Silence And Shrinkage: A Tale Of Two Titles

A couple of apparently unrelated items I read, yesterday and today, got me thinking about how games can be all over the news for a while and then quietly disappear without anyone really noticing. Or mentioning it if they did.

The first was this from MassivelyOP about server merges in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. It took me somewhat by surprise, for several reasons. 

For one, I couldn't remember hearing anything about server merges in the game before, although the article is very much "Here's a thing we knew might happen and now it has". Pantheon is in that odd position for me of being a game I don't play but whose news I watch with interest so I was a little puzzled that I'd missed whatever had passed for a warning about the contraction. 

It seems MOP reported on the possibility back in March in a round-up of various topics concerning the game. I definitely never saw it because I'd have remembered Chris Neal's opening paragraph, one of the oddest I've seen anywhere for quite a while. It's worth following the link to check it out. It's like he's channeling Chris Morris from thirty years ago...

I imagine I missed it because I was deep in a hole of my own digging as described in yesterday's post but had I caught the news I'd have been surprised to learn Pantheon had enough servers to warrant a merger. In fact, had anyone asked me, which obviously no-one was going to, I'd have said I thought they probably had just one server for each ruleset. I wouldn't have thought they could need much more.

If I'd said that, I'd have been very wrong indeed. Yesterday's report names twenty servers! And that's just in the USA East and West regions, which seem to be the only ones affected by the merger. There are also servers in the EU and "OCE", an abbreviation for Oceania I hadn't happened upon before. Plus another two FFA PvP servers that have just been added. That's more than two dozen!

Things Are Happening!

 

It seems like one whole hell of a lot of servers to me. Way, way more than I imagined the game could possibly support at this stage, even though the take-up when it went into Early Access was a lot more enthusiastic than I'd expected.

The Steam charts show an all-time peak just below 7,000 concurrent players. Even using the most generous of multipliers, 5X, that puts the population around 35k. I just checked and as far as I can tell it is no longer possible to play the game any other way than through Steam unless you already have pre-existing alpha/beta access or a buddy code from someone who does, so it seems reasonable to assume Steam's population count represents the huge majority of the playerbase.

If so, that means each of those two dozen or more servers would have been unlikely to have held more than a couple of thousand people (Assuming a fairly even distribution.) and probably only half of those at most would have been online at the same time, even at peak. I know Pantheon is a retro game, aiming to bring back the glory days of EverQuest and all that but even at the turn of the millennium I seem to remember EQ servers could comfortably accommodate about five thousand players, with a couple of thousand of those online at the same time. It seems to be going beyond the call of authenticity to try and replicate the server technology from two decades ago as well as the gameplay.

In the course of my "research" I naturally ended up looking at the Steam Charts for Pantheon as they are now. It's not a disastrous picture but it's not as encouraging as it might be. 

The game has been in Early Access for around three months, putting it squarely in that ninety day zone identified by the developers of the Star Wars Galaxy emulator as the point when people begin to jump ship if no new content is forthcoming. 

You can have too many new ideas...

Pantheon, as I said, seeks to restore the kind of gameplay, and thereby the kind of retention and loyalty, that golden age MMORPGs such as EverQuest once enjoyed. Back then, players really did expect to play these games for many months at a stretch; often for several years. It wasn't until a decade or so later that the term "three-monther" appeared, referring to the then-new tendency of players to hop from one MMORPG to another, abandoning each after no more than three months.

That had a lot to do with the explosion of new MMORPGs, which made it possible to put one down and pick up another almost without interruption. Before then, there just weren't enough MMORPGs to make chasing FOMO a viable playstyle but many players had been quite happy to stick with one game because, in addition to all those legendary social ties and as I can affirm as someone who was playing at the time, successful MMOs pumped out a continual torrent of fresh content in a way that would seem hard to believe now.

It's not just rose-tinted nostalgia talking. It's a matter of record. You can go read the extensive patch note archive at Allakhazam's mothballed EverQuest site and see for yourself. Back then, when I was playing, the problem was trying to keep up with the new stuff, not scratching around trying to find something new to make it worth logging in.

