unlock different things for you investigate will feed into your part availability make you more capable of kind of discerning more when you do so um insight is more of a skill that relates to more of your kind of just your ability to perceive things in general so you know whether you are able to get one of these pulses of insight one of these pulses of information sometimes you will

you won't actually have like a high enough inside skill to to really perceive what's going on you'll still get like a recording in your journal that there was something here that kind of you felt like there was something more but you weren't quite able to really you know get a sense for it and so there'll be kind of like marks that you can come back to later and check again because that's going to be a big part of the system too is our faction system the perception system they they play in such harmony with each other that there are there are going to be a large amount of things that you come in contact with and have these stirrings if you will that you're not quite capable as a keeper yet to unlock and so you'll want to come back later and revisit those things and you know constantly be gathering more and more information and experiencing more and more things based on your um ability as a keeper progressing

it was a mouthful it was but that's great i mean anytime you have reason to actually look you know the way you started off with that is almost precisely why i quit playing wow it got on this pattern of okay there's a big long road i'll start here i have six quests i finish them yes there's little stories but who cares doesn't really apply to the overall overall story and i go a little further down the road but you're right you don't pay attention to anything outside of this little hub and then once you're done with the hub you don't remember anything at all either so anything that makes you have to look and explore and pay attention i think is a great is awesome thing sorry dicks yeah i

i don't really have that experience again because i'm an explorer first so i am paying attention and the payoff is does it look beautiful does it look cool how do these mushrooms look different than these other mushrooms in this other area um so it's the diverse well i mean in so many ways diversity is the most important uh thing for me um so i'm and i just finished um so when i when i got done playing cataclysm i was pretty much done with wow i had pandaria on my shelf but i did not feel inspired to open it um i mean i had pre-ordered it and was thought i would be ready to go but i was kind of done just with the mechanics of wow and needed something different um uh but um one of the things that that that oh i started playing a battle for azeroth uh in january so i could prepare for shadowlands because i can finally once that comes out create characters that look like me um uh that's an incentive to try and play um there is no faction system really uh they're getting rid of the the horde versus uh what's the other one horde versus what did you play yeah support versus alliance they're kind of getting rid of that rivalry with shadow lands so there's some things going on that finally interest me but i haven't really been interested in wow since after cataclysm um and uh but that exploration was really all that i needed at the time if if you go around and it looks good and it's appealing i'm gonna i'm gonna go for it because i'm trying to make a movie i'll take screenshots all day um and uh you have different cultures oh zandalari trolls i i i liked going through zandalar because it was uh mesoamerican culture and i loved that mythology and that architecture um it's non-european um so um yeah that really captured me i loved all of that visually and that was enough for me but if you've got an extra dimension to explore too that's just more exploration

so if i'm parting a veil and going through a veil i mean sure that's that's another layer and like you said so one i i guess the question that brings up for me is replayability and you've touched on that a little bit with the um uh dispositions yeah and you just touched on it again with uh wanting to gather more layers from the veil um in general though uh there's other stuff i mean i i i think you would from what i hear there's lots of reasons besides just those two or maybe several other reasons that we might want to go back and revisit areas instead of just uh once you because because what what happens to me is not you've gone there and you've seen it or maybe not whether there's a quest kinda but um what is there new to do in the area once you've visited and explored it you're usually in a place for several hours and you go around it
why am i going to spend time there afterwards for me it's about stories so when i say when it's like there's no quest it's like there's no story there um but uh and i don't know that i would go back without a story would i go back i wouldn't and a lot of the reason is because we act but not the last room we did with the one before that i got i got on this a little bit but i mean i could talk about it a lot longer and it because i think it's so key um but i i think that's a by byproduct of overly overly narrative driven games especially mmos because you when you when you start off and you're immediately conditioned it's it's really is conditioning in the sense that you are conditioned to look for quests and complete quests and the content is created in a way where there's they are there to support the quests that are there to be done and so once you have done those quests you are conditioned literally to almost like close off that area because you're done and now it's time to move on to the next area and that i think psychologically even subtly creates a sense of of turning the lights off on older zones that you've been through because there's just no now you may get a quest that brings you back to those places but it in going back to do that particular quest it almost kind of magnifies the problem which is i have no connection to the zone like i'm here to just kind of find this thing and the reason there's no connection is because there's no change so maybe that's really what my question is is

