Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

696 hours in game as of this review. This game is a clown show. What started as a promise and a hope has devolved into a morass of poor development. The lead developer is a failed high school music teacher and his lack of ability to lead and coordinate a team shows. 10 months after release they have mainly rearranged the deck chairs (character abilities) and called these updates. These guys took the same classes from Everquest and utterly ruined them. Casters have to get hit by melee to gain "readiness" or they cant cast. The enchanter is a useless class (Did they even play EQ?) The wizard has 4 mana bars. A main mana bar and one for each type of majic (Ice, fire, arcane). The spells use up most of the mini mana bars (they have 6 mana slots and spells use 4 slots per cast) and often you cant cast at all with half your mana left. I have never seen a wizard with half mana that cant cast at all in any rpg I have ever played. The spell and ability selection for every class is about 6 things that just barely upgrade every few levels. Very imaginative. The different classes feel very same and not really unique in any way. The server population is so low that they have merged almost all of their servers into a handful. Those are mostly empty except for the multi boxxers. They had a healthy population when early release started in December of 2024 but every character "tweak" they have made has been for the worse. 98% of the players have left the game. Our guild went from 80 people in December to 03 by February. Content creation should be a priority for any rpg. Many different lands, biomes /zones, each with its own characteristics are the rule in these games. Apparently they dont have a team dedicated to creating content at all. 6 zones in 10 years is all they can muster. Orcs, orcs, orcs, and more orcs along with a few werewolves, humans, goblins, rats, bats, snakes, bears, boars, spiders, and deer are the mobs you will fight. Did I mention orcs? Priorities dictate that a game world must have content for the players to experience. Six zones isn't much content and most of it is just purchases unity assets. The time for tweaking character abilities is after you have a game to play...not before. They have added a few small areas to the 6 zones they started with, which is basically more copy paste unity assets. Back in 2017 these folks showed us great footage of nice graphics and interesting game play. That was all abandoned. All the money, time, and work put into that really nice looking system has been tossed out. Low res textures for buildings, ugly armor and clothing, character models that make Everquest 2004 look great, and very weak game mechanics have replaced the earlier work that was so encouraging. What happened? The lead dev that helped create Everquest died and the joker that used to be a high school music teacher somehow wormed his way into control. He used to make podcasts but those revealed how unqualified he was so he abandoned the podcasts. Ignore their promises and promo vids folks. It has been 10 years and they still have 6 unfinished zones full of unity assets (they couldn't even make their own icons.) It seems to many (banned users) that this whole early release was meant to milk an IP for a few more paychecks. I dont know if it is true or not but we have all seen scams before on steam. Lots of hype and promises and years later nowhere near achievement of the initial vision or scope of the sales pitch. This dog wont hunt. Don't dare to question these idiots in the forums. You spend your $40.00 and sit down and shut up. The devs have tons of fake shill accounts that try to gaslight the players in the forums. When one of the shill accounts gets utterly reviled by the players a new one magically appears with the same old hype and B.S. There have been devs that cheat for player "friends" in the game by spawning rare mobs for them, giving them rare items, ect. Scandal after scandal and the ones involved get promotions. I think we have seen that everywhere in our world and many of us are tired of the "failing upwards" behavior by certain segments of society. That mentality is strong with this dev team. The lead Dev failed his way into the top job, and of course things are going well now (sarcasm). I suggest you spend half of the asking price of this "game" on a different early release that is further along, and better run, by more talented and imaginative people. Pantheon : Fail of the Music Teacher isnt working out.

