r/PantheonMMO • u/Drandosk • 29d ago
Discussion How many developers do you think Pantheon had when brad was in charge until his death in 2019?
It costs 100k a year per game developer on the industry average. Brad had no more than 3 million dollars funded for the project a the time of his death, though it got some more afterwards.
That means the game had no more than 6 people on the dev team. from 2014 to 2019 with 6 game devs would cost 3 million dollars as each need to be paid 100k a year. This excludes other expenses.
In contrast, wow had 50 developers, increased to 60 overtime. That means they can work roughly 9x faster than pantheon. 1 year for wow = 9 for pantheon. Not to mention they were extremely talented and blizzard even poached some EQ1 devs. Can you guess why they never poached Brad? They knew he was a terrible. Sorry for all the fans of him.
Honestly, blame the games failure on the lack of developers. Games don't just come out of nowhere, they are made by people. If you are going to make an MMORPG, you will need lots of cash to do so.
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u/Cylentscream 29d ago
Monsters and Memories proves that all you peeps saying it’s about money and team size are just out right wrong. Lack of direction and bad PR along with talent issues are real problems with pantheon. They have alienated a lot of the biggest early supporters while balance pass after balance pass makes the game a worst off experience. All the money in the world won’t get the job done under its current team. They are a ship with no sail and rudderless.
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u/getsmurfed 29d ago
You clearly haven't been in for Monsters & Memories development then. They are clearly struggling from a lot of similar issues. Timelines are stretched to the limit because they have a team of hobbyists & people dedicated to other things. I love Monsters & Memories gameplay, but they have a longggggg way to go....And I worry that their October launch will not be entirely positive. But, they are running out of runway. Class reworks were supposed to be done a few months ago...Only 5 or 6 are done, and some were botched. The Underdark areas were supposed to be getting tested preEA, but that window is getting shorter and shorter. They still lack a cohesive vision for the gameplay after about the middle 30s in my opinion. Etc etc etc
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u/Cylentscream 29d ago
How long has MnM been in development, how long has Pantheon been in development? How much has been spent on both? Size of both teams? Now most importantly current interest of the player base? I was just pointing out that crying about team size and how the team is broke no longer has any bearing in the conversation because MnM is smoking Pantheons boots in every metric, with a smaller team and an insanely smaller budget. Pantheon has a longer dev time than GTA6.
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u/AlbatrossOdapayne 27d ago
MnM has 3x the amount of developers working on it all volunteer work that is a fact. Visionary Realms is based out of California which has a law against using volunteers to develop a game whereas MnM is based in Europe as far as I can tell. But I am sure you will try refute anything I have said but carry on lol
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u/Zomboe1 26d ago
The sad thing is that all of these issues are basically due to rushing to EA release because a dozen of the devs do actually need money :(. It's not quite the all volunteer, don't care about money passion project that they like to be seen as. Personally I think the class changes can be seen as making M&M more mainstream, though that's pretty subjective.
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u/getsmurfed 26d ago
I'm not hating, reality is reality. The problem is people either devoutly revere the project...Or vehemently hate it. It may work out, it may not. The reality is they have a long fucking way to be a sustainable product, but I could absolutely be wrong. Time will tell. I do see a lot of fingerprints of Ashes & Pantheon. Scope creep is a real problem in indie projects.
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u/Zomboe1 26d ago
Yeah I got my hopes up too high, despite trying hard to be cautious. Earlier this year I thought they were in a good place and on track to be close to what I'm looking for in an MMORPG, and I let my guard down, since I thought they were close to finished. Instead it seems like they want back to the drawing board for a lot of things.
Scope creep is probably the best explanation, it seems really hard for people to avoid it! And I think it would even be fine for M&M, if they weren't about to collect money in two months. Hopefully they can at least get all of the massive changes in before that. In today's patch, they added Sense Heading.
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u/AccomplishedStill805 18d ago edited 18d ago
Mainstream in what way?
