Posted in General

I’m a pessimist, no doubt about it. I’m always preparing for the worst, which is why I’m digging that bunker in the backyard. Of course, I’m lazy, so I never actually began work on the bunker, but what are you going to do?

After seeing Pathfinder Online in action, I was a skeptic (to put it politely). I’ve not been paying much attention, but I popped in on the unofficially official Pathfinder Online subreddit the other day with a simple question: “Is this game any good?” Having watched the game in action, I expected the response to be negative overall. My simple question didn’t merit much of a response, nor was it supposed to. I expected a handful of hardcore players saying, “yes, the game is amazing,” and a handful of dissidents saying, “no, I want my early enrollment fee back.”

However, a poster named Rynnik offered a detailed overview of Pathfinder Online, one I’d like to share.

It doesn’t start out with good news, though. At this stage game is grossly incomplete.

“If you want a ‘combat’ game I would honestly look elsewhere,” he said. The emphasis MMOs place on combat—especially MMOs with PvP—make this seem like a death knell for the game. “It is pretty meh,” he admitted, mentioning “issues around targeting, hit detection, desyncing,” and so forth. Ouch. That seems pretty brutal, especially for a game boasting open-world PvP. Everything that doesn’t work in an MMORPG is magnified tenfold when you’re in a desperate fight for survival against a red. Despite these issues, however, Rynnik remains optimistic that the development team will address the issues (and hopefully before the game’s public release).

“The rate and quality of updates and fixes is both consistent and ambitious,” he explains. Heartening news for would-be subscribers, but not enough to sway my opinion on the matter. It doesn’t matter to me how great the dev team is if the game is only half-functional, and no developers are good enough to patch a bad game into being fun. Despite my negative outlook, Rynnik’s discussion about PvP rekindled my enthusiasm for the gamer.

More to the point, Rynnik describes PFO as “a PvP sandbox,” not unlike “a fantasy version of EVE Online from 2003.” He identifies four core points of the PFO PvP that make the game worth playing: the economy, the scale, the difficulty, and the variability. While I’m all for talking about big and hard things, let’s start with the economy.

“Scarcity and localization are built right into the fundamental design of the game,” Rynnik says.

That means you might very well be going to war to gain to boost your economy—you’re going to need resources on enemy territory, especially if you want the best items and equipment. Even if you just want to crush your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their women, “you will at least be thinking about the economic implications.” War, as in real life, is not something entered into casually. Moreover, he notes that money sinks are in development (such as “gear destruction”) to “ensure that economic factors are going to always be at play in the ‘why’ portion of PvP.”

Supporting these economic factors is the scale of the game. “All banking is local and there is no fast travel right now,” Rynnik says. The lack of fast travel is a big deal, especially when you want to do PvP beyond small skirmishes. “Reinforcements can’t ‘portal’ into the fight.” The size of the game world reinforces the need for logistics, he explains, because “you can’t send a force across [the] map very successfully without planning for it.” Trying that is a recipe for disaster. If the foolish army marches to war haphazardly, their items might break, and they’ll “have a long haul to get back.”

That’s because PvP is hard. “Good hard. FUN hard,” according to Rynnik.

One of the negatives plaguing open-world PVP is gankers. Anyone who has played a PVP game has likely experienced a massacre at the keyboard of a high-level PKer. That’s still possible in PFO, but such tactics are “heavily penalized.” Each player has a personal reputation, which functions as a currency that determines access to game resources. If your reputation is depleted, you’re going to have issues spending XP and banking. It regenerates over time, so it’s not a permanent black mark on wanton PKing, but it helps keep the problem in check.

The variability of the PvP helps with this, too. PvP-heavy games like EVE Online and Darkfall lacked a solid target for “medium-sized” groups of players. As far as I’m aware, they focused their efforts on facilitating personal PVP and mass scale battles, leaving a dearth of options for intermediate groups who didn’t ally with powerhouses Goonsquad. The PFO developers are currently introducing Holdings and Outposts to the game, which will add in content for midsize groups—something, Rynnik says, “failed pretty miserably in EVE and Darkfall.”

All that being said, Rynnik readily admits that “PFO is still very much a work in progress.” No doubt about it. However, he is quick to mention that “the bones of PFO are already very solid.” The aforementioned combat issues seem small when compared to the vision of the development team, and “there is already more ‘sand’ in the PvP sandbox” than other games.

“The hope is that we will be playing in a persistent and meaningful PvP sandbox on the level of a fantasy EVE Online someday.”