tl,dr: game idea good, developers bad, current state of game bad, noone playing Now why would someone with over 1100 hours in a game write a review saying "don't buy this"? It's very simple: I bought it very early when EA started and had a blast playing it at that time. I had a static group that played every day and progressed to the end game. But times have changed: If you buy it right now, you will play until like lvl10 to 15 mostly solo and think "wow, nice game, the climbing mechanic is a great addition too to mmorpgs" and then you will start noticing 3 things: a) you won't be able to find a group because this game has like an average of 500 players online across all levels and all SERVERS and is bleeding 20% or more of its population every month (more about that later). Some servers are so dead you have NO ONE in the lfg tool for DAYS. b) you will start to notice that the starting content is over and the other content is like 1 or 2 camps per level range. Those are either camped by a static group (or a single guy boxing several accounts) which means even if you had a group you had nowhere to level. c) Reading patch messages for a few weeks will make you think "wtf are they doing?" A little bit of background: This game has been in development for like 10 years now. In 2019 Brad McQuaid died who was lead developer for this and key designer for EQ before. He planned this as a new, modern EQ. But the new lead/team don't really know what they are doing: Stuff like "hit rating is now based on Constitution" (yes! That's NOT a joke, it REALLY is currently based on constitution!) or reworking the same system again and again and again. Since the start of EA jewelry for example was reworked 5 times. Stats on all items have changed several times with the developers stating they want to spread stats across the board... with stuff like necromancers requiring dexterity for some of their spells now. Lots of people are royally pissed atm because you can't really plan your gear at all and even stuff you are currently using becomes worthless from time to time (well, hello int-caster-only ring with NO INT on it!) These reworks happen constantly, they happen partially across several patches which leads to half working systems making the game nigh unplayable from time to time and while some systems have the n-th rework now, some stuff gets no love at all. Example? Summoner class... is basically unchanged since EA start at the end of the last year, except for 3 minor nerfs. Even though the class has glaring bugs like in fights with multiple mobs the pets just stare at the corpse of the first mob if you don't manually retarget. Pets warping through the floor or ceiling, a whole spellline that does NOTHING (literally!) except consume resources when you click the spell. Or another example: Enchanters STILL don't have their charm ability. Official reason it wasn't added yet (months ago!): NPCs might start fighting amongst themselves when it wears off... no updates since then (that's like half a year!). And this is where the player loss is coming from. The developers ask for feedback, but then do whatever they like anyway. The official discord has turned into a castle of white knights meanwhile, since everyone that tried to change something for the better just left after getting ignored for months. Check Steam Charts... like 20%-30% of the player base gone... EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH. (And constantly having to regear because of the rework of the rework didn't help either or, while people are complaining about no content being added and bugs existing for far too long, you have the devs release articles about "the crafting stations have new graphics now") Financing the whole thing was a nightmare with a backer program running for years through pre-alpha and alpha. The smallest packages that let you play for like a day every month were 250$+. I guess they ran out of people willing to hand them money, so they had to release it into EA in the current state to get some more $$$. Oh and they had the engine changed several times, starting with their own engine, ditching that several years ago for Unity 5, atm it is at Unity 6. Content is added very slowly, like a single dungeon every few months. Stuff that's added is usually bugged and fixed a week (or several) later. All the time while this is happening they are reworking stuff that was already working or has been reworked already. I have to say that several times, since it goes on and on and usually makes stuff worse or changes it just to be different. Graphics don't get updated either (except for the crafting stations, lol!)... your lvl 40 gear looks exactly like the lvl5 beggar gear. If you are desperately waiting for a "new EQ" there will be better alternatives soon. This project isn't dead yet, but don't waste your money on an EA that is just a bumpy ride through fail-city. If they manage to find back to their roots (as an EQ-like) they could still make it, but as it is looking currently and especially with the changes they keep making, it is unlikely this is ever going to release.

This game was fun for a few months, then it shows it's true colors. Content is frontloaded until about 20, then you realize you've been in the same two areas trying to get groups to do the same thing you have been for weeks. Past 20, content is scarce with large gaps between groupable ranges, to do the same camps over and over. Devs are sarcastic as hell on discord and show obvious, and documented favoritism towards specific guilds. Pantheon is like a mansion that looks awesome when you first enter, but spend any time in it and you notice the cracks in the ceiling and holes in the wall behind the pictures. Game has been in development for about 10 years, and this is all they have to offer. There isn't a completed zone in the game. I had a lot of fun playing this game at start, look at my hours; i definitely got my money's worth, but there is no reason to continue. Made it til about level 23 as a player without a pre-made group.

11 years of development, millions of dollars, and to still be at this point of development is embarrassing. If you're looking to scratch that old school MMO itch might as well wait for the EA release of Monsters & Memories in Q1 of 2026

Played for months on release, first few weeks were a weird punishing kind of fun. Lots of deaths/corpse runs back to the goblin caves. Followed up with lots of re clearing to get back to corpse since only a handful of classes/players can/will corpse summon without charging arm and a leg. This might have changed, its hard to say, as i tried to log back in recently to find a completely dead server on a game that forces group content. Poking around i see they have had a huge drop in players since i stopped in Feb to now, July, which is unfortunate. You would expect a loss of some of the player base. Not 95%. This is what happens when the content updates arent very meaningful, still no bard?!? more level 40 content? how many players actually made it to 40 vs those stuck around 20-25? So my only choice is to switch to a new server, lose the hundreds of hours ive already spent on a character? Ok its EA fine and i got no life, logged on the highest pop server to find no one in LFG/chat lower than 25-28. Welllllll that sucks. So i have to play alone, 1-25, on a game with limited solo content, very little to no actual story/lore driven background? I suppose its up to me to make my own story? i will be Boars Bane by the time im done! Since you know not much to solo kill but some boars, and bears, oh cant forget the random cat or snake! I will check it out again if i ever see they get out of this hole, re do some of the leveling/solo content, and add some actual quests, with detailed story of the land so im not running around wondering why its called Rise of the Fallen, who fell? who is rising? am i the fallen for all the times i died to bears and geckos?

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.

