If you’ve been watching Visionary Realms’ MMORPGÂ Pantheon closely, you might be wondering about its development cadence, especially given its timeline shifts. Back at PAX East a year ago, for example, the team seemed pretty confident that it would hit alpha by the end of 2018, suggesting that the game would have to be pretty far off schedule to miss that date. But by August, you’ll recall that Visionary Realms walked that back, saying it was revising its plan.
YouTuber Bazgrim recently interrogated the devs on just what’s going on with the new timeline, and the response is predictable: that VR is trying to get the game “closer to launch-quality in art and polish” and isn’t “ready to share the revised alpha target date.” In other words, Bazgrim argues, it doesn’t really sound as if the game is necessarily off schedule developmentally, just that the devs have shifted around when they want to take the wraps off for a big influx of players.
On the other hand, the studio couldn’t confirm that when the alpha does launch, it will include the entire continent of Kingsreach as was once planned. And that seems to indicate that the studio is focused on tricking out a smaller slice of the gameworld for that big reveal.
As Massively OP readers can surely attest, that might be annoying, but it’s probably in the best interests of the actual game, given how judgmental early testers can be. And Pantheon won’t be the first indie MMO studio to take that lesson to heart.
You can watch the entire video below.
