While various competitors are currently fighting for survival (or have already lost the fight), the PvE MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen can now look calmly to the future.
What kind of funding is this? The old-school PvE MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has been in Early Access on Steam since December 13, 2024. The original plan was for this early access phase to last at least 2 years.
The team at Visionary Realms is comparatively small, which is why the development of Pantheon has already taken a long time – our first news about the game is from 2016. However, the number of developers is now set to increase, with new artists, programmers, and designers. This is made possible by the funding from passionate investors, who are apparently big fans of the MMORPG – as reported by gamerant.com.
On Steam, the developers explain:
Visionary Realms has secured additional funding in the millions to significantly accelerate the development of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.
The funding will be used to hire more artists, programmers, and designers, and to strengthen project management. This means for Pantheon: a much faster and more comprehensive launch. Thanks to the new team members, our timeline is significantly shortened, and we can release version 1.0 not only earlier but also in a more complete version. In a few weeks, the updated roadmap with all details about the next steps will be released here.
The Early Access trailer for Pantheon – Rise of the Fallen:
A positive message in a difficult MMORPG year
Why is this message particularly significant right now? The MMORPG year 2025 is primarily characterized by disastrous news and disappointing new releases.
- Of the first 9 new MMORPGs that released in 2025, none were really thrilling.
- The same goes for later releases such as Pax Dei, which has been facing issues with its subscription model among many players.
- The servers of Tarisland have just gone offline. The servers of New World are said to follow at some point (after 2026?).
- Things don’t look good for many upcoming projects as well. The new Lord of the Rings MMORPG is said to have been internally canceled. The studio behind Project Ghost is likely to close soon due to the backer NetEase dropping out. The same issue is also said to be faced by the new MMORPG for Warhammer.
And these are just the “highlights”. Added to that, the team of Pantheon looks back on turbulent years, with many unpleasant moments (notably the much too early passing of studio head Brad McQuaid in November 2019), but also a few great successes such as the surprisingly successful Early Access launch last year.
After the last update of the roadmap 2025, there was unfortunately more criticism, as the developers – according to the community’s accusation – seem to be focusing on the wrong topics and content. It fits that the next region Badia de Cara is supposed to utilize an element that many MMORPG fans have had bad experiences with: the PvE MMORPG wants to counter weak phases on Steam with a feature that “people LOVE” – Vashj’ir from WoW Cataclysm sends regards
