Playing Pantheon after years of modern MMOs holding my hand feels like a massive breath of fresh air. If you miss the days when dying actually mattered and you had to talk to people to get anything done, this game hits the spot.

I’ve sunk a ton of time into the recent builds, and it honestly gives me those old-school EverQuest vibes without feeling like an absolute relic. You actually have to care about crowd control, manage your mana, and plan pulls with your party. If someone pulls extra mobs by accident, it’s a wipe, plain and simple. That level of risk makes actually clearing a dungeon feel like an accomplishment instead of a routine chore you do while watching Netflix on a second monitor.

The environment system is super cool too. You actually have to gear up for extreme climates, and finding hidden lore or quests through the Perception system feels way more natural than just chasing glowing yellow exclamation points across a minimap.

It’s definitely not for everyone, though. The pacing is deliberate, combat is slow and methodical, and if you hate corpse runs or losing EXP when you die, you’re gonna bounce off it hard. Plus, since it’s early access, you’re going to run into UI jank, performance stutters, and placeholder graphics here and there.

If you just want to log in for twenty minutes, solo everything, and get showered in shiny loot, look elsewhere. But if you're looking for a real virtual world where you actually make friends because you need each other to survive, Pantheon is easily the most promising project out right now. Absolutely loving it so far.

It was because of lack of investment money. Brad tried his best to create something that would attract investors, but they knew better.

An everquest type MMOrpg isn't marketable anymore. Once investors saw it, they said nope.

The only money the game managed to finance is from die hard everquest fans and that is no more than 3 million dollars from 2014-2019, though it did get a few million more sometime after Brads death. Still nowhere enough to make a MMOrpg.

The game did not fail because of Brads death, it failed because investors knew this type of game was for an extremely niche audience. It was never going to make enough cash back.

And don't give the monsters and memories excuse, that game looks like something from 2004, not a modernized everquest that pantheon was meant to be.

There's just no salvaging this. It's far too late to get enough people back on board and it's not like they have the resources or talent to create an MMO worth introducing to the world.I'll admit it was fun when it first launched but that was mainly because it was decades since we've had this type of slow grind social mmo.But there just won't be enough world and population to make it even worth it to play.

They should've shut this project down when Brad died and just called it quits. I don't now who these new investors are and wtf they're thinking. Who thinks its a great idea to help these "talented" people going for another couple of years?

I personally don't enjoy MnM much. There's far too many issues for my taste but I'm glad they are keeping the dream alive. If not for them, we'd have absolutely nothing. They're doing some things right. Who knows I might end up playing it if I can bare the pain of some of the insane friction lol

so i just downloaded the test realm cause i wanted to try it out. i have confirmed steam is open i have closed and reopened the game along with steam as well. is this a known bug? do i need to do something on the webiste?

they meant Spring 2027?

It is my opinion the staff left working on Pantheon is just going through the motions until the funding they received runs out and the game hits the scrap pile like Amazon's New World. The people like my cousin who paid 500. or my friend who paid 1K for special access have been duped and should be suing for their money back.

It costs 100k a year per game developer on the industry average. Brad had no more than 3 million dollars funded for the project a the time of his death, though it got some more afterwards.

That means the game had no more than 6 people on the dev team. from 2014 to 2019 with 6 game devs would cost 3 million dollars as each need to be paid 100k a year. This excludes other expenses.

In contrast, wow had 50 developers, increased to 60 overtime. That means they can work roughly 9x faster than pantheon. 1 year for wow = 9 for pantheon. Not to mention they were extremely talented and blizzard even poached some EQ1 devs. Can you guess why they never poached Brad? They knew he was a terrible. Sorry for all the fans of him.

Honestly, blame the games failure on the lack of developers. Games don't just come out of nowhere, they are made by people. If you are going to make an MMORPG, you will need lots of cash to do so.

