Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen – April 2020 Producer’s Letter

If you’d like to see some fresh gameplay footage from Visionary Realms’ upcoming group-focused MMORPG, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, you should check out this month’s producer’s letter. There, you’ll find links to a number of livestream VODs, a general progress report, and a reassuring health-related status update.

Here’s the latest video:

And here are the text bits:

A Note from Visionary Realms on COVID-19

Before we get into the bulk of this month’s Producer’s letter I want to take a moment to discuss something that has been affecting all of our lives these past few weeks: the spread of COVID-19.

At Visionary Realms, our business structure is such that many of our staff have already been working remotely for the past several years. With members from coast to coast in the US, Australia, Canada and Europe, we have infrastructure in place that is very supportive of working from home. We meet online weekly and daily for work sessions, meetings and planning calls to accommodate the physical distance between some of us, so we are already accustomed to operating in this manner. For this reason, slow-downs in production have been minimal. Development continues and we will also continue to update you regularly through streams and newsletters.

That being said, the health concerns, economy and social constraints we all face are very real for us, so we encourage our team members to keep safe and take the recommended precautions. The wellbeing of each of our team members and their families and loved ones is top priority.

We also send our personal thoughts and hopes to all of you out there who have been supporting this project for a long time, whether through pledges or just plain excitement that fuels us, or both. Thank you for your continued interest in Pantheon. Please keep yourself and your loved ones safe in these unprecedented times.

[…]

What’s Been Happening This Week

Ross has been banging out new character animations like there’s no tomorrow. He finished off a few combat-idle stance variants, snuck in an emote animation and is now focusing on the monk animations.

Jared is focused on more UI work and has put together the beginnings of the character inventory and stats windows, replacing the placeholder windows. These newly designed windows show all the information you need, including a nice, intuitive interface for the Acclimation system.

Jimmy has been building a continent, it seems like. He’s put in a ton of work getting zones ready for Pre-Alpha 5 (and eventually Alpha), making insane progress in blocking out zones and placing assets. Some puzzle work is being done as areas need to be moved, resized or fitted into the zone layout. He’s got 4 zones on the go right now.

JN is busy writing the content for the PA5 zones and turning that writing into storylines and quests. Lots to keep our writer busy!

The entire programming team keeps their schedules full as they integrate new formulas, stats and systems into the main codebase, crushing bugs, fixing and scaling tools and ensuring new builds are able to be compiled routinely.

While all this is going on, Tim has been populating the PA5 zones with life and making sure the NPCs are acting in a respectful manner. Or at least acting as intended.

On Naming an NPC

If your pledge grants you the Name-An-NPC perk, you should have received an email this week with instructions on how to submit your name suggestions. If you are entitled to this reward and have not received this email please contact support at https://pantheonmmo.com/support/.

And that’s a glimpse into Pantheon development for this week. Keep an eye on the forums or social media pages for our latest news and upcoming streams. See you in the chat channel again soon! Until then, stay safe and Panthe-on.