Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Complete joke of a company and project. Company has community mods that ban people for voicing concerns after the team time and again misses self-set timelines by months and years at a time. They continue to put out nothing but reiterations of stat reworks that simply aren't worth having spent the time on to begin with. 1.5 years after EA release the game is in a vastly worse place than it was at EA release. Community mods straight up lying and spreading misinfomation about documented statements from the studio that can easily be fact checked. Complete clown show. Edit: Lol, psychotic Dev stalking customer's Steam profiles and spreading misinformation to cover their incompetent rear ends. You deleted posts of mine from weeks ago not just the posts from the thread you are referring to. Can't even reply to the comment you left on my review because of my temp ban from your Steam discussion page apparently so had to edit it into my actual review. Complete weirdo nonsense on the part of childish and unprofessional devs. Completely psychotic behavior from non professionals.

So I NEVER post reviews... truthfully. I don't bother. I play a game and if I like it, i keep playing. If I don't, I put it down and move on. Nothing complicated... HOWEVER... I am compelled to post what might be my... third? fourth? review in thousands of games and hundreds of thousands of gaming hours throughout my career. I have never been treated so poorly by a developer before in my life. Which is quite shocking to be honest. There was a recent thread in the discussions forums related to some ongoing development progress. A comment had lamented the delays and noted on how the team was behind schedule in both their combat update and the upcoming wipe. A dev responded to this thread and noted, I quote: "We have stated that we will do the character reset with the Combat & Progression Update. This has not, and will not change. Please don’t spread misinformation." I found it a bit misleading to state the user was spreadingmisinformation for noting the delays in the update since there was video not too long ago from Jappa on youtube's official pantheon account noting how in the spring of 2026 the wipe would come with a massive update to combat and many other changes. Seeing as we are now in the summertime, it was not misleading to state they were behind schedule. My post that I made linking the youtube video and commenting how it was not misinformation was deleted along with a few other comments. A subsequent discussion thread related to the most recent progress (June 6th) had a remark about how the previous update thread was locked. A developer responded noting that it was locked stating "The offending posts were removed." I responded in new thread to the poster "Terablethots" with this: --------------------------------------- Originally posted by Terablethots: "Are we aware a Dev locked a post for nothing more than people questioning this wipe or whatever that is? They say name calling and mis information? Just from reading this as someone interested. Ive read dont play till wipe and now when questioned the devs are locking posts? Yikes" MY REPLY: Yea my post was deleted for simply linking to a youtube video where they said the patch and wipe would occur in the spring of 2026 in responce to a developer stating someone was spreading misinformation because they were behind schedule. Here is that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSAnEdOszhs I made no namecalling, didn't post anything offensive. Hard to imagine how my post was "offensive." ---------------------------------------- When I returned to the discussion thread to read some more I noticed my account was permanently banned. The response you read above had also been deleted. The reason given? I quote, "Publicly debating disciplinary actions." Huh?? First off, I don't see how my original post needed disciplinary action. What exactly in my post was so egregious? I wasn't even notified I had broken any rules. I couldn't find any TOS that would prevent the contents of my post from being made. Never would I imagine that subsequently commenting on my post's deletion was grounds for permanent ban. For this reason I must leave a negative review. This is my very first negative review, and after hundreds of thousands of hours, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen gets it. Chiefly on the behavior of the developers towards their community. I'm not troll, i don't post sexist material, racist material, deliberately antagonistic or misleading comments/posts, so it baffles me why I was treated as such but it really speaks volumes to me on how they view their player base and the people who engage in discussions on their platform. If abuse of power coming from a developer of a game you paid to play doesn't bother you, and you don't mind long delays and development cycles, then you might like pantheon. When I first picked it up it had a lot of appeal. With time, and now this treatment, I simply cannot recommend it. I am hopeful for a refund but I doubt it. Take care all and watch how you talk if you post on their discussion forums. Even seemingly innocuous posts can get you silenced forever.

