The Kickstarter for Brad McQuaid’s new game Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is now live. There’s a great deal we don’t know about Pantheon. If the Kickstarter is managed intelligently many of those questions will get answered over the next few weeks, as more information is forced out into the traditional MMO news channels to keep the project’s visibility up. We’ll see what happens.
I backed it, modestly for now with an eye toward possibly increasing my support later on in the campaign. As far as I’m concerned the McQuaid name doesn’t have any special allure for being attached to EverQuest, a game I didn’t play until well after its heyday. But it does for Vanguard, which likely puts me in a small minority. I backed it not becuase I am convinced it will be awesome, but because McQuaid’s involvement suggests a certain amount of ambition. I think ambition is to be encouraged, especially many years of spineless copycat titles. A status quo that’s only now beginning to be challenged.
On a personal level, I’m rooting for Brad. He is now, after all, an underdog. Pantheon might succeed, if it has goals it can manage and a budget proportonal to its potential audience. I hope it does. It might fail, as many would say Vanguard did. But I’ll take an ambitious failure over a soulless hit any day. I hope, over the course of the kickstarter, to learn just how ambitious Pantheon is going to be, and to get an impression of how reasonable its design goals seem. And to learn more about the technical underpinnings of the game; Vanguard was built on the Unreal engine but modified it very heavily. Will Pantheon also be built on some kind of middleware foundation? Other indie projects with ambitious goals and modest budgets like Project: Gorgon, Pathfinder Online and Shroud of the Avatar seem, at least tenatively, to be getting good results buidling on Unity.
On the other hand, the title is terrible.