Pantheon is a game with a ton of potential that will never be reached. The game felt like EQ for the first handful of levels and the community was holding it altogether. The developers, however, seem to have absolutely no clue what they are doing.

The project is 10 years in the making so far and all they have to show for it is a bare bones product that will last you not even 10 levels before you realize that you've seen all that the game has to offer. Most systems are broken, gear all looks the same, there's practically no character customization and the only thing there is to do is stand around and kill monsters over and over and over and over.

The developers also have some major issues with communication with the players and corruption going unpunished. Unknown the community the developers had a guild with their friends who were being given special privileges over everyone else. They would spawn rare/boss monsters over and over for their guild to kill so they could farm the best gear easily while everyone else had to suffer through long respawns and bad RNG.

They also had issues where they would ban players who competed with their guild for enemy camps despite having a clear-cut policy that nobody could lay claim to enemy camps. Their stance seems to be that they can give all the special privileges they want to their friends despite everyone paying to play the game. Their community manager is also completely inappropriate when it comes to communication with the player base, constantly showing an attitude and happy to receive the privilege of telling developers to ban people they don't like.

And when people bring up concerns or complaints on the official discord? You guessed it. Banned.

Stay away from this project as it is currently a money-grab that is dying rapidly.

Well boys, we had a promising gem on our hands.

Unfortunately, the absolute low-IQ developers have tainted and taken a big steaming dump all over this mediocrity and pretty much botched it. Maybe it'll rise out of the stinky bar toilet and clean itself up.

But me? I'm just gonna flush this dirty turd down the hatch, and forget I ever took this steaming crap.

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⠄⠄⠄⠄⠈⠻⠿⠿⠏⣾⡿⠃⠈ to you lead devs. :D

Someone asked me today, would I recommend this game - comparing it to "a movie costing 40 bucks vs. the amount of time you got out of Pantheon" and honestly I didn't have an answer.

I spent a lot of my time getting several characters over 30, which means after 25 it's killing the same few things - over and over and over to watch very minimal gains in XP. XP being slow is understandable when content is VERY limited, so the game 'peaks' and has most activity around level 20, which is sad, because you can get there very quickly. And worse, VERY linearly. I also spent a ton of time trading up, sitting around AFK in town (when it was popular and there were a lot of players).

Now, I purchased this game for the future and to put a little $$$ towards Brad's vision, with VERY LOW hopes. I would not pay for this game in it's current iteration without that preface.

Listen, we are on year 10. You can do all kinds of backflips and mental gymnastics to justify the current state of the game after 10 years (low budget, graphics re-work at some point, yada yada) but this is a plain and simple fact. We are in year 10 and we don't even have basic proper functioning stats such as STR / STA / CON / DEX / ETC - foundational things that should have been hard-coded on year 0. STR does not function as it should, after 10 years, and now they are talking about a complete 're-work' where all classes will require 4-5 primary stats, and CON replacing DEX. Look, if we can't get 1 stat working properly after 10 years, let's tone down 'another re-work'. No more 're-works', this shouldn't be a sketchpad after 10 years guys. Get it sorted.

Besides that, you have a VERY linear progression path to mid 20s. You are playing most of your time in a single dungeon that has existed in this game for YEARS pre-EA. With a combination of orcs they seemed to just have spray painted all over a zone in AVP with terrible itemization, no chests, no boss, just respawns over and over. This is 'peak' content, this is where the bottleneck of players are. Fighting these braindead orcs for no rewards.

Many basic foundational things just aren't working, are bugged, or not in game yet: mitigation, resistances, stats, AC, dodge/parry, some spells, some abilities, perception system, mastery system, barebones classes, hell, Enchanters don't even have charm yet. Like really barebones 'should have been locked in at year 0' kinda stuff. It baffles me.

The singular worst thing about this game is this community spirit, devs begging for feedback on discord, saying they want to make changes based on player feedback (by gamers, for gamers kinda thing) yet player feedback is 100% ignored. In all this time, there isn't even a single dev-post in the Monk section of their discord, let alone many other classes. Really cool ideas and feedback from players, largely ignored. Instead, what DOES go in-game is so surprising, you'll think to yourself, is this feedback or are we just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks? Try to give a smidgen of criticism on discord and you will be ATTACKED by these die-hards who take everything personally, while the moderation on that platform is TERRIBLE at best.

Nobody asked for gathering nodes to have big bright sparkles splattered over them due to their visibility. Nobody asked for a 1-button-press debuff system, in a game that is already SO trivial in terms of difficulty. Nobody asked for them to trivialise the difficulty in their most popular dungeon (which was already an easy slog). Nobody asked for con changes (we know why they did though, so people don't burn through content too fast). All we have been asking for is CONTENT. There is nothing, each patch I feel second hand embarrassment for these guys. Every patch is followed by an emergency announcement post ''we are aware of the game breaking issue'', dupes, bugs, game breaking bugs, horrible in-game changes, the feedback is mostly negative, but nobody listens.

This last patch though, man what a doozy. It really messed with the flow of the game, some classes more than others. Feedback was CRAZY, they had make another announcement post basically saying "yes it's broken, sorry, we gotta break a few eggs to make a cake"... Nah, you revert the patch, or you fix it within 24h. We are going on day 3 since this game-breaking patch, many people leaving, 20% player loss in the last week alone, and they have no sense of urgency. You can see the design guy humming and hawing about changing the graphics to crafting tables (lol), the creative guy going on rants once a month like he's sketching stuff out on a whiteboard, and the rest of the team is MIA.