is the replayability i mean i guess you've mentioned one one of the things that changes is the dispositions that just dispositions won't won't be static yeah it's the static content that's the problem um i think it's part of it for sure right i've been saying a few times in the last month or two dark paw is still there no matter how many times i kill him he's back in the same spot when i come back to visit yeah um and i don't

i don't profess that we've that we're solving that problem completely i mean i think that's a problem that i think that's something that we're always going to be taking more and more steps towards lessening that and creating truly dynamic experiences but but you always also have to kind of be careful of you know ruining the familiarity too because i think there's a sense of familiarity that's also important to a to a degree i mean things are changing so dramatically that you never have a sense of like because there's there's part of that that feeling like you know go back to classic everquest when you go back to um when you go back to keno's hills you know seeing the baobob uh millers and seeing you know holly wins soccer walking around and doing her thing like there is that sense of and

i remember with cataclysm that was a big that was actually really fascinating kind of an experiment in a way because you take these long familiar areas and you completely change them and it's cool and it and it was cool but it also i think illuminated the fact that that it it it's not hard it's it's it's hard to even put into words like it's the same way like when you when you grow up and you come back to where you you used to live and it's different you know there's that sense of like aching of man it's never it's gone um but the reason i say it's part of it is because and it is part of it dispositions is a piece of that um are

one of our game designers um convo he's uh he's got a lot of really cool ideas for like our day and our night system and the way that night time has so much potential to create some of those dynamic you know things where visiting a zoo during the day is very different visiting at night um but another piece and

this is something that i could kind of gush and wax on with for a while is the um my my own personal love for the like the metroidvania idea where when you're playing games that you start off and you see areas that you cannot access yet and you just know you can't but it kind of puts this little you know peeing in your mind if i've got i can't wait till i can go back and see what's up there can't wait till i can go back and see what's over there and um i think that is a massive massive well to to draw from um in mmos um we're so used to like going into instances for example and you can just do the whole thing you know you just do it from start to finish um we're not as used to going into a dungeon and there being whole wings of it that you can't get to because you don't have the right items or you don't have and i mean i guess we're used to that in open world games to an extent just because of the way that levels can level disparity can create natural areas that are blocked off but you know that's not super intriguing what's really intriguing is when you start off as an elf in fairtale and pantheon and you see this ledge with a cave on it and this high waterfall that you just cannot get to but you know that it's possible you just can't climb high enough yet and so

when you're able to come back 20 levels later and you have climbing skill and the gear where you can actually climb up and see what's in there then that's exciting

now granted you know a lot of people instantly say well you know a month after release like all this stuff's going to be on websites anyway and i think that's that's that's fair in the sense that i'm not we're not blind to the fact that there's going to be spoilers and things like that but uh that i think it's it doesn't change the fact that like your experience of playing the game even if you've heard or you know and information brokering is going to be huge in pantheon too i mean that's another thing i'm excited about is you know

because there's no mini map
because knowledge of locations and how to achieve and reach locations is something that actually is going to be a fairly you know important thing to be able to share
and you know there's all kinds of ways of of with climbing and with some of our artifacts we haven't even talked about artifacts yet but like special traversal is a big deal we've talked about ropes ladders the climbing system warriors with their battering ram or they can break through certain walls and then you know our artifact system which really is a very loving nod to that
metroidvania idea where you've got something like the heavy boots from legend of zelda that allow you to sink to the bottom of the ocean or
um you know some kind of short form glider things like the hook shot um you know certain colored tunics that protect you from different environments
there's such there's so many opportunities to create these kind of now but not yet moments where you're seeing places in zones that you you want to be able to explore but you have to come back later to do it so that's going to be a big part of replayability

