Visionary Realms is an ambitious game studio that recently launched early access for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, a massively multiplayer online role-playing social fantasy game.
The December 13 launch on Steam was a bittersweet moment for the team, which had been run by EverQuest game pioneer Brad McQuaid. McQuaid died at age 50 in 2019, in the midst of the game’s development.
But the team carried on 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 the the PC. It is available for purchase on Steam for $40.
In an interview, the game leaders said they were honored at the reception it received for bringing back the classically spirited challenge, discovery, awe and social experience to MMOs, and it hopes sharing the story inspires other indies.
“To get to this point is very proud and humbling experience,” CEO Chris Rowan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “But we’ve got it out on early access on Steam and the reaction has been spectacular, with mostly positive reviews, great sales. We’ve been finding our way around this concept of open development, doing things with the doors and windows open and inviting the community to be part of that, and sharing what’s happening, and taking their feedback and including them in testing from an earlier stage than is has ever really been done.”
He said there were ups and downs to that process, but the net was positive. The game is still in development but now it can earn revenues 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 throughout the early access period. So far, the game has reached 40,000 unique players and more than 6,000 have logged in on early access.
“The numbers are great and the concurrency on Steam is strong,” Rowan said. “The concurrency has been better than expected and quite healthy. It did really well on the first day and has been steady since then. We actually got into the top 10 on day one, which was exciting for a small studio like us.”
Gameplay features
The features available include “adventure together,” where players form adventuring parties and guilds with friends to overcome greater challenges to receive greater rewards. It also has a “climb everywhere” feature where players can climb nearly any surface in the game for adventure in every direction.
It also has discover with perception, where you can uncover clues, dialogues and outcomes that enrich the story and your travels using the perception system. And you can plunder the depths, where you can delve into copious dungeons with other players where every cavern may lead to treasure, battle or a new friendship.
Players can fight a menagerie of monsters in challenging combat where strategy, knowledge and teamwork make the difference between victory and defeat. Players can adopt roles such as the Tank, Healer, Damage or Support and choose from a variety of class skills to customize their loadouts.
Players can also acquire powerful and iconic equipment and rare abilities that boast of the places you’ve been in the game and the battles you’ve won. These things can empower your character with enhanced attributes and unique effects. The denizens of the world Terminus have wide variety and can spawn with a multitude of different behaviors which alters their actions and strategies, ensuring no two adventures are alike.
Origins
The team started contemplating the game back in 2015, in the days of casual games, pay to win, and other kinds of new business models being tested. World of Warcraft had had its good run and the team wanted to do a classic MMO that set a really high bar for quality.
“Brad and I had worked together, and he felt like it was 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 and there were a lot of people who were into the idea,” said Rowan. “There were a lot of people who felt they had been orphaned from what made MMOs so great. That momentum built. And before we knew it, Visionary Realms was launched, and was time to build Pantheon.”
The game was a slow burn at the beginning and was very thinly funded. The ideation happened and the first serious funding came in 2017. That helped bring on more people and help accelerate the company. But then tragedy struck.
“With Brad passing in 2019, people thought the project was going to die,” Rowan said. “Maybe counter intuitively, it got the community and the team even more charged up. You know, when you believe in something, when you’re building a game because you want to play it yourself, when you’re really passionate about it, then people are going to see it through. We’ve been largely driven by passion and sacrifice and creativity and hard work. And to be perfectly honest, resourcefulness and grit.”
Overcoming challenges
This is the work of a small indie studio which had to overcome numerous very serious challenges along the way while watching other efforts not make it to the finish line, Rowan said.
Along the way, the company stayed independent and true to its vision through grit, persistence, plus some angel and crowdfunding.
Visionary Realms challenged the boundaries of dev transparency– with a lot of openness, interactivity and honesty with the community. That eventually became its path to success, Rowan said.
The team peaked at about 30 people, and now it has around 18 to 20, some of them part-timers who have other jobs. The company has raised less than $10 million through a combination of investors and crowdfunding.
“The amount of effort and commitment and passion and sacrifice has just been astonishing,” Rowan said.
Asked how the team held together after McQuaid’s passing, Rowan said, “I would credit everybody involved in the project — their commitment, their passion, and that goes as for the community as well. People wanted to see this game built. We were building 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 that the game of the year [for 2025] is going to be built by a studio. It might not be us, but it can be built by a studio that’s building a game that they want to build, that’s not designed by the marketing department, but designed by passionate game designers. And after the shock wore off to a person, everybody said, “We’ve got to do this. We got to do this because the world needs this game. We got to do this for Brad. We got to see this through.’ Our resolve was renewed.”
The company also successfully changed the art style to be more timeless and speed up development. It also made a significant shift in management style that resulted in faster production, iteration and progress.
“There’s a trend for a lot of Souls-like games now. I would describe our game as a classic MMO,” said Chris Perkins, creative director, in an interview with GamesBeat. “There’s a classic genre of MMOs when the genre itself first got started. It was very different and unique in style than modern MMOs. They were very social. They weren’t holding your hand a lot. They could be even pretty punishing in some cases. One of the ways I think we differentiate ourselves is with that classic style.”
Perkins added, “We’re bringing it into 2025 and we’re not interested in making a really cumbersome, like a fossilized game that’s really difficult for people to get into. We recognize a lot of the advancements 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 era that really taps into that classic formula that has kind of been lost.”
To the team, classic means games that were expected to be more of a shared experience among players. There’s more of a social element. The game wasn’t as on rails. And the goal was to make a more challenging MMO in the mechanics, but also where there was a risk-reward in that there is some sting from a death, Perkins said.
“This may be the last chance we have. In fact, this might be the last studio that is really leaning into believing this can be a style of MMO that has legs today,” Perkins said. “There’s an opportunity to to do something here that may not have another chance. There’s a lot in that that’s driving us.”
For good or bad, the latest AI tools didn’t arrive in time to be really useful in the development of the game. 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 hits,” Rowan said.
The roadmap
The current aim is to take in the massive amount of feedback coming in now and polishing the game that has been released. The team thinks of the current offering as a slice of the game. Then the next task is to ramp up the next part of the world, which his massive. On the tech side, the company plans to upgrade to the Unity 6 operating system with new optimizations and better performance.
“It’s been a real journey, against many odds, with many bumps along the way,” Rowan said. “We’ve seen a really tough year in the past year in the industry, with a lot of studios falling by the wayside. I’m just pleased that through our community support and the passion of the team and the support of customers that we’ve been able to make it here, and we plan to get even stronger from here.”
The team was small but it made good choices about focusing on easy-to-use, accessible game-building technology. The team built its own platform with a focus on low code and no code, using Node Graph technology. It allows designers who aren’t programmers to get content into the game without having to interact with the programmers, Rowan said.
“It is really quite amazing that a team of this size, with this budget, has managed to pull this off,” Rowan said. “The proof is in the pudding. It’s out there.”
“People are loving it, our passion and long hours, combined with really good, accessible technology,” Rowan said.
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