January Pre-alpha Recap: Hello Alpha Pledges!
December was exciting for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen Pre-alpha testers. Aside from our usual (awesome) crew of testers, we invited the alpha pledges into Terminus for 24-hour sessions.
How did that go?
After a fumble and swift recovery, it went well. Players enjoyed stable servers and a full session of gameplay along with an additional surprise session. For those who participated the entire week, they were offered 2 full days in Pantheon to explore, adventure, and craft.
We had a combined total playtime of 7 years, 269 days, 16 hours, 2 minutes, and 8 seconds across all accounts. The average playtime duration for all accounts was 26 hours, 14 minutes, and 37 seconds with the most hours played on one account being 41 hours, 55 minutes, and 39 seconds.
What did they do? Well, they killed things. 294,790 NPC corpses were looted during the alpha pledge sessions. They also ran tasks, and 61,612 quests were completed.
This gave us a plethora of glorious data and we found something kind of cool. Grouping matters. When reviewing feedback from players, the “fun factor” for players who spent time grouped was rated as “high.” Overall, players who grouped during the session experienced 20% more fun than those who soloed. As a community-centric MMORPG, this hits the sweet spot for Pantheon and signals that the game is heading in the right direction.
Alpha pledges also had some fun comments for us in the session aftermath.
I just liked that the game was not easy per se. I died at least 30 times on all my characters. Sometimes it was even comical. CON EVERYTHING!
Grouping with strangers and exploring to see if we could find something no one else has seen. It was awesome. The world was beautiful even with the lack of finishing details it was more then enough to be enjoyable.
The group play traversing the gloom fracture and exploring the goblin caves was riveting and challenging; what a rush! I also LOVED the random spawns/locations of the wolves which keep you on your toes at all times and even better were the vipers near the gloom that had random spawn timers AND a random amount that would spawn which really made the world feel alive.
The most notable NPC was the Tyrannical Chicken who still reigns supreme as the newbie player menace. The advice there? Just, don’t.
At the end of the day, many of our players sat in reflection. We held a screenshot contest and gave away a PA pledge to one lucky winner, who now is enjoying regular access to Pantheon. This resulted in a lot of great screenshots and today’s screenshot offerings are brought to you by (in order of appearance) Avaen, Tombie1020, NudeMetalDude, Mornroc, Aster Lea, Ezrael, Awesome, and Ellethecatlady. These are all players who participated in our most recent alpha pledge session.
We will be holding more alpha pledge sessions in the future, so keep an eye out on PantheonMMO.com, our official Discord server, and your e-mail for news regarding your chance to play!