So, I'm leaving a bad review. I haven't played for weeks. I'll change it in 6 months to a year if there is even the slight hint that you, as a customer, can have any faith in these guys - but my only concern now is that with the dwindling population and no new sales, it is likely the game will be shutdown by then.

A last minute EA cash grab. Do not support this scam - let it die as a lesson to other devs who defile the hopes of the mmorpg community and treat their audience like gullible children.

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen: A Promise Perpetually Unfulfilled
The Early Access Excuse Has Worn Thin
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has been lingering in development for what feels like an eternity, hiding behind the shield of "Early Access" while delivering an experience that increasingly feels like a rudderless ship. The developers' approach to game development has become a masterclass in how not to build an MMORPG in today's market.
A Roadmap to Nowhere
The so-called "roadmap" for Pantheon might as well be labeled a "dreammap." It presents a fantasy vision with no grounding in reality or clear timelines. Milestones slip by without acknowledgment, while new, grandiose ideas are constantly being added. This creates the illusion of progress while the fundamental game continues to flounder. The recent patch exemplifies this problem – instead of addressing core issues, it introduced new half-baked concepts that have further destabilized the game.
Quality Control: Missing in Action
The most glaring failure of Pantheon's development is the complete absence of proper quality control. Patches are deployed with seemingly no testing whatsoever. Each update becomes a roll of the dice for players – will your character still function after this one? Will your progress be lost? Will that dungeon you were halfway through suddenly become inaccessible?
The lack of a Public Test Realm (PTR) is inexcusable for a game of this scale and ambition. Even the most basic MMORPG developments implement test servers to catch obvious bugs before they reach the main playerbase. Instead, paying customers are treated as unpaid QA testers, forced to endure game-breaking bugs that could have been caught with even minimal pre-release testing.
The Broken Foundation
While the developers chase shiny new features to showcase in developer diaries and fundraising efforts, the core systems of the game remain fundamentally broken. Basic functionality that should have been prioritized years ago continues to receive band-aid fixes at best, while resources are poured into flashy new systems that inevitably break something else in the process.
This approach reveals a concerning truth about the development process: there's no solid architectural foundation upon which to build. Each new feature becomes a Jenga piece precariously balanced on an already wobbling tower.
Transparency: An Empty Promise
Perhaps most frustrating is the disconnect between developer communication and reality. Community updates paint pictures of steady progress and exciting developments, yet the actual game experience tells a different story. This false transparency is worse than silence – it creates expectations that are routinely shattered when players log in after each update.
Conclusion: A Game to Avoid (For Now)
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen continues to demonstrate that good intentions and ambitious ideas mean nothing without disciplined execution and proper development practices. Until the team demonstrates a fundamental shift in their approach – prioritizing stability over new features, implementing proper testing protocols, and providing honest communication about the state of development – potential players would be wise to invest their time and money elsewhere.
The game may one day fulfill its potential, but based on current evidence, that day remains far beyond the horizon. For now, Pantheon remains a cautionary tale of game development gone awry, a promising concept repeatedly undermined by its own execution.

The game has a lot of potential as a modern take on a classic MMORPG, but sadly the development team does not seem to have a clue what they're doing. Every update is a mix of random nerfs and minor additions that no one asked for that seemingly suck more and more fun out of the game. They wasted god only knows how much time creating a PvP rule set server and a couple weeks before launching it created a poll asking who was excited for PvP. It turned out to be 8% of the population was excited for it. How about spending those resources creating better instancing or fixing the god forsaken buff system dropping buffs every time you zone? There are too many bad decisions and missteps to list, but suffice it to say, this game will likely die before it ever leaves early access.

Go play EQ2 instead

I Love the game.

However I cannot recommend it for right now unless the buyer is 100% aware it is a work in progress and subject to many many changes and not all of them make sense. It does not even really feel like a EA game. it feels more like a alpha/beta. Patches go into the game unintentionally and sometimes only half a patch which changes(wrecks) the game play experience while you wait for the other half or additional changes to make it all add up into a good experience. It's like everyone has a piece or several pieces of the puzzle but no one has the final image or idea that they are aiming to produce.

Love the game, the Dev's are very nice people and are working hard to bring this game to the public. It just needs a lot more time cooking. By all means buy the game and support the project, but don't be surprised if the fun / not fun roller coaster is in constant flux. I also feel bad for the Dev crew they are constantly taking harsh feedback!

This game has some good traits but it may as well be a solo game since grinding for EXP is the only real content and you get penalized for doing it in a party. Looking past the bad traits you find an empty world full of poor balancing, exploits, people running multiple accounts, and bugs that should have been caught with even minimal testing.

The amount of pandering done towards the whales who dropped hundreds of dollars on this before early access is shameful. When interacting with others in the game and doing nothing wrong you shouldn't have to believe them when they say that they've contacted the community manager about your "suspicious behavior" but after reading through the drama on their Discord I believe it.

If you're considering buying this game at least read over the Discord before pulling the trigger. If anything this game got worse since I started playing it. Also I'd recommend looking at how "real" some of the other reviews for this game are...

>Reach level 5 after grinding for a couple hours
>Die to something way more powerful than anything else in the area (for some reason)
>Lose experience and all of your inventory/money
>No marker for your corpse, it's probably lost forever because there's also no map
>Looks like it's time to start grinding from scratch again
>Oh, you made an elf?
>Sorry, no groups for you unless you run across the entire map, dying countless times in the process
>Whole game is a buggy catastrophe
>$40 price tag for this mess

This game is pure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Don't. Just don't.