Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen February 2022 Newsletter

This month’s newsletter for Visionary Realms’ party-focused MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen brings us the customary Producer’s Letter, a quick progress report, a developer Q&A revolving around the game’s Wizard class, some lore, and a community spotlight section.

Here’s the letter and you take things from there:

Greetings, Pantheon fans! 2022 is in full swing here at Visionary Realms, and February is quickly shaping up to be one of our most substantive months to-date. Let’s catch up on all the recent goings-on, shall we?

At the beginning of the month, we achieved an internal milestone with the first playable HDRP build making its way into the hands of our QA team, who have been busy identifying issues that tend to crop up with such an enormous update. Initial feedback to gameplay changes included in this build has been positive, and we are continuing to tweak and refine the experience in preparation for the next build.

On the design side of the house, the team has been heads-down fleshing out Thronefast following its HDRP makeover. This includes correcting the placement of NPC and world object spawns to adjust for things like rocks and buildings, as well as adjusting populations and itemization to better suit the gameplay flow following updates to our combat formulas. We’re sneaking in a few more surprises as well, and expect to transition this effort into Avendyr’s Pass towards the end of this month.

Meanwhile, our programmers have been hard at work preparing the HDRP client for pre-alpha testing with the integration of our flora, biome, and water systems. We expect to begin the integration of our sky and lighting solution shortly as well, which will allow us to realize our day/night cycle and support the implementation of additional planned features such as time-of-day driven spawns and dispositions.

Work on networking integration remains ongoing in addition to HDRP support, but we anticipate being able to dedicate more attention to networking soon. Additionally, we are getting ready to tackle many of the long-standing items on our roadmap that have taken a backseat to HDRP implementation. Chief among these are the supporting systems for Crafting and Perception, so expect to hear much more about both of these later in the year.

Last – and far from least – our art team continues to make progress on multiple fronts. Character art and animation has been focused on introducing a veritable armory of new weapon models, refining our combat idle and auto-attack animations, and beginning to concept out new animations to support a variety of special weapon attacks. Wild’s End remains the focus of our environment art team, with ongoing progress on creating the bespoke landmarks that make up the vast and varied home of the Halflings.

As we head further into 2022, a lot of our internal focus has been on what we want to accomplish this year and with it the growth of Visionary Realms. Each department has refined its hiring plan, so as resources become available we have a solid growth strategy to address key needs – though this is generally good practice to update once or twice a year as needs and priorities may change. That being said, with progressing our Alpha roadmap being our main focus this year we have a pretty good idea of the roles we want to fill and in which order. Thanks to our amazing community and your generous pledges over the years we have come such a long way in filling these roles, and only have a few more key spots to fill when the time comes.

The entire team at Visionary Realms remains ever-grateful for our community’s continued patience and support. Much and more awaits in the months ahead, and we can’t wait to share it with you all!