It had a tragic journey. People were unfair at the start and Fires of Heaven created most of the hate. That community turned on Brad and hated him for what happened with Vanguard, and I never felt it was justified. The public can be such bandwagoning cunts. Brad was key to EQ so was a gaming god to people for a while, then Vanguard went badly and they turned on him. They built all these narratives about how evil and terrible Brad was, he fired all the staff in the parking lot, was a crackhead, etc. Most of it wasn't even true, and everyone losing their job is what happens when a company falls apart... The blame should have fell to Microsoft who fucked the project, but people didn't know about this until too late and they didn't care, and by then they just used it to blame Brad even more for not tying Microsoft into a contract earlier.
I loved Vanguard even though it was a fuck up. The way I saw it, even if you consider it a total failure, Brad made EQ which was a huge success, and then Vanguard which failed. So at worst his record should have been seen as 50/50. That's even if you ignore the two expansions he did for EQ which people loved so much they now consider it "EQ Classic". But people wanted to forget EverQuest and judge him by his last game which was a failure. It never made sense to me. It was all so fuelled by sperg nerds, hysteria, drama, and personal butthurt feelings. To me anyone who actually cares about gaming should have wanted to encourage Brad to try again, and most of the comments I saw online were exactly that. But the vocal minority wanted to tear him down. I never follow game devs including Brad so maybe all of them have this aspie retard audience. But I suspected someone's agenda was hard at work because there was so much constant hate towards Brad and Vanguard that seemed unnatural.
So Pantheon was announced to this hostile audience. The Kickstarter was also far too primitive and basic. I think they assumed there would a lot of excitement from the fans who would understand that it was more proof of concept. And there were a lot of fans waiting for him to come up with something, but their Kickstarter was just too barebones, I wasn't surprised it failed. At that point I thought the project would end, but it managed to keep limping along with a few people working on it for free in their spare time. And these volunteers grew, but it also included some very questionable people who FOH tore apart. I was with them on that. Then the project turned around. They ditched the bad people and got some good people working on it. They set up the company with a professional management team and Brad was just the creative officer. Then they were talking about how they had an "Angel investor" and things really grew. Their website became slick and they started making good looking screenshots and class design and stuff. People started funding them via the website. Things looked to be going well for a while. They did some videos where they played as a group with various streamers, and it started looking like they had the beginnings of a real game. There were some good moments like when they finished in a dungeon and ran back to town and were thanking the audience for watching and talking about what would be in the next video. Then a mob had followed one of them back, it attacks them and wipes out the group. It was so classic EQ ish. The audience loved it and I thought the game had a chance.
They built some nice looking areas and character models, the UI really improved, they had people working on lighting and stuff which really improved the look. At that point I was happy to just tune out and wait a few years for them to build it. But a year or two later it was clear they were polishing and tinkering on a tiny area and still only working part time. It still looked promising because if they had a really good "vertical slice" they could use it to get more investment to just duplicate it and make more areas and take it closer to a full game. But at some point in these years Brad died. They said they would continue, but I think he was the main reason anyone ever invested in the project. For years since then they have been all smoke and mirrors, talking constantly about what they are making and doing, yet nothing was ever shown, just the same few areas they did in steams which looked boring and undeveloped. I figured if they had a bunch of people slaving away through those years, then someone might want to buy the project and finish it off. But it became obvious they didn't have anything to show, it was all tease. And whenever they did break down and show some actual in game video, it looked bad. This was years ago. Since then they have just been all talk. I hoped someone might buy the company and finish the project. But now I think it's probably just a pile of unfinished work that nobody wants, and these guys are desperate to recoup some of the time and and money they spent on it.