As I've suggested before, to a degree Early Access games have an advantage over live ones in this regard. By definition, there's still a lot to add to an EA title, assuming the devs are doing their jobs. There really ought to be a steady flow of new content throughout the EA period, although not all of it is likely to be particularly exciting. There may still be a lot of tweaking of detail and systems work going on. Even so, there should always be something new happening.

For that reason and because of the type of game Pantheon promotes itself as being and the kind of audience it seeks to attract, I'd figured retention would be more robust than it appears to have been. I imagined quite a lot of Pantheon players would be in it for the long haul and would already have settled down in their "forever game", as people like to call it. They'd keep on playing, regardless of whether there was anything new to do because Pantheon would be home.

That's most likely true still for some but it looks as though there may also have been quite an intake of curiosity-seekers and tourists. Peak concurrency according to Steam has fallen from that all-time high of close to seven thousand back in January to just over half that in the last thirty days; less than a third in the last twenty-four hours. That leaves a couple of thousand at peak, which with that generous 5x multiplier might mean as many as ten thousand people still playing, still a decent number for an indie mmo. 

Not a disastrous decline, then, but a bigger slide than I would have predicted at this stage. Certainly a steep-enough drop to warrant those server merges, although given they cut the total of American  PvE servers from twenty to just four, it does suggest there were too many to begin with.

The "Latest" News as of 10 April 2025

 

The other news item I referred to back at the top of the post relates not to any kind of announcement giving cause for concern, more the exact opposite: total silence. Michael Byrne of MMOBomb is wondering if Tarisland is "unofficially dead" because he hasn't heard a peep out of it "in months".

That's a bit of a reach as it turns out if you read the whole article because the "months" of supposed silence actually go back only as far as mid-February, which is more like "weeks" to my way of counting. Still, it's long enough to go without any type of PR puff from a major game to suggest something might be going on. Or not going on...

Tarisland is precisely one of those MMORPGs that dominated the news cycle for a while before slipping quietly back into the pack of live service games that no-one really follows or cares about other than the people still playing them. Lost Ark would be another example but the huge difference there is that I still see news items about Lost Ark all the time whereas I had to go look up what the last reports on Tarisland were before I wrote this post. I couldn't remember hearing about it for, yes, months.

We can't use Steam's charts to reveal anything meaningful about Tarisland because although it's on Valve's platform, pretty much no-one ever played it there in the first place. The all-time peak was 582 players! As MMOBomb suggests, most current Tarisland players will be going through the game's standalone launcher or playing it on mobile. It may still be booming for all any of us know.

Except if it was, I'm pretty sure Level Infinite and TenCent would be telling us about it. And pumping out plenty of content to make sure it stayed that way. As with EQ back in the day and as with Wuthering Waves now, just to name-check a game I play that pushes far more content at me than I can cope with (High quality content, too.) MMORPGs that are doing well don't tend to clam up and keep quiet about it.

In some ways, Pantheon and Tarisland sit almost at opposite ends of the MMORPG spectrum, even though in others they could be cousins. One is extremely indie and still in relatively early development, the other is as corporate as they come and went Live long ago. Then again, both are basically diku-mud variants that can trace a very direct lineage back to EverQuest, one directly, the other by way of World of Warcraft.

If I had to bet which would be with us longer I'd put my money on Pantheon. I wouldn't have said that before I read Micheal Byrne's speculations but I do find the developer's and publisher's lack of engagement with both the players and the media suggestive of a general lack of commitment to the game itself. Hardly surprising given the size and scope of the mega-corps involved, for whom Tarisland may well already have either met or missed its profitability targets, consigning it either way to the completed projects file.

Pantheon, conversely, is the one and only engine keeping the Visual Realms ship afloat. If that fails, the entire company sinks. Tarisland could probably have fifty times as many players and TenCent might still shut it down. VR won't give up until the bailiffs are banging on the door.

As a player, it does seem counterintuitive to imagine your characters would be safer in some niche game that may never even make it out of Early Access, rather than in one of the biggest MMORPGs of its day, but that might very well be how it goes.