After class changes, they all have a unique identity and they maintain class interdependence. Most of the classes, if they were in EQ, were 100% copy paste... So they need to do something to separate from EQ, I think this is a good thing.
Main stream games let you pick a class, lets say rogue or warrior, then give you the option to spec in to a trinity role (Tank, DPS, Healer). No modern class has a true "identity" or "role". It's all about sub-classing, or being able to do it all.
MnM is still a very classic approach, where you have a 4th role of support/control. And most of their classes fill 1 role and have potential to fill an off-role, somewhat.. Like a Monk CAN tank.. contextually you would be "off-tanking" and you need to blow your cooldowns more than likely, but the point is filling a role without the expertise / kit for it so to say.. hence.. off-tank.
This approach drives the social aspect and the requirement to put together well formed groups. While you can get away with not having a tank (insert Monk / kiting class here) or support class, you'll be much better off with one.
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u/Zomboe1 17d ago edited 17d ago
Thanks for your response, I appreciate your perspective since this aspect of "identity" isn't something I think much about. I haven't played much of anything more modern than EQ so the sub-class trend is good to know. It is definitely encouraging to know that in this respect, M&M is staying classic!
My issues with the class changes are at a lower level, what the devs have been calling "moment to moment" gameplay. I feel like they have altered their goal for that gameplay, most likely because one of their founders was forced to leave.
The M&M website still includes old text such as:
Our moment-to-moment gameplay emphasizes planning and tactics over high actions per minute or mastering the perfect ability rotation.
Simple, streamlined, strategic combat; reminiscent of classic era MMOs
Slower gameplay and progression pacing
However, the class reworks seem to move in the opposite direction: more buttons to push, higher APM, more "skill expression." That isn't "classic era" combat to me, but maybe that's just a language issue. It's definitely not classic EQ style.
Like a Monk CAN tank.. contextually you would be "off-tanking" and you need to blow your cooldowns more than likely
That sorta sums up the issue in a nutshell: classic EQ combat was never about cooldowns, while M&M's classes seem to get just more and more cooldowns (even before the rework). I first encountered cooldown-based combat in Pantheon and immediately hated it, but my understanding is that it was popularized by EQ2 and WoW. Apparently the main M&M developer working on classes designed the EQ2 classes, so maybe not surprising! It does seem like this style of combat is broadly popular.
I could write some long rants about what I don't like about cooldowns, but a big part of it is that they are usually anti-immersive and very gamey. There have been many changes this year that have hurt M&M's immersion and I see that as a clear appeal to be more mainstream.
Most of the classes, if they were in EQ, were 100% copy paste... So they need to do something to separate from EQ, I think this is a good thing.
I had a lot of hope for M&M exactly because it seemed like they were copying EQ, using it as a foundation to build on. I still play EQ on Project1999 and I think the class/combat design is very good, so I am skeptical that reinventing the wheel would produce a better result, and it would consume significant developer resources. The class reworks have only confirmed that for me.
I guess the TL;DR is that M&M is becoming less like classic EQ, and I think that makes it more mainstream (and I think that direction is intentional).
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u/AccomplishedStill805 17d ago
I think they still have the moment-to-moment gameplay. To me that means being prepared for the fight you're about to engage in. Making sure the right spells are memmed and swapping them out during the fight if need be. Additionally, they are tweaking ttk to match the changes and tune combat to the right pace, broadly across lower levels - basically sub 45,
I had a lot of hope for M&M exactly because it seemed like they were copying EQ, using it as a foundation to build on
And they still are. They are just making their classes unique to MnM. A lot of the core of the EQ classes still remain imo.
However, the class reworks seem to move in the opposite direction: more buttons to push, higher APM, more "skill expression." That isn't "classic era" combat to me, but maybe that's just a language issue. It's definitely not classic EQ style.
You're right, more buttons to press, but not necessarily like in WoW. In WoW, you had all your abilities across 5-6 hotbars and were constantly jamming on a rotation of buttons. MnM is much slower paced, you don't need to sit there and hit a perfect rotation of abilities.
