by Nephele, Project Manager
Hi again everyone! It has been nearly a year since we launched into Early Access and opened Pantheon to many new players in doing so. Over that year, we’ve gathered a huge amount of player feedback which has helped us to refine our design for the game. Alongside that feedback, we have also been watching how many of our players are approaching the game’s content and taking copious notes. One of the areas we have paid close attention to is our dungeons.
Dungeons are important aspects of any MMORPG and Pantheon is no exception to that. With any dungeon, we want to provide a set of challenging encounters to explore that encourage players to group up and work together to defeat them. Of course, we also want to make sure the rewards in terms of experience, items, and lore/story reveals are exciting and enticing as well. Dungeons should be places that players are excited to see and experience. Delving into them should feel like an adventure where the possibility for both great danger and great rewards lurk around every corner.
Our dungeons are some of our most popular areas today, but even so, we have noticed that many players are reluctant to head into the deeper recesses where the most challenging and rewarding content usually hides. Apart from organized guilds that often bring multiple premade groups to “raid” these areas, we see a distinct lack of people grouping up for the deeper parts of the dungeons. Most groups stick to areas relatively close to the entrance and don’t really venture further down. When we investigated the reasons for that, we found some recurring themes: First, many players feel that they have to spend long hours camping named NPCs or bosses inside the dungeon to make the expedition “worth it” in terms of the loot, since there are easier options available for experience grinding. Second, many players are worried that if someone in their group has to leave, or if the group wipes while inside the dungeon, they will not be able to recover from it and all that progress made getting to that point will have been for nothing.
We want more players to be able to experience our dungeons, so we are going to be doing a bit of an experiment with Halnir Cave in our December Update by adding two new systems.
Here are the two changes you will see in Halnir Cave:
Corpse Summoner NPC
We will be adding an NPC at the entrance of Halnir Cave who will (for a fee) summon adventurer corpses. Corpses summoned in this way cannot be resurrected for experience, but this will provide an option for groups exploring the dungeon to recover their bodies and their items in circumstances where corpse recovery would be very difficult.
Localized Teleport System
We are also planning to add an unlockable teleport system to Halnir Cave that will allow players who have explored the cave to unlock teleports that they can use to quickly move down from the entrance into deeper areas. You will still need to have visited the destination area first (and potentially complete some other objectives such as acquiring certain items) to unlock it as a teleport destination, but this should help speed things up for groups that are interested in pushing deeper, and make it easier to bring in a replacement member when an existing member needs to leave. These teleports will take you to semi-safe areas that will purposely be designed so that they are not usable as camp locations, which should make them good places for groups who need to take a break or are waiting for members to arrive. As a bonus, if you have unlocked a teleport location, it will be two-way, which will allow you to teleport back to the entrance when you are finished with your expedition as well.
In Conclusion
We are hopeful that these two systems will encourage more players to head down into the lower areas of Halnir Cave and try out the content there. Once these come into the game, let us know how they work for you. As we move forward into 2026, we are going to begin bringing our combat and progression systems into their final and complete state for launch (we will be talking a lot more about what that means over the next few weeks). Dialing in the challenge and rewards for our dungeons is a big component of that, especially as we add more dungeons and zones to our game world.
If these systems are successful at encouraging more players to try out the deeper parts of our dungeons, we’ll extend them to other dungeons and areas where it makes sense to do so. We are being cautious and starting with just a single dungeon because while we want these places to feel a little more accessible, we also don’t want to trivialize the challenge and fun of exploring the dungeon in the first place. We may also consider some other changes to the way we build our dungeons in the future, but we want to evaluate how these systems work out first.
The December Update will be releasing before the holidays, so you won’t have to wait long to try these two things out along with the first iteration of our Mounts and Taming system. In the meantime, please get ready for an increased number of developer diaries over the next few weeks. We have a major gameplay update planned for the Spring that we have been working on lining up, and we’re planning to start talking about that in our next developer diary, which releases Monday.