Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen February 2020 Producer’s Letter
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Visionary Realms, the team behind the upcoming group-focused MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, is now producing videos instead of their usual development updates. And so, as a quick recap of the recent progress, we now get this producer’s letter that summarizes the two latest video updates and shares an extended gameplay session of Pantheon.
Here’s the second update:
And the letter itself:
Welcome to another Producer's letter and let me start off by saying we hit 2020 running!
First, let's get caught up on the streams you may have missed since our last Producer's Letter in December.
We ended 2019 with a 2-hour fun-filled adventure through Amberfaet. Shortly after our Climbing and Warrior Ability stream with CohhCarnage we wanted to get back in there and play organically as a dev group, to give you a taste of what awaits you. Saicred, Roenick, Kilsin, Medawky, Tourke and Zoeii scaled the treacherous route and uncovered some secrets of this vertically-designed dungeon in the December 2019 Amberfaet Play Session
To start off the new year, we streamed our first Development Update of 2020. We briefly discussed the Murk for the first time, which is an eerie, swampy area within Faerthale. We expanded a bit more on the Climbing system demonstrated in December and showed the Living Codex in development -- the ability book used to track your spells, abilities and their upgrades.
Our second Development Update of 2020 took place two weeks later, on January 30. In this episode, Jared offered an expanded look at the Living Codex now that it is implemented in game, detailing the additions and tweaks since the last stream and expanded upon ability upgrades. There's still more to come, so expect to see the Codex again in future. Senior Programmer Jason Weimann made a guest appearance to talk about the Codex implementation and general thoughts on programming a large-scale MMORPG in Unity. We showed some early WIP terrain and caves of the Murk (below), talked about NPCs and their wandering AI, and went over some patch notes (pasted at the end of this column).
What's Next?
What's next for Pantheon? Soon, we will stream a first look at Faerthale - actual gameplay and a peek at the content. Stay tuned to the official site and our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts for the details as we announce them.
On the development side of things, the team is working on breathing life into the Murk, tuning abilities and encounters, adding more UI features, more animations, squashing more bugs and implementing more performance increases.
It’s quite the start to the year and the momentum continues. It’s going to be an exciting year for everyone - no doubt about it. With that, I leave you with the promised patch notes. Until next time, Panthe-on!
Patch Notes
GeneralNew Things
- Massive client side performance improvements (massive UI performance improvements too)
- Refactored/improved scrolling combat text
- Pathfinding improvements related to chasing/LoS and spell casting
- NPC Wander zones defined in game
- NPC auto attack synchronization fixes<
- Fixed bug where a group member's status bar did not display correctly (as seen on the Dec/19 Cohh stream)
- Fixed bug where a spell aura buff did not display correctly (as seen on the Dec/19 Cohh stream).
Fixes
- Codex Replacement
- Ability Upgrades added to Codex
- Wizard UI Updated
- Faction System Updated to meet specs
World
- UI (greyed out hp/mana/buttons)
- Damage Calculations & Randomization
- Murk Playspace Changes, Collision added to most murk assets.
- Murk - Glowy orbs, Tree cliffs, Tree Remnants, set dressing, Water Spots added, Fog color scheme changed.
- OW - Significant additions of: Roots, Rocks, Vines, All terrain sanded down from terraced look.
- FT - Campfires, General Housekeeping, cleaned up placement in caves.
- FT - Grass initial changes.
- FT/Murk - Murk cleanup with caves. Murk fires have been lit. Oldwood set dressing and terrain work.
