Partying like it's 1999 in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

“You have a steam gift.” The notification in my inbox was not necessarily a surprise, but it was still welcomed. In December, I had started playing Final Fantasy XI again with my younger brother, a game we’ve played off and on - mostly off - over the last twenty years. During our most recent foray, though, he disappeared to play some other game. I had balked at the idea of continuing to playalone in Vanadiel, when the notification hit. He had gifted me a copy of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which entered Early Access on Steam last December. As someone who cut his teeth on early aughts MMOs like EverQuest Online Adventures and FFXI, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has me revisiting a bygone era of party-based MMOs. 

For those unaware, EverQuest is a 3D fantasy MMO released for Windows in 1999. Yes, you read that right. Back then, we weren't swimming in seemingly endless options for online gameplay experiences, so EverQuest was massively successful for the time. Players would first build a character from a dozen or so races, pick a class, and decide upon a starter city before being dropped off into a living world filled with monsters, NPCs, and…other players. You simply could not get very far, physically or level-wise, without partying up with a group of strangers to face the dangers ahead, evoking the sort of party dynamics inherent in Dungeons and Dragons, an early source of inspiration.

While I have never played EverQuest, I have played more than my fair share of its PS2 console spinoff, EverQuest Online Adventures. Unlike FFXI, which required the PS2’s external hard drive, EQOA simply ran off the 8MB memory card. It had the trappings of EverQuest married to a console game, and it was great. Support for that game ended in 2013, and I’ve more or less dabbled in some MMOs here or there, mostly returning to FFXI for brief spurts every few years. So during this recent relapse into FFXI, the idea of switching to a new MMO wasn’t really one I had considered. 

Pantheon was announced in January 2014 through a failed Kickstarter, despite the game’s pedigree with EverQuest co-creator Brad McQuaid serving as the game’s creative chief. It underwent significant delays and setbacks, including the death of McQuaid in 2019. Despite that, the game continued with development and finally entered Early Access in December 2024. 

It's a party-based MMO that all but requires you to band up and join forces with other players to make a dent into that experience bar. It straight-up screams 2005: Levels take a slow crawl and require you to work effectively with party members of other classes, lest you succumb to inefficiency if nothing else. Everyone needs to know their role, and a false move can mean an easy death. You don't just get to start over at your last homepoint, either: you die here, and you are dead. Your corpse is left behind with the bulk of your loot. You're free to get it back, if you can get there in one piece. Did I also mention you lost a nice chunk of XP? Before Pantheon, I hadn't de-leveled while playing a video game since the Bush administration. 

There’s also a true sense of exploration and danger here that I find missing from modern MMOs. There’s no in-game map, forcing players to cautiously explore their surroundings, especially when venturing into a new zone. One of my greatest memories from FFXI around twenty years ago was tiptoeing my way through the Valkurm Dunes, cautious to avoid aggro from life-ending goblins. Adventuring through Terminus, and I find myself recalling those times in the Dunes, fraught with worry that one wrong move will prove deadly. It’s frustrating, but the tension it adds is gratifying, even if I grumble when losing a half hour’s worth of XP gain. 

When I first started Pantheon, I was overwhelmed. I had no items, no money, and no idea where to go. I saw a rat a few feet away from my spawn point, and started to attack. This was my first lesson, as I was dead in three hits. I quickly learned from other players that I needed to leave my hut and travel to the nearby village to pick up quests and start partying up. No problem, I thought, as I hugged the corners and started making my way. 

I made it a few feet outside of this cave, into a field where I died - again. I made this dangerous run a handful of times, died each time, threw my hand up in the air, and quit the game, resigning to try some other time. Three hours later, I was back on. I wanted to figure this out - or maybe I needed to figure it out. Outside of the barebones tutorial, I felt flummoxed. What was I missing?

Turns out, I was missing perspective. You aren’t in Terminus to grind out levels as fast as you can so you can hit max level and engage in elite content. There isn’t a level 99 here - there isn’t even a level 50 (yet) - as the current level cap is 40. The journey is the point of this game, and it is one you are almost exclusively meant to go on with others. I committed to, at the very least, finding my way out of this starter cave and into a proper party. To do that, I needed to get to level 2 fighting rats and nearby spiders before making my way. Even then, I needed to be cautious, timing my dash across an enclosed area without getting aggroed by angry cultists, skeletons, or both. 

I eventually made it to the village, mostly because the cultists were too busy killing someone else. I ran like hell to the bridge when a skeleton gave chase, where I was rescued by a guard NPC. From there, I quickly joined my first party. Here I was, some green humanoid-looking Dire Lord (whatever that means) partying up with five other strangers, playing a game. While together for an hour or two, we start chatting about nothing. We leveled up a few times before parting ways, when I got a friend request from one of the other members. It was something I personally haven’t done in an online game in a very long time. It was awesome. 

The game is as involved as you want it to be. Outside of leveling up, there is crafting, cooking, and other systems to engage in - if you want. During my first character, I didn’t bother with any of it. I made another character when the Dire Lord hit 17 so I could get a glimpse of the other side of this developing game world. Pantheon is certainly far from finished, and I am not sure what the long-term roadmap for development looks like. The development team is active and seemingly issuing regular updates, ranging from minor fixes to engine updates and new zones. In a way, the development saga behind the game parallels my own in-game experience: learning a few things, suffering from some setbacks, but always wanting to move forward. 

Do I think there will ever be a completed, fully “released” version of the game that offers the full experience the creative team is envisioning? I’m not sure; but I’m also not sure that I care all that much. I’ve put in a few dozen hours of grinding out some characters in a game full of the old-world hardness of MMOs in the early 2000s. With no appreciable endgame in sight, I don’t have to get swept up in a race to Level 99 so I can be with other players. I can sit in a starter city as a low-level character and be surrounded with other gamers to chat and party with. Playing this new game with such an old-school mentality has been absolutely worth every dollar (my brother) spent on it, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go in 2025 and beyond.