Earlier this week, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen ran into a SNAFU with a backend system that ultimately led to Visionary Realms cancelling a planned pre-alpha test for alpha backers, noting that this test would instead happen in the beginning of 2024. That unhappy news wasn’t met with great aplomb by an already unhappy playerbase, primarily because alpha backers apparently were widely unaware of the cancellation.
At the heart of the issue is the fact that the announcement wasn’t communicated very well; recall that the postponement was posted to Discord but not on the MMO’s other social channels, which ended up leaving many alpha backers surprised by a lack of access or forced to disseminate the news themselves.
As a result of Visionary Realms’ latest self-own, the studio announced on Discord (as well as Twitter and Facebook this time) that three additional pre-alpha tests would be held for alpha pledges over the next three days. “We have a full awareness of the disappointment that the alpha pledge test session postponement caused,” the announcement in Discord admits. “We made a commitment to our community and it is important to us that we honor that.”
However, there are a couple of asterisks to these tests to bear in mind, namely the fact that the persist system issue that caused the postponement in the first place still isn’t fixed. As a result, testing populations will be smaller, server reboots are a distinct possibility, players will have to contend with item and stat loss, and cross-server travel will not be permitted. “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 announcement closes.
Players still appear to be unhappy about the state of things despite the concession, though, with many offering anger, shaking of heads, or resigning to the fact that Pantheon will not be finished. “You can always hope,” reads one reply. “I was pretty hyped about it a few years ago, now I just hope.”
