Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's developer, Visionary Realms, has addressed the community's disappointment following the canceled Pre-alpha test over the weekend. To make amends, the company announced it will be holding three new tests this week, despite the issue that caused the cancelation still persisting.
As we reported over the weekend, the Pantheon pre-alpha was postponed thanks to an "underlying issue" with Pantheon's Persist system. The team said that because of the issue, Pantheon would "not be able to perform under the increased server load" thanks to the influx of new testers the much-anticipated pre-alpha brought.
The fact that this cancelation was announced at seemingly the eleventh hour, right before the test was to take place, didn't sit well with many in the community, especially as the company has struggled to regain its backers trust following quite a few blunders the past few weeks. The Pantheon subreddit was flooded with confusion, frustration, and more in the wake of the news.
While some posts to the Reddit were initially people struggling to log in, unaware that the test had been canceled, this quickly turned to frustration with the dev team, with one upvoted comment simply calling the way this was handled "obscenely incompetent."
Today, the Community Manager Savanja addressed this frustration in a post on the official Discord, acknowledging the "disappointment" caused by the postponement.
"We have a full awareness of the disappointment that the alpha pledge test session postponement caused. We made a commitment to our community and it is important to us that we honor that. "
Savanja goes on to say that the team has been "working on a solution" that will allow for alpha testing. As a result, Pantheon will run three tests over the next three days, with invites going out later today to those Alpha testers who have registered their keys.
"Registered alpha pledges will be broken down into three groups, each assigned a day and a server for testing. Emails with details will be going out to alpha pledges later today."
However, the elephant in the room is whether or not the issue that caused the postponement in the first place is fixed.
Simply put: "No."
Savanja says that to mitigate the issues that the Persist system could cause, the team is limiting the population in each test, as well as shutting down cross-sever movement for player characters. There are other issues as well, with Savanja saying that there are problems with "item/stat loss," which are not recoverable.
"We completely understand that there will be alpha pledges who do not wish to test in this state, and we are planning future test sessions for alpha pledges in 2024 once these issues have been resolved."
The last few months have not been easy on the Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen team, with the recent experiment to work on a spin-off extraction MMO mode, dubbed colloquially the 247 extraction mode, which was pitched as a way to speed up the MMO's development. However, the community made it quite clear that this was not what they pledged their money towards, and the Pantheon team canceled the mode.
Additionally, the team has faced some criticism over its new art style, which some in the community have blasted as losing the darker tones and realism that was initially pitched to backers. Hopefully, the tests this week will help to restore some of the trust from the community which has been strained for some, and shattered for others, over the last few months.
