Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is now a decade removed from its initial Kickstarter in 2014, but even in 2024, its core development team is still doing its darndest to see late MMO luminary Brad McQuaid’s original vision through to the bitter end – with a modern take on the old-school, EverQuest-style MMORPG.
As those who’ve followed its lengthy development cycle can tell you, it hasn’t exactly been a stroll through the Faydark. The infamously short-lived 247 Extraction mode represents both a contributing cause and catastrophic result of a cyclical series of major erosions in trust between the Pantheon team and its loyal fanbase in the wake of McQuaid’s tragic and untimely passing in November 2019.
But Pantheon developer Visionary Realms – still largely made up of venerated disciples, friends, and colleagues of McQuaid himself – hasn’t given up. Instead, with renewed resolve, the team has carefully begun the piecemeal process of making the game promised to longtime fans available. The team plans to gradually inject new content into regular updates via Pantheon’s recently-announced Seasons progression format, starting with one zone and a handful of playable classes.
I couldn’t help but wonder: even if the final product is exactly what long-time EverQuest retrophiles invested over ten years of time, money, and emotional energy into, could a finished version of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen survive on its own two legs without sacrificing some of its old-school appeal to please a broader denomination in today’s gaming market? I wanted some additional perspective from the developers working tirelessly to bring Pantheon to life, so I sat down with the top brass at Visionary Realms for a one-hour conference call. There, I got a chance to ask the most pressing questions that have been on my – and, hopefully – many other players’ minds as Pantheon ramps up its Seasons rollout.
“I think it would do very well [in today’s market]. But it depends on how you define that,” says Chris Perkins, creative director at Visionary Realms, who assures me that the team doesn’t aim to be obtuse in its reimagining of early 2000s-style massively multiplayer online roleplaying. “We want to capture the classic spirit of these games. So, back when you went into experiences, not just assuming that you were going to be successful.”
“I don't think that's lost even on the current generation of gamers, given a lot of the games that are out there now. There are a lot of tactical games that, yes, they may be more action-oriented, but they require that level of thought planning and group makeup. So we're trying to capitalize on that.”
I’ve already had a chance to go hands-on with the same version of Pantheon that’s currently available to Champion and VIP-tier backers, and its tactical gameplay engaged me as someone who grew up playing RPGs of all varieties, including classic EverQuest (which is now enjoying its 25th anniversary). Even with the light amount of content available in Pantheon’s sole zone of Avendyr’s Pass as of Chapter 1, Season 1; Pantheon’s brutal combat, minimal guidance, and heavy focus on class role symbiosis made other players feel like necessary allies in a genuinely enjoyable fight for my life. Slowly leveling up a Human Warrior to 4, which was a surprisingly arduous task requiring the help of five other random adventurers, felt as overwhelmingly nostalgic in many respects as it did underwhelmingly archaic in others.
“Our goal is not to alienate for the sake of old-school,” Perkins continues. “That was never Brad's intent, that's not mine, that's not ours. It's been to find those classically-spirited elements, put them back in the forefront, but capture them in more of a modern gameplay experience.”
Regardless of whether you cared about EverQuest in its heyday, it’s tough to ignore Brad McQuaid’s larger-than-life passion for building immersive worlds that superseded the confines of regular games. His vision for EverQuest in 1999 was contagious enough to inspire Blizzard Entertainment’s genre-defining World of Warcraft less than five years later, and his capacity to move mountains – and, at one point, cause San Diego’s internet to fail for an entire week – still inspires Perkins, who was once one of McQuaid’s handpicked mentees.
“Vision is not necessarily the same thing as low-level design decisions,” Perkins points out to me after asking how difficult it’s been for the team to recapture McQuaid’s original vision. “Vision lives, kind of at the highest end. It captures, like, what are the ultimate goals? Not so much how to achieve those goals, necessarily, even though he did have several ideas on that.
“And as far as those [ultimate goals] go, I don't think we've lost any of that. I think, if anything, we've only further kind of pressed into that. It's really a question more of, what are the specific design decisions that are going to get us there? And the good thing is, from about 2015 until Brad's death, he and I have had many, many, many meetings going over these things – specific mechanics, specific systems, lots of arguments, lots of agreements.”