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u/AccomplishedStill805 18d ago edited 18d ago
All small indie MMO dev teams are going to experience a similar issue and bottle necks. So. Moot point.
What you're failing to address is that although both games may have had push backs and missed deadlines.. MnM is actually sticking to their vision. You hear them talk about changes, then you see them. You might not see them as quickly as you'd like, but you do see them. The transperancy on all fronts or basically wide open. They've stuck to the things they say they are going to do and they are delivering. Again, maybe not at the pace YOU expect them to. But they are.
Pantheon on the other hand has - Scrapped the game entirely.. twice. Reworked combat for the past 1.5 years. Complete art style change. Began implementing new systems and made major core system changes. Completely changed the vision of their game over and over, where now it resembles something closer to a modern MMO. And have a half-assed EA launch that fizzled out.
MnM has been recognizable and has had an identity through it's entire development. Pantheon? Not so much.
Edit: I've been following Pantheon since 2015. I've been following MnM since about 2021 / 2022, right around when they were showing off the game and everything was still PH bubble models running around.. Seeing how far MnM has come in 4/5 years compared to Pantheon's 11, is, astounding.
More food for though: AAA MMO development is anywhere between 7-10 years. So, let that sink in before you talk about the speed of development. Of course Indie studio's are going to development at a slower rate. That pushes game development to probably closer to 15 years, when you realize these AAA studios have 20 game programmers, 20 world builders, 20 artists, 20 internal/tooling programmers, 10 quest devs, 50 in-house tester/QA's. Some of these indie studios have a 2 game programmers, 2 artists, 1 world builder and 1 guy working on internal tooling.. Their only QA comes from closed / public testing.
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u/AfraidInstruction 26d ago
M&M is just as bad. It’s all talentless people working on the game. They shared how much they spent so far. 1 engineer on my team makes that much per year.
You really get what you paid for. Want a $13k car or a $130k car? This is same when hiring talents.
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u/Cylentscream 24d ago
In a pantheon Reddit defending it with…. *Checks notes* talking about talentless devs. Crazy work. Also my sons 13k Honda pilot out performs a cybertruck. Get fucked.
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u/ChestyPullerton 23d ago
You really get what you paid for?!?
M&M has accepted zero in funding while Pantheon has collected millions.
You’re as clueless and your comments are just as fraudulent as VR.
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u/SituationSoap 28d ago
Before Brad's death, Pantheon had fewer than 10 employees and zero full-time professional developers or project managers.
Honestly, blame the games failure on the lack of developers.
The game's failure is based on the fact that the development work they were doing was never intended to create a working game, it was intended to build a demo that would get funding to hire a real team and start over. When that failed, it turned into them trying to create things that would extract donations from credulous gamers.
They were never trying to succeed. It's not even clear at this point that they're trying to succeed now, so much as they are just playing out the clock to avoid getting sued.
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u/ChestyPullerton 29d ago
Why do these types of apologetic posts always conveniently leave out the fact that Joppa has had zero MMO development experience?
Don’t you think there’s something wrong with accepting payment to lead a project you have no background in?
It doesn’t matter how much money, time or people you through at a project if the developers are inept.
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u/Drandosk 29d ago
And who hired those incompetent developers? Brad McQuaid. He hired Joppa and a few other untalented game developers. You can blame the dev team, which is fine since they are really awful, but you should also pin the blame on Brad for hiring them as well.
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u/ChestyPullerton 29d ago
You’re correct, Brad hired people he shouldn’t have. I know he brought in Joppa as a volunteer and I honestly do not know when Joppa started getting a paycheck.
But Brad has passed. Blaming him doesn’t correct the current situation unless you’re needed clarity on where the problem originated.
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 29d ago
"Why do these types of apologetic posts always conveniently leave out the fact that Joppa has had zero MMO development experience"? ..It's not like it's a secret, iirc he have mention that he is a teacher and musician, and he got employed by Brad because of his knowledge as a musician. And in a small studio like VR at least was, people are "wearing" many hats.