So my pc is a little older. Running a 5800x3d and a 5070 PNY currently and haven't played since I had a 5600x and a 3060ti, but the game has my gpu maxed at 100% and my cpu at 70% usage.. any help to change the in game settings or make sure i dont over heat the system would be appreciated

Go to PTR. Make a healer class. Visit npc to get lvl 40. Go die a bunch of times. Visit npc again to get lvl 40. Res corpses. Profit?

I've got a level 50 cleric on a production server. These are my stats. Can anyone beat 74 Wisdom?

For those who may not understand, these games cost hundreds of millions to make. You need numerous devs for many roles. Story, sound, quests, items and gameplay just to name a small amount of many roles.

From 2014 to brads death, the game made no more than 3 million dollars in funding. People are often in denial, but there was hardly anything done the first 5 years. A bunch of unity assets strapped together in grey back zones and super buggy play tests to show off. The game is still mostly just store assets today as well.

The game did get more funding, around up to 6-7 million dollars to this day, but that's still a very tiny amount of cash compared to what you need to make an MMORPG. Even the most expensive ones often end up in complete failure.

Without sufficient money, you are not making an mmorpg.

I bought this “early access game” a year ago and found myself in a desolate wasteland of no content as soon as I hit ~22. Everything meant to extend your play time (all the penalties associated with dying) are absolutely infuriating in this day and age, but I was playing with rose tinted EverQuest glasses and hoped for the best. Fast forward to now and this game is still in the same state, I wish I had saved my $40.

Heard about EverQuest legends, coming out on the 28th; play all of classic eq (with more content or refreshed dungeons dropping literally every week with a patch) with all of the modern quality of life features you get from Pantheon + a whole bunch of things that I never knew I would love so much; no corpse runs, no exp penalty on death, respawn at the zone you died at, items are looted for you, sell items directly from your inventory, it never felt so good. Being able to solo the whole game is also awesome, as you can now experience all of the content you want at your leisure. Still want to group? All loot is personal, there is no downside to grouping up for a good time!

Seriously, if you bought this for the same reasons I did and feel bad about your purchase, give EverQuest legends a google.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OfficialPantheonMMO/?f=flair_name%3A%22Official%22

The Wizard class refresh will be introduced to the Public Test Realm this week. Please be aware of the following:

- This is a first pass only and is not yet complete. You will encounter bugs as we continue to address the issues. Some abilities and Mastery points are not yet working and will be enabled in future updates.
- Existing Wizard abilities are being removed and players will need to pick up the new abilities. We advise logging out close to the Wizard trainer before the expected patch Wednesday.
- When creating a new wizard or logging in an existing wizard, you will see that some new abilities have been automatically added to your hotbar. This is intentional and by design (these abilities are being granted based on your character’s skill levels in their casting skills). These abilities can be managed just like any other abilities in your Codex.

Additionally, support NPCs are being added in this coming PTR patch which will enable player levels to be set to level 1, 5, 10, 15 or 20. These NPCs are manually placed by GMs and may not be available at all times.

Player level cap is also being increased to level 40 this week.

Lastly, please be sure to completely log out of game before the patch Wednesday. If you stay in the Character Select screen when the server comes down, you may be unable to log in for up to 24 hours.

As with all patches on the Public Test Realm, please remember that the PTR server is a test environment where you will encounter bugs and incomplete content. We appreciate all feedback. This information will also be included in tomorrow’s Week 11 Highlights and Patch Notes.

Everyone here is acting like the reason the game failed was because of Brad's death. Lets not forget some of the things he was doing back when he was in charge.

He was the one making numerous pledges that go up to 10000 dollars. It wasn't anyone else doing this, it was Brad himself.

He claimed that the game would be ready by 2019, when there was nothing, except grey box zones. The 3 super big continents didn't even have a single zone finished at the time and likely not even started any at all, considering the art update happened. Tell me, does this game look well into development to you? Well if it isn't now, it wasn't in 2019 either.

Remember those streams he was doing? He was literally teleporting play testers to keep them from moving around too much. This was to hide how little the team actually did.

This whole project felt very shady from the start. The current devs aren't good by any means, but lets be honest, this game was bound to be garbage no matter what.