as well yeah i like getting that idea that we're kind of talking about in chat that not everyone experiences the same content or it doesn't experience it at the same time i think it's is a it's a very good goal and a good way to experience things um instead of this everyone guy does the exact same thing the exact same pace um have you done you know raid x y and z oh no okay well let's go do it and this this idea of it actually takes time and you might have to go find the right person to get to do something or you might have to take the time yourself um i do like the idea that you just you don't all experience the same i have this really wacky especially when it comes to storyline progression like in world of warcraft and some of these others that you know if and diggs will argue with me on this but because he'll always bring up dungeons and dragons but you know if the 10 extra levels you put into your expansion is is basically filler to experience a story so that you can finally get to the end game to con to actually quote play the game then why do you have levels um you know why we're all experiencing the same thing the same way anyways so why not just make it a narrative driven sort of content as you experience the story you gain you know whatever you gain new talents or things as you're witnessing so

sorry i'm kind of going off topic but uh well actually the artifacts kind of touched on that a little bit that's that's basically what you're looking for is almost like that legend of zelda style like you find the artifact that opens the next gate sort of thing

it's your progression putting less of it like yeah the hearts and yeah the armor and stuff and link does eventually get a little bit tougher a little bit tougher over time

but you know the things still more or less are the same amount of threatening if you don't address them so you still have to fight stuff the same way uh it just gets a bit easier uh is is that a little bit more along the lines of uh what you're what you're talking about there uh phantom for the um the sort of progression you're looking for something a lot flatter and a lot more um you know you get the gadgets and the goods to get by and open stuff up rather than you get to level 70 and then you can do this thing you get to level 80 now you can do this thing

yeah i mean there is the journey is just as important i know everyone says that it sounds very cliche but it is i i mean some of my best memories are not from when i was quote and you know in game rating and everquest it was the the time it took to get there one of the things that i wish more mmorpgs would do and actually this was going to be a question for you because i i know there's a focus on group and

obviously it'll be some solo content and then some rate content

but the the experience or at least from what i've read or watch being more so for group based content but one thing i miss is you know in everquest especially you know mid-level raids you know you have varying degrees of content that you can come to later on you know um you're a group of five people
but you can't go into castle missile more right now and you come back later you know those those are the kinds of experiences the way things are not just you know x a to b to c and everybody does it a to b to c you know i i like a to d to c to e maybe out to w coming back to t not so much who's listening anybody who's watching mmo history would say that it could i think i understand specifically what you're saying and i think anybody who's really paying attention would know that you have to have you have to build content you have to build zones that have multiple level ranges in mind

like places for higher and lower level players to interact for lower level players to see higher level things that they can't access yet for higher level players to be going back to those places able to interact positively you know even just through like prestige parading in a way like this that sense of like i get to show off what i've become the power and the knowledge that i've gained lower level players are able to see that and swoon and long you know for that and uh i think that's a massively massively important that that's a that

that is almost like a certainly a tenant of ours is um to address both things is we want we want to encourage social bonds and not social isolation so it's not it's not a forced grouping game
it's just we want to encourage those social bonds and not design the game to encourage social isolation um and then within that we want to encourage

we're building and designing our world to where lower and higher level players mid-level players there's always opportunities for those to kind of come back and coincide with one another for sure yeah another one of my experiences that sticks in my head and has for 20 years now again in everquest was this this scenario i i was a druid so i had well i played several classes but druid had just learned how to teleport to a certain area so of course you know for money would teleport people or items whatever it might be but you know i was here i was this this lower level character in a area of the zone where i could survive i could help people buff people teleport people but this one time you know i had one guy that was you know much higher level it was going to a different part of that zone and as a thanks for porting them you know they handed me my first sort of clicky item that i've i've never had had one before it's sort of that experience you know that i have a reason to go there but so does this person who is much higher level you know gives me a taste of what i can maybe one day go get myself so it's just yeah that's yeah that's huge again with levels it's the issue of numbers and how do you um represent experiences uh