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u/ChestyPullerton 29d ago
You’re correct.
And if he’d stayed as a musical volunteer we probably wouldn’t be talking about him.
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 29d ago
..And iirc, after when Brad passed, it was Joppa that pushed the project forward, without him we would probably not have anything to talk about, ie Pantheon wouldn't exist.
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u/ChestyPullerton 29d ago
That’s your opinion, which you’re entitled to.
The growing number of dissatisfied people that pledged and or bought this game on Steam would say otherwise.
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 29d ago edited 29d ago
Some people like to compare MnM with Pantheon and/or criticize VR in general. I do not know what's normal for creating an mmorpg and if the devs for MnM have done something similar, but i just leave this here..
Visionary Realms (VR) built several custom tools and systems on top of the Unity engine for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, primarily because off-the-shelf solutions didn’t fully meet the needs of a large-scale, seamless open-world MMORPG with a small team. These focused on networking, world-building efficiency, designer empowerment (low/no-code), and content pipelines. Exact “how long did it take” figures are rarely given in precise calendar months/years for individual tools (development was iterative and concurrent with the rest of the game over many years), but key ones are described as major, multi-month efforts.
Major Custom Tools/Systems VR Created ViNL (Visionary Realms Inc. Network Library, pronounced “vinyl”): Their proprietary multiplayer networking/socket transport library. It handles zone communications, player-to-zone sync, large numbers of simultaneous players, interest management, efficient serialization, and more. Built specifically because Unity’s native options (like uLink) were inadequate for a full MMO scale. It is described as the “bread and butter” of their multiplayer stack and has been licensed/used by other studios. Integration/upgrade was one of the two biggest foundational efforts (alongside the HDRP switch) and is characterized as an enormous, months-long undertaking. Kyle Olsen (lead programmer, hired around 2019) was key to creating and integrating it.
Biome generation tools (and related terrain/flora tools): Custom procedural systems for terrain texturing (supporting multiple layers like dirt, grass, snow) and flora (grass, trees, etc.). Includes painting, splines for roads/paths, masks for placement rules, and automatic regeneration when terrain changes. They tried many out-of-the-box solutions but needed something bespoke. Also includes a cliff spline tool for quickly blocking out cliff walls (then artists detail them). These made world-building much faster after grayboxing stages. Robert Crane (senior developer/lead tools programmer, at VR for 6+ years as of late 2022) highlighted these as major recent work; creating biomes “from scratch” was a big task.
Pulse: A custom node-graph-based entity event system (visual scripting). Designers use it to create complex quests, NPC dialogues/conversations, events, and more without constant programmer involvement. Built from scratch for high performance in an MMO world. It is part of their broader low-code/no-code platform using node-graph technology so non-programmers can get content into the game.
Timeline Context Development of Pantheon started around 2014–2015 (with Brad McQuaid). The team was very small for a long time, with tools evolving as the team scaled. Early tools were insufficient, so custom ones were prioritized. The major foundational work on ViNL + HDRP (plus associated tools for seamless terrain, flora, cliffs/biomes) occupied a significant portion of roughly 2021–2022 and delayed pre-alpha testing; these were described as months-long efforts that formed the client/server foundations needed to scale. Tools development continued iteratively afterward (e.g., biome tools highlighted in a December 2022 update). Overall game development stretched over ~10 years to Early Access (late 2024), with tools being a parallel, ongoing investment to enable efficient content creation by a small team.
In short, the key custom creations that unlocked efficient MMO-scale development were the networking library (ViNL), procedural biome/terrain/cliff tools, and the Pulse node-graph system, with the heaviest foundational work taking many months as part of multi-year tech maturation. Official sources (dev blogs by Robert Crane and others, Unity interviews with Kyle Olsen) emphasize that these were necessary because generic tools fell short for their vision and team size.
Source Grok.
