A Life Jacket For PATHFINDER ONLINE?

Pathfinder Online hasn't had the best year. Ryan Dancey left GoblinWorks (the company producing the game), and funding issues led to nearly the entire development staff being let go. This left the company seeking up to $2 million from investors to finish the game. Things looked dire, but a letter from GoblinWorks and Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens hints that there may be light at the end of the tunnel - an (as yet unnamed) company has signed a letter of intent to fund the game after spending two days at the Paizo offices in Seattle. This is phrased in the letter as an "acquisition", and that the company is still negotiating the funding. The plan is for the new company to take over the game and its development on March 1, 2016.

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Here's Lisa's full letter, which also contains information about recent updates to the software.

The year 2015 has been an exciting but tumultuous time for us at Goblinworks. The team delivered 11 expansions to the game including holdings and outposts and the warfare associated with them; the ability to craft and build your own settlements; new monsters and escalations such as the elementals, duergar and dark elves; new spells, armor, weapons, feats and classes such as the Expert and Freeholder, and much more! But as many of you are aware, we never found all the funding we needed to finish building the game that we have been describing to you. This led us to laying off the majority of the Goblinworks staff at the end of August.

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But there is good news to be relayed! Just today, I received a signed letter of intent from a company that wants to take on the Pathfinder Online legacy and see it through to completion. One of the principals of this company has been playing Pathfinder Online since day 1 and understands the vision for the game we are making. The company recently came up to Seattle to the Goblinworks offices and we had 2 productive and exciting days planning for the future and what this game can be.

Now this acquisition of the Pathfinder Online game is incumbent upon them finalizing the funding they are currently in negotiations for, but all signs are very positive on that front right now. This funding will give Pathfinder Online more money to invest in the game than has been spent in over 4 years of development. This will significantly accelerate the development and support of the game to a point unprecedented in Pathfinder Online history. If things continue to go well, they expect to take over the game entirely by March 1, 2016.

In the meantime, the legacy team has been working for the month of December on doing a bunch of polish and bug fixing in the game. The biggest new thing will be the long-awaited and desired vault sorting of personal, company, and settlements vaults. The vaults will use an interface very similar to that used in the Auction House right now. Also, auctions will last for a month instead of a week.

Another much needed feature will be a command for you to use if you become stuck somewhere in the game. By typing /stuck, you will enter a countdown timer for five minutes. During that time, you cannot move nor engage or be engaged in combat. If any of those things happen, the /stuck command expires. If you can manage to not move or be part of combat, after five minutes, you will be teleported to the nearest shrine and none of your items will take durability loss.

Mike has also enabled cloaks and packs in the game, so you will now be able to equip them and have them show up on your characters.

There are more fixes that will be revealed when EE11.1 goes live. The goal is to do testing when the team is back after New Years and if all goes well, launch it in January.

In closing, I thank you all for your support for Pathfinder Online and your friendship in the game. I thank you for an exciting 2015 and look forward to seeing the game expand to its full potential in 2016. Thank you once again!

-Lisa Stevens
Acting CEO
Goblinworks Inc.​

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[Evenglare]

I'm absolutely sorry but this thing needs to be taken out behind the shed and shot. The mmo genre is starting to fall so much that even WOW won't report on their subscriber base anymore. Legitimately awesome games like Wild Star were almost dead on arrival and again, those were really really good games. PFO has sub Original Everquest animations. The environment has no personality and looks immensely bland. Anyone who even has a passing interest in video games know this is a bad idea. Disregarding the awful state of the game, just the idea of sustaining something like this is just about impossible.

Think about it, you have an entire set of gamers, a pretty small fraction of those play MMOs. After getting the pool of people who want to play MMOs you're going to have to persuade that audience why you should play PFO over games like WOW, AION, Guild Wars 2, Wild Star, Final Fantasy XIV etc etc. OR you are going to have to draw in a completely new user base which is going to be almost impossible at this point. Also from what i remember it doesn't play anywhere near what pathfinder tabletop does. It's... it's not even a dumbed down version of the game, it's completely different.

I have nothing against the developers of the game, and it sucks to have a crappy project but man... this... they seriously need to scrap it.

 

[Radaceus]

I have to second the above post

I was very excited about this game, and once in I felt completely let down. Ironically, the mention above of 'sub Original Everquest' animations was exactly how i felt while in game. I played EQ from beta until the sell out to SOE, I also followed Brad, to help recognize his 'vision', with Vanguard (again sold out); playing PFO while it was up left me feeling as if McQuaid had a hand in this venture as well,

 

[uriel222]

They couldn't even get a Virtual Table Top up and running, but somehow they're going to save Pathfinder Online?

 

[turkeygiant]

I have a feeling the game we have seen will never see the light of day as anything more than a bare minimum of what backers were promised, I can't figure on what investor could possibly be interested salvaging it. My guess would be some other company wants the Pathdinder license Goblinworks currently has so they are offering to pay to get PFO out there in exchange for the license on future pathfinder games. Paizo and Lisa Stevens get to save face with backers, and a publisher who isn't a pipe dream gets the game license.

 

[darjr]

Software is hard, game software more so. I know it sounds like an excuse but it is absolutely true. Most software projects fail. And many that don't are only successful by the blood and tears of it's designers and developers and owners. And probably should have failed.

 

[Koloth]

I pledged this, tried it, and was one of the many disappointed. At least the non MMO pledge benefits mostly covered the cost.

It says a lot about the state of the game and the concern shown to the ones who still try to play that a touted new feature to get someone out of a bugged area of the game requires a 5 minute wait while hoping a wondering monster or human ran character doesn't interact in any way with the stuck character. If you get stuck in a high traffic area, you are screwed. Better would be to do the teleport when the command is entered and auto file a bug report for that location, complete with the player's information.

 

[Ziusnafallion]

Really what I wish someone would produce is an expansive 3d virtual table top of some kind. I think that's always what I'm hoping for in all of these games based on pen-and-paper RPGs. I would look to games like Neverwinter Nights, Sword Coast Legends, Neverwinter (MMO), and PFO with the hope that I could play a virtual (lite) version of an RPG on some level with friends. They all disappoint in this regard (though NWN was close), but have mostly been decent games in their own right.

I think the experience I'm always looking for is to be able to log into a game, and essentially play an existing RPG I love with the game auto-calculating what I need it to. To generate and insert my characters into a virtual world, and through them look across the plains or mountains in a virtual environment, and to interact with animated NPCs and creatures. Basically just a graphical representation for a game I already play. If you're the DM, you can prepare a game with a toolset. Random encounters? Okay there's a tool for that based on the (numerous) random encounter generators already out there. Or create your own. Create villains, drop loot, etc. Just make it easy for a DM to run, and fun for players.

Sword Coast Legends had some good ideas in this regard, but it ultimately fell way short. Maybe PFO could scrap their mechanics, and build a toolset to just let us login to their virtual world to create our own adventures? I'm sure that would be near impossible not to mention there wouldn't be much of an audience for this sort of product aside from tabletop RPG-ers, but that's my dream.

 

[Plissken]

I think it would have benefited them to work on a CRPG based on Pathfinder setting.

 

[JonArkanix]

I think it would have benefited them to work on a CRPG based on Pathfinder setting.

Whatever happened to the rumored Pathfinder CRPG using the Pillars of Eternity engine?