Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Looks Back At The Past Year’s ‘Triumphs And Troubles’
The Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen dev team is closing out the year with a retrospective blog from Visionary Realms CEO Chris Rowan where he looks back at their “triumphs and troubles” over the past year. He also expressed pride at the progress that they’ve made on the in-development fantasy MMORPG in 2023 which he says is more than they’ve accomplished in previous years.
The two main highlights of Pantheon’s year are its artwork revamp and the release of an extraction-style game mode called 247, both of which were ill-received by its community. The new game mode received extremely negative reviews that the team scrapped the controversial project just a few weeks after Visionary Realms confirmed rumors of its existence.
“Originally envisioned as a way to keep the testers happy and radically accelerate Pantheon feature and content development, while also ideating on a future PvP mode of Pantheon, 247 Test mode launched us forward on so many fronts,” says Rowan. “Everything accelerated, but when the concept was introduced to the community and we mentioned that we were considering monetizing it to help fund accelerated Pantheon development, the community quite literally freaked out.”
“They thought we were abandoning Pantheon (we weren’t) and made it painfully clear that they didn’t like 247,” he continues. “We listened and shifted right back to full development focus on the MMO mode of Pantheon, almost overnight.”
As for the art style, Rowan claims that, while most players who don’t like the new look, many of them ended up liking it when they got to actually experience it in action. “It works, and it works well, but you have to play to feel it,” he says. “[…] Nothing helps more than allowing people in to see for themselves, so that will be a major theme of 2024 – more people playing Pantheon, seeing it for themselves.”
To achieve that goal, he says that the team will be taking “very bold steps” to get more players into the game, including more frequent content releases, better internal and external communication, and investing more resources to speed up development.
Rowan also reports that the recently held backer-exclusive pre-alpha tests received “overwhelmingly positive” feedback from testers, although the Pantheon Reddit paints a completely different picture. We do note that the game’s community might just be airing their disappointment over the game’s drawn out development and the unpopular changes that the team made over the past few months.
