Greetings, first heroes of the Pantheon!
My name is Uros Banjesevich, I am the creative director of Pagan Online from Mad Head Games studio, which means I am responsible for your gameplay experience. With this post I want to start the tradition of having knowledge and idea exchanges between you, players, and us, developers. This exchange will take many forms and will be done by several people from Pagan Online team, responsible for different aspects of your experience inside and outside the game.
This first post I will dedicate to the first days of Early Access and a few topics that I’ve seen emerge in the community:
- Why Early Access?
- Will the game be free-to-play?
- Where is the “Online” part?
I don’t have enough words to express how exciting it is for us, game developers from Serbia, to see people from different parts of the world start populating the Pantheon and playing Pagan Online. The thing that started as a crazy idea some three years ago (one day I’ll tell you more about what it is like to be a game developer in Serbia) has now turned into reality. We appreciate your trust and interest in our game so much. I also want to say thank you for your patience when tech issues occur, and for the feedback and suggestions you’ve provided from the first minutes of Early Access.
Why Early Access?
Indeed, some of you may ask – you teamed up with Wargaming, a major publisher, why Early Access? Here at Mad Head Games we love games, and the hack-n-slash action RPG genre in particular. We’ve played this type of game since the first Diablo, the moment the genre was born. We believe that we have something new to add to the way hack-n-slash ARPGs are made. Making things differently is fun but it is also very important to keep the balance between vision and reality. Early Access feels like the perfect way to innovate and co-create with you, players, all while staying very real.
Will the game be free-to-play? (No)
When we started a couple of years ago, we wanted to know everything we could about our potential players. To put it short, our research showed that a good share of our potential players believe that free-to-play games are lacking something they tend to call “soul”. It is a very interesting topic for a separate discussion, and maybe a book, about the difference between believable digital worlds and casual digital entertainment.
Today I just want to say that we always wanted to build a game that people would love, and in this genre it felt like love and free-to-play would not go together well. After reading through comments and reviews where some of you worry that we may turn into free-to-play game, it seems we were right. So I just want to assure you here, that making Pagan Online a full premium experience, also known as “buy-to-play” game, was an informed decision. Things like paywalls or competitive advantage for real cash will never make it to our development roadmap.
Where is the “Online” part?
There are two things about the Online part, that I want to share. The first one is that the “Online” part is our tribute to phenomenal games like Ultima Online, Warhammer Online, EVE Online, which were all of different genres, themes and settings, but had one thing in common - they gathered enormous communities of passionate players, who believed that the game was more than just a game.
The second thing about “Online” is that co-operative play is one of the most important features of Pagan Online. Those of you who participated in our closed beta weekends - Trials - have already tested it. I can’t express to you how much I wish co-op was available from the first day of Early Access. But your experience is more important than our wishes. We need a little bit of time to be sure that co-op is a fun and meaningful experience. We will be adding co-op soon, so keep an eye on patch notes.
We have a lot of plans for Pagan Online; new zones, new bosses, new playable characters and new ways to have fun in the game. We will be sharing our plans regularly and listening to your feedback and suggestions very carefully. Expect me and other Mad Heads to show up on the Steam Community hub, our official Discord server and on Reddit with posts and comments.
See you in Pantheon!
Uros aka dzudzubajac