Visionary Realms: Rise of the Fallen’s Pantheon marks early access success

Visionary Realms is an ambitious game studio that recently launched early access for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallena massively multiplayer online role-playing social fantasy game.

The December 13 launch of Steam was a bittersweet moment for the team, which was led by gaming pioneer EverQuest Brad McQuaid. McQuaid died aged 50 in 2019, at the height of the game’s development.

But the team persisted, and after years of development, the company was able to launch early access for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, a social high-fantasy MMO game for PC. Available for purchase on Steam for $40.

In an interview, the game’s execs said they were honored by the reception it received for bringing back the classic-spirited challenge, discovery, awe, and social experience of an MMO, and they hope sharing the story will inspire other indies.

“Getting to this point is a very proud and humbling experience,” CEO Chris Rowan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “But we put it in early access on Steam and the response has been spectacular, with mostly positive reviews, great sales. We’re finding our way around this concept of open development, doing things with open doors and windows and inviting the community to be a part of that, and sharing what’s going on, taking their feedback and getting them into testing from an earlier stage than ever before done.”

He said there are ups and downs in this process, but the network is positive. The game is still in development but can now earn revenue through early access payments.

The Early Access build contains six zones, six playable races, and 12 playable classes. Players can level up to level 40 and more content will be added during the early access period. So far, the game has reached 40,000 unique players and more than 6,000 have entered early access.

“The numbers are great and the concurrency on Steam is strong,” Rowan said. “Concurrency is better than expected and quite stable. It did very well the first day and has been stable since then. We actually hit the top 10 on day one, which was exciting for a small studio like us.”

Game features

Available features include “adventure together” where players form adventure groups and guilds with friends to overcome greater challenges and gain greater rewards. It also has a “climb anywhere” feature where players can climb almost any surface in the game for adventures in any direction.

Additionally, there’s Perception Discovery, where you can uncover clues, dialogue, and outcomes that enrich the story and your travels using the Perception system. And you can loot the depths, where you can delve into abundant dungeons with other players, where each cave can lead to a treasure, a battle or a new friendship.

Players can battle a menagerie of monsters in a challenging battle where strategy, knowledge and teamwork make the difference between victory and defeat. Players can adopt roles such as tank, healer, damage or support and choose from a variety of class skills to customize their loadouts.

Players can also acquire powerful and iconic gear and rare abilities that boast the places you’ve been in the game and the battles you’ve won. These items can power up your character with improved attributes and unique effects. The denizens of the world’s Terminus have a great variety and can appear with many different behaviors that change their actions and strategies, ensuring that no two adventures are the same.

Origin

The team began to consider game in 2015in the days of casual games, pay to win and other types of new business models being tested. World of Warcraft performed well and the team wanted to make a classic MMO that set the bar really high for quality.

“Brad and I had worked together and he felt he felt very passionately that it was time to kind of bring back the spirit of MMOs, what really made them great at the core, in the very beginning, and there were a lot of people who fell in love in the idea,” Rowan said. “There were a lot of people who felt they were orphaned by what made MMOs so great. That momentum built. And before we knew it, the Visionary Realms were launched and it was time to build a Pantheon.”

The game was a slow burn at first and was very poorly funded. The idea happened and the first serious funding came in 2017. This helped bring in more people and helped accelerate the company. But then tragedy struck.

“With Brad leaving in 2019. people thought the project was going to die,” Rowan said. “Perhaps counter-intuitively, it energized the community and the team even more. You know, when you believe in something, when you build a game because you want to play it yourself, when you’re really passionate about it, then people will see it through. We have largely been driven by passion and sacrifice, creativity and hard work. And to be perfectly honest, resourcefulness and courage.”

Overcoming challenges

It’s the work of a small independent studio that has had to overcome a number of very serious challenges along the way while watching other efforts fall short of the finish line, Rowan said.

Along the way, the company has stayed independent and true to its vision through determination, persistence, plus some angels and crowdfunding.

Visionary Realms has pushed the boundaries of developer transparency – with lots of openness, interactivity and honesty with the community. That eventually became his path to success, Rowan said.

The team peaked at about 30 people, and now has about 18 to 20, some of them part-time, who have other jobs. The company has raised less than $10 million through a combination of investors and crowdfunding.

“The amount of effort, dedication, passion and sacrifice was just amazing,” Rowan said.

Asked how the team has stuck together since McQuaid’s death, Rowan said: “I would commend everyone involved in the project – their commitment, their passion and that goes for the community as well. People wanted to see this game made. We made it because we thought the world needed a game like this. Again, we were building it because we wanted to play it. Just like Sven Vinge said at The Game Awards.”

He added: “Sven said the game of the year (for 2025) would be made by a studio. It might not be us, but it might be created by a studio building a game that they want to create that isn’t designed by a marketing department, but designed by passionate game designers. And after the shock wore off for a person, everyone said, “We have to do this. We have to do this because the world needs this game. We have to do this for Brad. We have to finish it. Our resolve was renewed.”

The company also successfully changed the art style to make it more timeless and speed up development. It also made a significant change in management style, resulting in faster production, iteration and progress.

“There’s a trend now for very Souls-like games. I would describe our game as a classic MMO,” said Chris Perkins, creative director, in an interview with GamesBeat. “There is a classic MMO genre when the genre itself first started. It was very different and unique in style from modern MMOs. They were very social. They didn’t hold your hand much. They can even be quite punitive in some cases. One of the ways I think we set ourselves apart is this classic style.

Perkins added: “We’re moving it to 2025. and we’re not interested in making a really clunky, like fossilized game that’s really hard for people to get into. We recognize many of the advances in quality of life that have been made over the years. We want to make a game that’s more accessible, but we want to make a game in the modern age that really taps into that classic formula that’s kind of lost.”

For the team, classic means games that are expected to be more of a shared experience between players. There is more of a social element. The game was not on rails. And the goal was to make a more challenging MMO in mechanics, but also where there was a risk-reward in that there was some kind of death sting, Perkins said.

“This may be our last chance. In fact, it might be the last studio that really believes that this can be a style of MMO that has legs today,” Perkins said. “There’s an opportunity here to do something that might not get another chance.” There are a lot of things in that that drive us.”

For better or worse, the latest AI tools didn’t arrive in time to be truly useful in game development. The team is still experimenting with AI, but Rowan said it’s not quite there yet.

“We got to EA before the AI ​​tidal wave hit,” Rowan said.

The road map

The current goal is to take the massive amount of feedback that is coming in now and refine the game that has been released. The team thinks of the current proposal as part of the game. After that, the next task is to develop the next part of the world, which is huge. On the technical side, the company plans to move to the Unity 6 operating system with new optimizations and better performance.

“It’s been quite a journey, despite a lot of hardship, with a lot of bumps in the road,” Rowan said. “Last year we saw a really tough year in the industry, with a lot of studios falling behind. I’m just pleased that through our community support and the team’s passion and customer support, we’ve made it this far, and we plan to go even stronger from here.”

The team was small, but made a good choice to focus on easy-to-use and affordable game-building technology. The team built their own platform with a focus on low code and no code using Node Graph technology. It allows non-programmer designers to bring content into the game without having to interact with the programmers, Rowan said.

“It’s really quite amazing that a team of this size, with this budget, was able to pull this off,” Rowan said. “The proof is in the pudding. It’s in there somewhere.

“People love it, our passion and long hours combined with really good, affordable technology,” Rowan said.