Still, those words may seem hollow to long-time fans who’ve been waiting for what seems like an eternity for a proper follow-up to what EverQuest was back in its prime between 1999 and 2002. Perkins’ sentiments are similar to those that came about during the lead-up to McQuaid’s previous project, 2007’s Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which didn’t pan out as well as anyone hoped it would – ultimately shutting down in July 2014, mere months before the dissolution of Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Game Company).
After all, what good is a clear vision if the road to its manifestation is paved by tactics that don’t necessarily reflect the spirit of what that vision is meant to achieve? Following last year’s 247 Extraction mode blunder, I needed to ask the Pantheon team up-front: how do they plan to rebuild trust and, crucially, reach potential new backers through the mire of all that controversy?
“[247] was largely my idea. And I think it could have been really, really good,” Perkins tells me point-blank. “I'm actually kind of bummed that we don't still have it.”
“Developmentally, it was extremely valuable. And I think that's something that gets understated. It was extremely valuable for us with, you know, small slices of content to make them much more replayable.”
Perkins acknowledges loyal fans just want the end product promised in the initial Kickstarter. However, developing any MMORPG is a colossally challenging and expensive venture with an unknowable number of roadblocks between the beginning of development and the point at which a viable product exists. Thus, the team needed to find ways to keep people engaged – even without a “final” product to show off.
“I mean, we knew that the initial reception was going to be pretty rough. But our hope was that it would be able to weather long enough where we could extend [Pantheon] to more people,” Perkins explains.
“We didn't make it to that point, though. And ultimately, we decided that, based on the feedback we were getting, it was better to stop sooner. I do still very much want to see it returned down the road. I think as a PvP offering especially.”
Without the ability to incrementally test individual features and chunks of content in a replayable extraction mode, Visionary Realms needed to come up with a way to walk the tightrope of satisfying fans while making sure it could deliver a stable product. The result of all that brainstorming was Seasons. But exactly how many Seasons would it take for Pantheon to become ready to leave its backers-only closed alpha, let alone release commercially to the public?
According to Visionary Realms’ Chairman and CEO Chris Rowan, the team’s preferred release window for Pantheon would have been a few years ago. But with Seasons now underway, the new goal is getting more content rolling out faster with every subsequent update.
“The thing about Seasons is that it puts us on a production and development cycle that is consistent every six weeks, and we crank out content, and it pushes us forward faster,” Rowan chimes in. “Where that gets us and when is somewhat dependent on the amount of resources we have.”
“We were a very small team for quite a while. We really only got our first considerable funding in 2017 and started growing from there, and got to accelerate a little bit. But we have – right now, I think – an excellent pipeline that is predictable, consistent, and reliable. We can crank out content with Seasons, but we want to go faster.”
Rowan reasons that if Visionary Realms can secure more resources, Pantheon’s developers will know what to do with them. “We have well-honed pipelines that we can invest more resources into and move a lot more quickly. But in the meantime, I think we found a pretty good formula for people to play and enjoy the game.
“The past year has been an exercise in really – and almost kind of ruthlessly, to be honest – buckling down and just getting gritty on getting stuff done. And it's paying dividends in a big way. Reliable, consistent production pipelines.”
Given how little content exists in Season 1 relative to what’s been promised, I dug in further to find out exactly what backers can expect in Season 2, Season 3, and so forth, now that these pipelines are in place. That line of questioning prompted Perkins to jump back into the conversation and reassure me that the team knows exactly what it wants to do.
“The way that we’re handling Seasons [for Chapter 1] is primarily focused on world-building, so that's what we are guaranteeing in our releases. And the reason for that is because other things have variable timelines depending on complexity and resource availability.”
“Again, when you have a small team, there's a variable in terms of how quickly things can be done,” Perkins notes. “And the only thing that we really wanted to hang our hat on and say is ‘This is what we can do with our current resources, with the tools that we have, and with the pipelines we've developed’.
If everything goes smoothly, Season 2 is planned to include a large overland dungeon called Madrun, which itself is a “huge injection of content” aimed at players level 20 and above.
