The developers of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen have answered the community’s questions in detail following its recent production overhaul. The team admits it has made a lot of mistakes in recent years and now wants to stop reworking and get the game back to a stable, cohesive foundation first.
The main priority will be a new version of the game that provides a complete experience for characters level 1 to 50. It should include a balanced combat system, progression, NPCs, and items. At the same time, the developers are not ready to give an exact date yet: they want to fully test the assembly first before releasing it. They promised to come up with a new roadmap in the coming weeks.
Additionally, the team explains why Pantheon often finds itself in situations where it has to rebuild an already running system from scratch. Designer Mark Maragino said large areas such as combat, careers, crafting and resource gathering were previously handled by individual specialists. For an MMORPG of this scale, that’s not enough: different systems are constantly dependent on each other, and changes in one force changes in the other. Now each component will have several people working on it at the same time.
The developer also revealed the current size of the team: there are 30 employees, 25 of whom are responsible for development and 5 for management. The total number of full-time employees is approximately 26. Meanwhile, Visionary Realms claims that there are enough funds available to release Pantheon version 1.0. Additional funding will only speed up production.
The side project situation looks interesting, too. The company does engage in outside work unrelated to the gaming industry, but claims that the funds received will be used to support Pantheon and add resources, not take away resources. Only a small number of employees combine work in both areas.
They promised to handle communications in much the same way they did during the season. Rather than publishing an internal library of thousands of tasks, the developers wanted to present a shortened version of the library to the community in a Trello-like format, showing the current status of work. New visuals, screenshots, and other demonstrations of progress are also promised.
However, the team isn’t ready to confirm a full release date just yet. First, Pantheon should become a fun game again, and then the developers hope to more accurately estimate the path to 1.0. At its core, the main message of the Q&A is very simple: stop promising things that haven’t yet been implemented, and ultimately stop undermining the foundation every time a new question arises.