i was thinking of this earlier with the um with the falling into the pit of deep darkness where you're saying that we're supposed to overcome that by listening but kind of the problem fundamental problem with playing mmorpgs is that we don't have five plus senses that we're dealing with um so if i were falling into a cave that was completely dark i wouldn't just be relying on my senses on my hearing i'd also be relying on touch um and balance and all kinds of other uh things i would probably um yeah i uh all other kinds of senses or information would be coming to me besides just hearing and how do you represent that in uh you know virtual game space cool ways i think uh because because first of all if you think about just on the level of game accessibility there are people that may play pantheon that can't hear and so you have to you know think in terms of like if you do something that's purely based on auditory feedback then you've you know potentially created something that some portion of the the player population can't navigate um so it would never be a completely auditory thing but

it would be one one way that you could navigate the other way could be something like having a keeper with you for one with that tactile with with the representation of the tactile so that's what i'm saying that part becomes a representation right so it's the same thing with leveling the leveling and the numbers there are a representation of of of that it's the same you know there are people and i think phantom kind of says this but um with uh there's a contingent of people who don't want to have health bars but in the real world we would have many more cues about the health of an adversary or anything that we're coming into contact with um other than just visual but the health bar helps us represent represent yeah and so it's it's just a representation and it's going to have to be some kind of representation um for the record i don't remember saying that but but um yeah one thing's

so in a dungeon that i'm have been thinking about uh kind of is like what you've been talking about joppa in some ways i don't know if this is going to be in pantheon but um as a rogue in a dungeon um whatever level i am i'm gonna try and scout and especially as an explorer i'm gonna try and scout the dungeon and come back to people with information about what i found um and like you said maybe as a second level scout i only go so far through the dungeon but i should be able to complete quests or tasks or whatever in to the best of my ability at that time i don't i should we shouldn't have to clear a dungeon every time we go in a dungeon and i think that is the mentality that um we've been prepped for is that if you go into the dungeon your goal is to clear it of everything and the next time you're just going to clear it faster and it would be nice to be able to go into a dungeon and i'm soloing it i don't need the uber loot from everything just let me complete my task whatever i'm capable of and maybe i'm helping you out with more information especially from a keeper perspective um and then yeah we can return later and do some other part of it because not everybody doing a mission in a castle is a king or a knight or a duke or whatever we might be peons we might be the the scullery maid who's been asked to do something and we can only go so far we're not gonna kill all the knights but we might be able to poison a couple of dukes i don't know um so that d that d d inspired created creativity of thinking about handling situations is very much kind of at the root for sure

i do have a quick question about uh social skills there's perception but are are there like i said i usually will try and charm my way out or intimidate my way out um flirt my way out uh combat are there social skills at all in in uh pantheon there are as part of the the perception system so

a keeper is to have a lot more options in dialogue interactions with npcs um now that could come at cost i mean that's you know part of the risk reward of that is you can end up you know turning turning someone in a bad way towards you i'm thinking of one particular storyline in right now for the uh for the dire lord that um that that's the case uh where where your your responses in the way that you can attempt to manipulate a situation can can go good or can go back so for the keeper yes and not so much with like non-keeper players except through other other means like um you know we mentioned the paladin with their um with their ability to to make a hustle and pc friendly for a time um which could open up dialogue for a keeper which could you know uh change that npc's uh stance toward toward those players in that vicinity for a period of time

let's say um and then you know other things like you mentioned you know a poison or some kind of an elixir that can have the same type of effect and you know maybe it requires a rogue to get close enough to administer it or you know something like that so um when it comes to social skills particularly a lot of that we're we're intentionally uh kind of folding into and weaving into the the perception system as a keeper and the whole persona what keeper's capable of and then other more gameplay-oriented means to to do some of the same things just a much i guess on a lesser scale and more in a one-to-one direct way that sounds cool