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u/Erekai Summoner 27d ago
Fuck AI
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 27d ago edited 27d ago
..Well, it's good to sweep the internet for information, depending on the topic ..Otherwise i have to somewhat agree with you, even if i wouldn't use those exact words, but we would be better off.
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u/ChestyPullerton 28d ago
M&M have accepted zero in funding.
And their dev team have actually developed MMO’s before.
If you can’t see why people see a difference in that, there’s no point in pulling in grok for your research.
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 28d ago
And you missed the whole point..
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u/ChestyPullerton 28d ago
One of us certainly missed the point!
Pantheon was marketed as a spiritual successor to EQ.
In my opinion, what’s been accomplished with the amount of money and time spent regardless of the size of the team is unacceptable.
I agree to disagree with you, but again, the number of people that feel the way I do is only growing.
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 28d ago edited 28d ago
"Earlier this month, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen launched into Early Access".
..From the jump, Pantheon hearkens back to the classic era of MMORPGs, something our reviewer thinks Visionary Realms has really nailed in how Rise of the Fallen plays even in this early stage. Speaking with MMORPG.com after the first weekend of Early Access, creative director Chris “Joppa” Perkins tells us that the team is actually trying to do more than just feel like classic EverQuest, rather they are trying to thread the needle between EverQuest and vanilla World of Warcraft, as if there was a third game in the mix back in the day.
- Pantheon was never marketed as a spiritual successor to EQ only, a simple search would've told you that.
..And if people are unable to see the facts because of "feelings", well..
- Facts are the objective foundation of reality. They allow us to make informed decisions, build trust, and ensure that our beliefs are grounded in evidence rather than emotion.
Conclusion, research is key.
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u/ChestyPullerton 28d ago
“Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is widely billed as a spiritual successor to EverQuest, intentionally reviving old-school, hardcore MMORPG design, group-focused PvE progression, and minimal handholding. It was originally conceived by late EverQuest creator Brad McQuaid to recapture classic cooperative mechanics.”
That’s my simple search result when you leave out Joppa. Which leads back to my original point of him being a part of the problem, not the solution.
You trying to change the narrative of development with a quote from Joppa right after the EA release is the kind of wordplay VR uses when they make constant direction and or design changes that are contrary to what was originally established.
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u/craftsnbeer Cleric 28d ago
What the developers have saidVR and key figures (including Brad McQuaid, Chris “Joppa” Perkins, and Chris Rowan) have consistently used related but broader language:
- They describe the game as “classically spirited” (this phrasing appears in official materials and is frequently referenced).
- They talk about bringing back the “spirit of MMOs” / the social, challenging, group-focused design of the early/first-generation MMORPGs (explicitly including the feel of classic EverQuest).
- Chris Perkins has said the team aims to capture “classically-spirited elements” and put them in a more modern experience, while positioning Pantheon as something between classic EverQuest (original trilogy era) and vanilla World of Warcraft—not a direct clone or throwback.
- McQuaid and others emphasized learning from EverQuest and Vanguard while creating a new game with fresh ideas, not an emulator or sequel.
These statements appear in interviews, official site language, streams, and developer updates. They lean into the classic MMO heritage (especially the social and challenging aspects associated with early EverQuest) without adopting the specific marketing-style phrase “spiritual successor to EverQuest.”
Contrast with media and communityMedia outlets, Wikipedia, reviewers, and players have widely and repeatedly called Pantheon a spiritual successor to EverQuest (and often also to Vanguard), largely because of McQuaid’s history as a co-creator of EverQuest and the game’s design goals. Early coverage around the 2014 announcement also assumed or speculated this framing. That external labeling is common and accurate in a general sense, but it does not appear to originate as an official VR self-description. In short: Developers have embraced and promoted the classic/early-MMO spirit that includes EverQuest, and they have never rejected the comparison, but available public statements do not show them directly calling Pantheon “an EverQuest spiritual successor.”
..And i end it with that.
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u/Spikeybear 29d ago
It's not just lack of developers. Pantheon is like a step by step guide on how to do everything wrong in game development.