To Visionary Realms, I loved EverQuest when it launched in 1999, and I loved World of Warcraft in its classic era. Because of that history, I was genuinely excited to try what was marketed as a spiritual successor to EQ. Unfortunately, after even limited playtime, it’s clear that the core formula hasn’t meaningfully evolved—and worse, it hasn’t aged well. A striking example appears almost immediately. In EverQuest, players begin in a dark, primitive cave killing rats. In this game, you do exactly the same thing. Rats, snakes, bats, spiders—no narrative hook, no sense of wonder, no mechanical surprise. Even the moment-to-moment gameplay is identical: standing in a dim cave, cycling abilities (1, 2, 1, 2…) for 20–40 seconds per enemy. The enemies themselves path and behave like prototypes from a beginner’s game engine. I understand this is intentional homage, but it made for a weak first impression then—and it makes for a weaker one now. Developers of World of Warcraft have been open about their early inspiration from EverQuest. They believed they could build a similar game and improve upon it—and they did. WoW featured faster, more responsive combat, richer environments, more varied abilities, better loot feedback, and crucially, vastly improved enemy balance. Combat felt dangerous not because enemies took forever to kill, but because both the player and the enemy could die quickly. This made encounters exciting and tense rather than tedious. Anyone skeptical of this distinction need only try WoW Classic Hardcore. I had hoped this game would follow a similar philosophy: preserve what made EQ special, but iterate and modernize it. Instead, it feels nearly identical to the very design that caused players to abandon EQ en masse for mechanically tighter, more engaging alternatives. My negative assessment—and what I believe will ultimately determine this game’s success or failure—comes down to one subtle but critical design choice. It’s something Blizzard understood when creating genre-defining classics like Diablo II and World of Warcraft: Enemies do not need to be damage sponges to be threatening. In fact, damage sponges are rarely threatening at all. In EQ, enemies took an extremely long time to kill—but they hit hard. The danger came from lethality, not attrition. In WoW, damage sponges were reserved almost exclusively for dungeon elites and raid bosses. Normal enemies died quickly, but so could you. The same principle applied in Diablo II: solo play was viable, but monster health scaled intelligently with party size. Difficulty came from risk, positioning, and damage—not inflated health bars. In WoW, a normal enemy might take 10–20 seconds to defeat solo, and elites took a similar amount of time when fought by a group. That pacing felt good. In this game, enemies routinely take far longer than that—without posing meaningful danger. The result is what many players call “wet noodle combat”: enemies don’t hit hard, don’t force quick decisions, and don’t threaten death. They simply take forever to kill. Combat becomes a war of attrition, not skill or excitement—and that is not fun. Initially, I was encouraged after reading Visionary Realms’ 2026 roadmap. It appeared the team understood this issue. Statements about reducing rigid content divides, empowering solo and small-group play, and rewarding skill, preparation, and knowledge suggested a move toward harder-hitting, less sponge-like enemies. However, that optimism vanished when I reached this section: "Time-to-kill (TTK) for most NPCs will be increasing. Instead of the current, often rapid rate of mowing down NPCS, combat will have a greater focus on sustainability, resource management and time for each player to utilize more of their toolkit. In addition, experience gains will be adjusted to smooth out the leveling curve at low-mid to mid-levels and grant more experience per kill to match the increased TTK." The current TTK is already slow. Increasing it further will only exacerbate the very problems holding the game back. Slower combat does not make enemies more threatening—it makes them more tedious. It deepens the damage-sponge problem and further entrenches wet noodle pacing. It’s unfortunate that the game’s original creative leader—the CCO behind EverQuest—passed away in 2019. I would have been genuinely interested to see how this project might have evolved under his continued guidance. As it stands now, given both the current state of the game and a roadmap that explicitly doubles down on slower combat, I cannot recommend it. Artificial difficulty through inflated health pools is the wrong direction. If the goal is excitement, tension, and longevity, damage output—not time-to-kill—must increase for both players and enemies. Unfortunately, the developers appear committed to doing the opposite. For that reason, I believe this game will struggle to find and retain an audience.

Game developer employs extreme favoritism to a select few of players by bending the ToS rules. Further, they suspend accounts without providing any notification until the following day for investigating reported issues and acting based on heresay. They indicate they favor competition but then ban people when that competition does not meet their own narrative. Highly discourage playing this game if you want a competitive MMO.

It was a really fun game when it initially released for early access, especially with friends. It had that old-school feeling of early mmo´s that´s hard to find nowadays and the community was overall really nice to play with. As time went on though, and issues with developers and their in-game guilds started to crop up, it became clear that the people behind this don´t take their jobs seriously enough for me to recommend this to anyone. It´s pretty common knowledge nowadays that employees from the studio that play the game tend to do favours to their guild mates and friends, and even retaliate against other players on their behalf. It´s the sort of shenanigans you´d expect from someone hosting a private server in their home as a hobby and not from a studio that´s charging actual money to thousands of people. The fact this still persists today, and that no one got straight up fired when these issues cropped up, speaks to the amateur-hour flavour of the studio itself. These are not serious people and you should not given them money. I would refund now if I could. It´s a good base for a good old-school MMO. Unfortunately ran by a bunch of people who can´t take their jobs seriously.