I almost never post game reviews. Don't know why, I just don't. But... Don't buy this. I don't tend to regret too many game purchases I make, even when a project fails. But this one feels wrong in a lot of ways. It's interesting on the surface level but the further into it I got on Live servers, the more I realized this only looked like what I have been searching for (something that would bring back a classic MMO feel, like Everquest). I jumped into the PTR to try to give this more time and another chance and I can't really say I'm liking what I'm seeing there either. Apparently none of it is up for discussion. If I don't like it "I should just STFU and go play something else". So that's what I'm going to do.

I played Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen for 100 hours. This game is horrible. Graphics suck, gameplay is ass, everything about the game is uninspired. And that's not even the half of it. The game uses egregious monetary practices and they don't even deliver on those empty promises. The game mods have player accounts that they will use to join certain guilds and give preferential treatment (including spawning bosses, player killing you and banning you for player killing their team mates.) There very much is a hidden whale system that almost nobody will openly admit to. There still isn't even a map. People will defend all of these choices but the fact is, they have about 50 players, with a 24 cap of like 100. And those players are split between realms and the PTR. If you do stick around anyways just to try the game out you will eventually realize this game is basically just a 5m server with people power-tripping and abusing GM and PM relationships, and there are no shortage of examples of that. Tl;dr - For only $40 you can beat yourself in the d-ck with a hammer.

Pantheon’s population collapse is not just bad optics. It cuts directly against the game’s core design. This is a group-dependent MMO. Low population hurts any online game, but it hurts Pantheon more because grouping is not optional flavor. It is the premise. Wipes and early access explain some drop-off. They do not explain the scale of what SteamDB shows: a long decline from thousands of players after Steam release to a tiny fraction of that later on. The remaining players are then divided across servers, time zones, and level ranges. The actual pool of available groupmates is much smaller than the already-low numbers suggest. For a game built around grouping, that is the core problem.

I love the game but sometimes feel like I'm going to die of old age before it launches. (I'm actually serious. I'm an old guy)

This one won't be around much longer. They've decided to take any fun that could have been had and chucked it out the window. Most people don't want to group with a bunch of idiots, but they've made this so solo "unfriendly" and the mechanics really are bad. You can make an old school mmo without incorporating all of the old school mechanics that made older mmos too much a of a chore to play. A lot of areas that I experienced are tiny and choked off. I really had high hopes for this one as EQ1 was my first mmo, followed by DAoC.

PTR is a complete Intergalactic cluster F#%k and regression in a ten year endeavor of disappointment. Each iteration is one more step away from the original pitch, until all that is left is another MMO undecipherable from the plethora of dung.

At the current state of the game, art style changes keep happening and missed promises I would not recommend the game, logged in during a "prime time" hour and I saw next to nobody in the area I was in. They mentioned they were doing a Spring wipe but that seems to no longer be happening. I"ll return to the game for sure, but at the moment in time if you are looking for an MMO Scratch, i'd keep looking. A lot of players exploited the game and got massive amounts of gold before they patched it and then let them keep it since a "Spring wipe is coming" but it really messed with the economy of the game.

Each "what we've been up to" update gives the illusion that they're actually doing anything substantive. Over 1.5 years into EA and I can level up to 20 in PTR. I had fun and made some friends that I'm sure I'll play a real MMO with before this will ever be finished. Balancing and mastery should have came before new zones. Instead the catered to the few vocal people and look where they are. A community that is nearly non-existent. The data they gather is from a few hundred people. I logged on and ported to TF and saw maybe 50. So, I have no idea how they are balancing based off of that. Probably the 1 or 2 people that they "trust". One of my characters names got flagged by someone (?) and instead of letting me rename my character, they just when with "inappropriatename". And, to be frank, my name wasn't inappropriate considering the term is used as an alternative to something that MIGHT be offensive. tigoldbitties to be transparent. I can see VR looking up the records and considering banning me now... In any event, I got my $ worth, but I can't recommend this to anyone else in this state unfortunately. VR - you should have left my favorite "solo" class alone (Paladin) considering the population. Be seein ya > EQ Legends where I'm encouraged to be OP.