Rolled a bunch of characters. Went with the Spiderman meta of full stam Dire Lord so I could try to climb out of the world. The big castle on the horizon wasn't open and climbing up on the cliffs to look down inside, it was just a bunch of walls unfortunately. By the end I started getting the hang of the zone and layout, but outside of the main town it's basically just empty expanses of unpopulated content with no resource/mob spawns. Kept hitting invisible walls on the edges, so you can't just go anywhere you can see. You have a stamina bar like Breath of the Wild (though this was in development before that, so maybe Nintento ripped it off VR
) and can climb/jump/sprint using it. There was a climbing and sprint skill but it never got high enough for me to feel a difference in stamina consumption.
Engine was 'fine'. Combat felt a little clunky but once I got a few abilities it gave me something to push. Conning mobs was a little laggy sometimes and the UI felt a bit large with wasted space/odd icon decisions. Gathering was essentially you punching the resource node from 100% to 0% and then looting it. Skinning seemed to respawn a 'corpse' resource node on the corpse of the mob once you chose to skin it. By the end of the day, my FPS was chunking, said 40ish on 'normal' but felt more like 5 in most places.
Quests were mostly 'gather shit' as harvesting tutorial quests. There were also some annoying quests where you had to lug a heavy box to random people to show off the encumbrance system. The quest log gave some clues for the first person you had to find, but after that it didn't tell you much. Without a map or anything, it felt really bad running around town encumbered looking in empty buildings for some asshole. Once the community started sharing locations in /ooc it got better, but I'd recommend they either cut these short or give much more detailed directions on how to find the people in the quest text.
Soloing you could handle blue easily, white with some rest after and yellow would be a crapshoot. This was as a monk 1-3. Grouped up with a bunch of other level 4s and we explored some of the bandit/undead camps around the outside of town. Con system seems to have white < yellow < orange < red and anything orange and red really fucked us up. Would pull a couple of deep red rats out of the undead camp to the guards and then the group could handle the rest of the camp pretty easily. Hard to tell what is going on in group combat, but our enc was able to mez/root semi reliably. Feedback was probably the biggest complaint, with only humans everyone looked kind of the same and the combat pile was a little messy vs something like EQ where things feel more 'spread out' or deliberate. The combat was more 'spam your instants' like WoW than the calculated slow spell choice of early EQ.
That being said, if you never played EQ, then both Pantheon and MnM would feel completely awkward. They both have the 'mem spells' mechanic, which is not clearly laid out in either of them. I feel that is the one to compare it to, since they are both going for the old 'Vision" inspired sandbox mmo feel. The one thing Pantheon had over MnM was the item icons being finished. It's a small thing, but the desaturated icons for things in MnM really makes it feel like a weekend unity project, whereas Pantheon feels more like a mixed review early access game on Steam.
All in all, I'd say it prob felt the most like Project Gorgon of anything I have played recently. If they kept building content that spread further out from the main town, it would probably sit comfortably alongside it.