Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen May 2020 Producer’s Letter

Benjamin Dean, a producer on Visionary Realms’ upcoming party-focused MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, brings us this month’s newsletter that includes a general progress report, the latest pre-alpha patch notes, and some basic graybox UI screenshots. Here are the text bits:

Greetings Pantheon fans,

Looking back at this month, I couldn’t believe how close we are to completing this milestone. It quickly became obvious which topics this month’s Producer’s Letter would include. The easiest way to get everything in is by simply going through the list of what the team’s been up to. Let’s get started!

Programming has been making magic by creating a node-based ability system. We talked a bit about this on last month’s Dev Update stream. This system allows us much more versatility and control over PC and NPC abilities. It’s a game changer. The core system is now complete and the first class, the Dire Lord, is being implemented into the new system. Meanwhile, the content team is infusing mastery abilities for inclusion in the new system.

Coupling well with that work, programming has implemented some robust new tools for the designers. Our design team can now place quests, storylines and dialog much more easily.

And that they have! Many new stories and quests have recently been placed in game and are currently going through the rigors of internal testing. These are such an integral part of the game that seeing them in is like watching the game take its first breath. What systems and mechanics do for the body of the game, content does for the soul of the game. So Pantheon is growing its soul one might say, if waxing a tad existential.

And let’s not forget about the clothes for our little entity. As seen on recent streams, the UI is getting a facelift and that work is progressing rapidly every day. This isn’t just in terms of art, but also functionality. Behind the scenes, art and programming work hand in hand on details like resizing and anchoring.

So what’s the bottom line when looking at this all together? It means our monolithic milestone will be completed this summer. Even better, we can now schedule a solid date for the next round of game access for pre-alpha pledges. We have the internal target date and will share it with our Fantheons when it is a few weeks away.

When it comes time to test, to our Pre-Alpha testers: please be ready to test for the first sessions of Pre-Alpha 5. As much as we want to get your feedback on organic gameplay, we will start by setting a specific focus for each test session. This is an important part of the process because we need to ensure everything works on a massive, live scale before we can stamp it ready for alpha consideration. That being said, after the focus tests there will be opportunity to get in and play organically.

We’re getting close, gang! Thanks once again for your patience and continued support during the production process. We’re very excited to see this milestone wrap up as it’s incredibly significant to the entire project. It is the first genuine Pantheon experience and we can’t wait for your thoughts on it.

Benjamin Dean

Producer, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Patch Notes

WORLD BUILDING

• World origin established (center of the world located and all zones oriented around it appropriately)
• Split large zones into multiple zones to improve load times, more real-world zone aggro behavior
• April 7th Murk and Silent Plains come online
• New Black Rose Keep location and supporting environment
• Updated Mad Run cave system
• Added new Orc models

SYSTEMS

• Game-wide stat overhaul, full deep-stat integration
• April 8th EVERYTHING IS CLIMBABLE
• First pass of Mastery experience gain
• First pass of new character inventory (greybox)
• INVENTORY (Different layout / final art)
• Massive amount of progress on Quest & Perception system

PROGRAMMING

• Small refactor around ability cast cancelling
• Fix to critical hit damage bonus from attack and spell power
• New spell power conversion for damage and healing numbers
• Formula scaling for intended top end of Attack & Spell power numbers at max level before buffs
• Heals can now properly show up as crits in scrolling combat text
• First pass of partial resists for spell damage based on target resistance
• Aura controller performance improvements
• Fixed a bug where procs could trigger themselves to proc again (infinite proc loop anyone?)
• Fixed a bug that was removing passives on log in
• Efficiency upgrades for NPC wander behavior, small tweaks to MoveAround
• Fixed melee animation being overridden from EntityStatusType changes
• April 9th First round of AI/pathing robustness updates
• NPC chat bubbles, hooked up
• Adjusted NPC hitboxes across the board to make selecting/looting smaller NPCs easier
• NPC AI & threat refactor

ANIMATIONS

• Rounds of polish on 1h slashing/blunt and 1h piercing auto attacks
• New /cheer, /wave and /conversate emotes (for dialogue with NPCs)
• Monk unique combat idle, main/offhand autoattacks, flurry punch, gale kick, blazing hand strike