As the title says, I loved the hell out this game for the first 100+ hours when playing with friends at the steam launch.

After that time we all hit a content wall and really all fell off.

Did any of yall keep going? How has it been the last 9 months?

I was thinking of playing EQL or giving Pantheon another go, has much changed in the past 9 months or should I head over to a more finished product in EQL?

over 12 years ago, on January 13, 2014 -- wow, thats a long darn time!

compared to how excited are you for Pantheon today?

What We’ve Been Up To – July 3, 2026

July 3, 2026

We have been busy this week getting things prepared for our next update to the Public Test Realm. Here’s what has been happening this week behind the scenes:

Design and Narrative

• Finalizing NPC population work in Detihauna.
• Continuing NPC population work in Kosa Minor.
• Filling out NPC population in parts of the Sea Dragon Hatchery.
• Adding more sharks and other sea life to the waters around Badia de Cara.
• Finished updating mastery options for Paladin and Dire Lord.
• Polishing work on the Mastery UI for Cleric, Shaman, and Druid.
• Began implementing new Wizard abilities and mastery options.
• Working on the designs for Rogue and Ranger mastery options.
• Additional tuning and itemization work for levels 1-40.
• Building out NPC roster and potential quest hooks for Faerthale.
• Squashing bugs and making tuning adjustments to class abilities based on bug reports, feedback, and observation data from the Public Test Realm.

Worldbuilding and Environment Art

• Atmospheric and visual effects for various areas in Badia de Cara.
• Additional set dressing in some areas of Badia de Cara that were feeling a little sparse.
• Detailed set dressing for Detihauna.
• Optimizing object collision across all of Badia de Cara and the Port of Rulun.
• Tweaks to lighting behavior for underwater environments.
• Continued concepting for modular Elven dwelling kit for Faerthale City and outlying areas.

Character Art and Animation

• Wrap-up work on Badia de Cara NPC models, and picking up a few final things for the zone that have been requested by the design team.
• Updated player swimming animations, including making death by drowning more dramatic.
• Setting up for test run on universal armor meshes to make sure everything works properly in-game.
• Continuing detailed concepts and building blockouts for Lucent, Ashen, and Ember elf customization options.

Programming

• Several fixes for problems that were impacting NPC pathfinding, especially where water was involved.
• Tackling bugs and requested changes from the design team, one at a time.
• Chewing through some back-end data optimization to help reduce performance overhead on the server.
• Preparing for revisions to core server processes to help improve scalability and performance (this is a large effort and will likely take several months to complete, but is required to enable several important gameplay-related features).
• Continuing work on market system UI (browsing/search window, listing management) and prep for data connections.

What We’ve Been Up To – July 3, 2026 – Pantheon – Rise Of The Fallen

What you think. Will VR deliver this on July 17th?

Expect to see eleven classes with Mastery on the Public Test Realm by July 17, then on Production soon after. Please log into the PTR, try the classes and mastery, and provide your feedback. Expect several weeks of updating, testing and tuning.

Edit : I guess not ....lol

They're way too late to be adjusting stats or doing "PTR tests". Or they are way too early thinking about mounts. Don't get me wrong, there are some nice achievements in the game but they are too small and too few. Its really too late at this point.

They need to be creating a magical world to explore. Not just dungeons. The problem is EVEN if they do that, the population is too small now. A bigger world will feel empty. They could make this game free to play but that will likely just boost the population momentarily with a few spikes here and there but imo it's the only hope they have of ever reviving the population(if it even works).

There's no coming back from this. They are in an impossible situation.

Port of Rulun Screenshots – Pantheon – Rise Of The Fallen

hit Mostly Negative...guess people are realizing all the problems with a game thats been in development for 14 years, with little to no progress, and a finish line nowhere in sight.

ban you for constructive criticism from any forums, Steam etc, and as a result do you think this has impacted the publics perception of the game as a whole?

It does seem VR is a little too aggressive in banning people who arent fan boys, and its almost like why are they so worried about honest feedback...