“Six weeks after that, we have another huge injection of content in the form of an overland dungeon that's even larger than that,” Perkins explains. “It introduces a new climate and introduces some new game systems as well.”
But Pantheon’s content production cycle isn’t only moving on a Season-to-Season basis. Once the first few Seasons are out in the wild, Pantheon’s second Chapter is slated to eventually begin, and that’s when Visionary Realms expects its loyal playerbase to start seeing Pantheon’s bigger picture come into frame.
“The start of the following Chapter is another huge release the players are gonna be really excited to see. When it comes to sub-features – things like new races, new classes, new gameplay systems – those are things that we are consistently working on. But it's not something that we're putting a timeline to, in terms of ‘You can expect [Chapter 2 by this Season or that Season]’.”
Already shown off in the initial Season is a deliberate art direction switch-up, transitioning away from realistic Unity assets shown in earlier pre-alpha builds, toward a more original, painterly art style with a broader color scheme. Pantheon’s evocative lighting is the first thing that popped out to me when I booted up my first character, especially when gazing across a body of water in the starting village at a distant castle – presumably, Avendyr’s Seat, which glimmers with the faint glow of candles and torches.
“Our style before was very generic fantasy, brown, blah, just generic without true brand identity,” Rowan remarks on the new art direction. “I stand by the [new] style; I think it's terrific. I don't think it's showing its full potential right now, but when it does, it's going to represent Pantheon well.”
Rowan certainly isn’t joking about that last part. Character creation is currently limited to just one race – Human – and right now, there’s no aesthetic customization besides equipped weapons and armor, meaning everyone looks the same at lower levels. Meanwhile, the character and enemy animations I experienced in my early impressions of Pantheon’s closed alpha are a bit more rickety and disjointed than I’ve grown accustomed to – for better or worse, considering they’re either unfinished or just playing off EverQuest’s rudimentary graphics.
But at the same time, I can already see the impressive direction in which the new art style is heading. At least in theory, it should allow for a quicker turnaround of original assets and new content in future Seasons, hopefully including those missing character customization options.
“It's faster to produce, which means we get the game done faster. It's less taxing on hardware, meaning more people can play,” Rowan continues. “And I think people are going to dig it when it gets to where it belongs.”
The team also assures me that Pantheon’s lighting engine is set to receive a major upgrade when Season 2 rolls out on March 30, bringing its visuals up to speed with the level of color depth and fidelity shown off in the handful of exclusive screenshots featured throughout this article. Once that happens, Visionary Realms hopes its current backers will get to enjoy a much richer, “grittier” world with “more dynamic range and less color compression”.
Before wrapping things up, I knew I needed to address one final elephant in the room: is Pantheon going to have an Early Access period, or is that essentially what Seasons is intended to be? I’m promptly given a swift “Nope!” by Rowan, who shoots down my suggestion without missing a beat.
“We see Early Access as a higher bar than what we’re doing right now,” Rowan intervenes. “Plain and simple. This is not an Early Access experience yet. If all of the stars align, it's something we would be obliged to consider. But the stars must align. It's not something we're going to force.”
With all said and done, I’m a bit more excited about Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen than I have been in light of its recent controversies. The team is clearly passionate about fulfilling Brad McQuaid’s final creative vision, but a far more important factor (for my own excitement) is the fact that other, real players I interacted with were refreshingly hopeful for its future. One in-game party member told me they’d been struggling to put it down since Seasons access began as we teamed up to defeat a tyrannical chicken who’d previously swept the floor with my avatar’s lonely level 1 corpse.
At the same time, Visionary Realms asserts that even as it’s begun opening Pantheon up to the public – albeit in a limited way, considering it currently costs a minimum of $250 for two weeks of game time per Season – it’s largely retained the good faith of its earliest backers. Many of them pledged hundreds or thousands of dollars (or more) to secure VIP status for the privilege of growing alongside the game and eventually being immortalized within it.
But as Perkins says, there’s a “shared understanding of the greater benefit” whenever Pantheon’s barrier to entry is lowered. Plus, if Pantheon successfully receives the financial resources it needs—whether by attracting a broader populace of backers or otherwise—its developers are confident that they’ve locked down the planning and processes needed to deliver the exact experience promised so many years ago.
