Even though I do my best to follow the will of the polls for Choose My Adventure, there are some times when I have to make an executive decision. Either I just really dislike a game choice that I started out curious about, I flip a coin (or roll a dice, which is similar except it earns me at minimum six extra nerd points) to break a tie, or I just find that I made a bad move in adding a game to the list.
In the case of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, I made an error in judgment in offering it as a poll option. Now that I’ve played it a bit, I concur with my colleague that it’s just not ready for me to really dive in to with any sort of depth for this column – at least not at the time of this article’s writing. I want to talk about why – and what I’m going to play for the next edition instead.
That’s not to say that I didn’t give Pantheon at least a bit of a shake, of course. Between peeking into this game for a stream and for CMA, I think I got a reasonably fair measure of where things stand, how much I could do right now, and whether there would be a lot of choices for me to poll readers on. I’m pretty confident that I answered the first two questions and was therefore led to a decision on the third.
Right now, in the starting zone that I selected as a freshly minted Hobbit Warrior, there are ultimately only a couple of things for me to do: run around and slay monsters a bunch of times until I slowly earn XP, or focus on the gathering skill mini-quests that are available to me. On the face of it that sounds like a lot of options, but in reality I would just end up doing all of those things at once anyway in the hopes that I would get to a point when I could provide some more potentially robust options.
Pantheon’s “problem” as it relates to CMA is pacing. It feels like it takes far, far, far too long to make progress at the interim. You’ll note that I put that word in quotes in order to clarify that I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing in general; it’s just a bad thing for CMA. I don’t really have the ability to power through this mountain climb of early leveling right now.
And besides, I’m not sure I have many guarantees that what awaits after getting past this point will be of interest either. It doesn’t look as if there are a lot of quests to do or things to discover (and yes I made sure to talk to all of the NPCs to be sure), and the perception system – the big-ticket feature that brings up things to look into while out exploring – isn’t available yet.
Now to be fair, none of this is necessarily a surprise to me. These were known quantities that Visionary Realms itself called out in November. I was prepared for the slow and methodical pacing that was outlined here, but I still wanted to try it out just to see if it would work. And it does! Just… not for a series of articles that have some pretty tight deadlines. I just do not have the time to devote to Pantheon at the exclusion of all else, which is kind of where things feel like they’re at right now; there’s “methodical” and then there’s “you are not allowed any other leisure activity.”
To put it another way, I pretty much agree with the vast majority of Justin’s impressions. Yet even so, I’m not going to kick Pantheon off into the bushes like I might do other games that have gotten in the way from a mechanical standpoint.
Part of that is because I will openly admit to a bit of bias in favor of Visionary Realms. It might have injured itself needlessly with the 247 extraction thing back in 2023, but the course correction over 2024 told me a lot about the team and the game it is wanting to build. Also I’m just desperately hungry for a real, new PvE sandbox MMORPG and have been starved for that, without going to other choices like Embers Adrift or Project Gorgon, though the latter choice is definitely closest to my personal ideal.
More than that, I still feel the huge amount of potential radiating from Pantheon that I felt when I first tried it out during one of its open tests. This game really does seem as if it’s looking in the directions that I want it to. But it’s just not there yet. Not for me, and definitely not for CMA. So that’s why I’m going to flip the script for the rest of this month and take up the second poll choice: RuneScape.
Also, when I do decide to return to this one, I plan on giving it its best chance to experience what I can: I plan on waiting until there’s more additions, I’ll take our readers’ suggestion of starting a character in Thronefast instead of Wild’s End, and Justin has already offered to duo with me. All that said, it’s important to stress again that CMA is not a review column; we don’t do reviews anyway, and this series specifically is an impressions travelogue, not a final grade.
Anyway, let’s circle back to RuneScape. It has been some time since I came back to this one, and I’ve offered it up a few different times in polling before, but the fact that last time the results were just one vote away meant that it seemed like the right time to revisit. And hey, who knows? Maybe this one will end up being the PvE sandbox I’m craving. One can certainly hope.
Now, I know that there’s not really any classes in this game exactly so much as professions and more specifically its combat triangle, so what I’m asking instead for the first poll question is whether or not I should stick to the safe option or the new one.
Loading ...Second, this one will probably be an easy one, but I want to ask: Should I bring my husband along? I did the last time I was playing this game and had fun, but our work schedules have definitely adjusted since then, so it might be a bit harder to coordinate. But on the other hand, these things are always best with friends. But then again, he’s so sleepy; he’s napping on the couch as I write this right now.
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Polling will wrap up at the usual 1:00 p.m. EST time on Friday, January 10th. In the meantime, now that I don’t feel the time pressure of this article’s deadline in relation to Pantheon, I can perhaps take that slow and arguably sluggish walk forward through it. Or I’ll just be cheering it along from the sidelines instead. Either way, I am most certainly cheering for it.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
