With December almost wrapping up, Visionary Realms CEO Chris Rowan is taking a moment to pen a retrospective of the year that was for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, where he talks about the “triumphs and stumbles in 2023” but also expresses pride in how the MMORPG “has progressed further in 2023 than any year prior.”
Naturally the address remarks on some of the more recent fumbles of Pantheon’s development, especially in regards to the studio’s attempt to make 247 a thing:
“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. 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. We listened and shifted right back to full development focus on the MMO mode of Pantheon, almost overnight.”
Rowan further continues to defend the game’s art style, claiming that while many people still dislike how it looks in stills and video, many of those critics like how it looks in action while playing the game. “It works, and it works well, but you have to play to feel it,” he argues. “[N]othing 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.”
Speaking of 2024, Rowan states several “simple” goals for Pantheon’s next year, including “very bold steps” to get more players in-game, making more content at a faster pace, getting more resources to accelerate production, and improving internal and external communication.
Tangential to that final point, Rowan sprinkles some live in-game experiences throughout the address, noting that the recently opened alpha backer access has been met with “overwhelmingly positive” feedback from players. This flies in the face of Redditor impressions, which are almost universally negative at the moment, though there is the asterisk that this subreddit has not been happy for a very long while, so grains of salt on both accounts.
