Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen Teaser Trailer, Newsletters, and Screenshots

There has been quite a bit of activity between the official Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen website and Visionary Realms’ Facebook page for the fantasy MMORPG, including a July newsletter that features a Q&A with industry veteran Brad McQuaid, an August newsletter that features Q&As with new team members, and batches of screenshots featuring new environments, a sky fortress, outdoor flora, a lush ravine, mountainous viewscapes, interesting structures, and trees. There was also a new teaser trailer posted late last month, so let’s dive into that first:

And then quote from the Brad McQuaid Q&A:

The earliest version of MMORPGs were all very much community based, what do you think caused that?

Brad McQuaid: I think it was really the text based MUDs that spawned the genre and created the sense of community. MUDs got their start in colleges and universities from folks who had grown up playing fantastic single player games like the Ultima series. They really longed for a place that felt alive, a persistent world where they could meet up with other adventurers and be the protagonists of their own story. This subset of users formed the genesis of the community that pushed the role-playing genre into those persistent worlds, where the AI took control of all the more menial tasks–the dice rolls, the NPCs, all of the more tedious stuff–and gave the players the freedom to explore these multiple user dungeons.

We really banded together out of necessity in these MUDs as they were pretty unforgiving. Just like the early MMOs, there wasn’t a lot of hand holding in those games and people really had to come together to accomplish tasks and to advance.

Some of my greatest friendships came from a time when I was out adventuring. I had heard from some other players that there were dragons in the world, and I had to find them. At any rate, I soon got overwhelmed by some mobs when a random high-level cleric who saw me about to die decided to stop and heal me. That made a really lasting impression on me and it has carried forward even to this day.

We want to foster those sorts of interactions in Pantheon, what we call vertical interdependence.

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Why do you think the playerbase is so hungry for a game that extols the virtues of grouping and challenge?

Brad McQuaid: When that course correction happened, and the game space shifted to far more solo friendly titles, it pushed out a lot of the players who enjoyed that more challenging experience and they became marginalized. So now you have a lot of options for players who enjoy solo and casual MMOs, and that’s great, but the player who is really focused on community, challenge and long-term investment has been orphaned.

There is this perception out there that that type of player, the one who really enjoys that group-centric game, is strictly made up of people who played EQ, DAoC, UO or Vanguard, and that’s not true at all. There are so many younger players who are gravitating to our type of game. You see it happening in genres that are traditionally all about the single player experience, like in FPS games where now some of their most popular modes are the co-op ones like Zombies in the CoD franchise. The desire to play with your friends, in a group, cooperatively, against the AI – that wasn’t some odd preference that appealed only people who played EQ, DAoC or UO, it’s something that exists within every generation of gamers.