so we are i think close to running out of time actually we're an hour overtime um we really appreciate it there at one there's so much more that i feel like diggs just doesn't quit talking so um it's a really great conversation really fun yes as you know underwater zones and and uh there's a lot of stuff that i was well maybe one day get two with you in the future hopefully not five years from now um yeah i do still have my racial questions so i actually have to we don't have time because that will go for a little while uh for the first time as of this morning i was able to create um a party with uh uh in d baldersgate i was able to have a rpg party with more than one african-american character um in it um and when i was looking through races in uh pantheon i did not see many examples that's just looking through video so i don't know what the character creator really does but it's just the videos that i've seen i've not seen a lot of african-american dwarves or afro well dwarves or elves with african-american features um what is the is it the scar

is that the reptilian race what's the name of the reptilian not reptilian they're but that's probably what you're thinking of is that more kind of um bony almost like skeletal face kind of a a race they're not they're not reptilian they're they're more i mean i would i would probably liken their skin and their to more of like a like a raptor or some kind of a a um avian um kind of they're kind of a malcolm nation of the two i would say yeah uh but the name is scar is that the name s-k-a-r um they seem to have what was the closest to african-american hair african hair african hair i guess i don't know what the actual texture is but um so um what is the possibility in uh the fantasy races to represent non-european looking uh ethnic features well it's definitely planned i mean racial diversity is like a big part of something that we celebrate and and really want to have because i don't think you can have a an immersive believable world without you know fully embracing the reality of that and and that's something that we we want uh the i mean the

the simplest way to answer the question is more of a question of where we are in development more so than what we're planning there um even though it's good to to make that clear uh but so and that maybe that's something we can get into next time too is talking about like you know spend some time on more like state of the game type stuff and kind of you know where we're at and where we're headed more specifically but but yeah i mean that when when it's all said and done like this this would be a game where you would absolutely be able to find the look that you resonate with that is you know rightly representative of more of an ethnic um aesthetic and uh the the interesting or i guess the the specific response to some of the races that are more um i mean i guess you could you could say the dwarves in the sense that like their their skin tone is is kind of locked to a because they're they're we're basically created from like a celestial fusion of ice and stone and so i have this kind of like bluish hue but even that we've already discussed kind of opening that into grays and even more of kind of like the grayish brown area but even then skin tone it's not features and that's that's what i was going to say is that the true thing here is that however we handle features whether we do that through like a host of like specific sliders or whether we have preset faces that that would be you know the other place where we would make sure to capture that and even more so especially when you get into races that have more of a fixed skin tone that's not any you know that's blue or that's green or you know something like that making sure that the hairstyles the facial features those things are all fully representative of that kind of diversity is absolutely the plan um

and i'm just gonna end it with even for the gnomes like when i look at the known masks i'm thinking can i get african style masks or other styles of masks mesoamerican style math those are things that i'm thinking of so absolutely absolutely cool all right well i guess my only one last pin you down kind of question uh just because i'm eager is is there any time do we know when pa5 will be soon ah i thought i could get something better than soon out of here sooner than people probably expect good all right well i'm ready to go so yeah i'm super excited too and and i would love to do this again um you know i think i don't know what a good cadence would be but i mean whenever you guys start feeling the itch again just let me know be real if you give us yeah because if you give us free time i'll be i'll be hitting you up sooner rather than later so okay we'll just we'll chat we'll chat in the channel here that we've got and um we'll find another time sooner yeah it was a lot of fun i really enjoyed it it was really fun yeah no there's a whole lot more underwater underwater class synergies all that so um yeah uh thanks again uh for joining us and thank you to everyone who's been watching for the last over two hours now uh this has been a really fun good show so we will definitely plan to do this again in the future um and as of right now these two will not be in pa5 with me so if there's anyone out there that would like to have me in a group let me know as it will be soon is what we just found out so all right everyone have a good week if you are new to us we do this every sunday we typically alternate shows so uh for example next sunday will be ashes of creation show that we do every other week so um yeah looking forward to pre-alpha five everyone have a good week thanks guys be late everybody