Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen August 2022 Newsletter

While Visionary Realms’ party-focused MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is getting ready for a new round of pre-alpha testing, we get this newsletter featuring a producer’s letter that tells us what to expect from the game’s next phase, a quick overview of recent progress, an internal interview on what it’s like to showcase a work-in-progress MMORPG, and the customary community spotlight section.

Here’s the letter, and you take it from there:

Pantheon Community,

The development team here at Visionary Realms is heads-down and all-hands-on-deck preparing for the next pre-alpha session.

As the culmination of many substantial development initiatives over the past year including our conversion to Unity’s High-Definition Rendering Pipeline, the integration of our in-house networking solution ViNL, and enhancements to our combat framework, we know many of our Pre-Alpha testers are eager to know when the date of this session will be. We appreciate your patience thus far, but must ask you to be patient a little while longer.

In July, we reported that the long-awaited integration of ViNL was complete, with only minor bugs following integration to be resolved. In the course of addressing these bugs however, we became aware of a conflict between ViNL and the volume of string-based text sent over our network resulting in memory corruption and server instability.

Programming has identified the root cause and is hard at work to resolve the issue, which we must address before we are able to conduct pre-alpha sessions. While we are still aiming for the target dates communicated on last week’s stream, we are acknowledging that there is a risk that we may need to delay the upcoming session.

We understand the apprehension that news of a potential delay can bring. Rest assured, the entire team is eager to bring our Pre-Alpha testers back into Terminus as quickly as possible. We are evaluating every avenue to avoid this potential delay, but at this time cannot make any guarantees.

That being said, we would like to share some information about our target date, and our commitment to communication as we navigate the coming weeks:

• Our current, tentative target for pre-alpha is the weekend of September 17th, 2022.
• This date is not guaranteed due to the issue mentioned above.
• We have set an internal deadline to make a final decision about delaying past this date; that decision will be made no sooner than August 30th, and no later than September 3rd, ensuring that if we are able to meet the September 17th date, testers will be given a full two weeks of advance notice.
• As soon as this decision is made, an announcement will be provided in our official discord, in the #pa-announcements channel.

We would also like to share that this pre-alpha session will take place on a single server; we will not be dividing players into different server groups or time slots, and there is no need to request being moved to a specific grouping through customer service for this test.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into some of the highlights of what to expect in the coming session!

What to Expect in Pre-Alpha

Due to the amount of new systems being introduced and tested by a large volume of players at the same time, we are treating the next pre-alpha session as another ‘shake-out’: a limited experience intended to help us isolate potential problems by focusing players in specific areas and content.

Below are some of the highlights testers can expect to experience in this upcoming shake-out:

• Experience Thronefast in glorious HD(RP), including new explorable regions, enemy distributions, camps, rare spawns, and loot.
• Play as the Dire Lord, Rogue, Monk, Wizard, Enchanter, Shaman, or newly-added Cleric. Each class has received substantial updates to align with how our combat systems have evolved.
• Choose among the Human, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Halfling, or Ogre, and explore how newly-defined base attributes and growth rates alter the feel of class play between them.
• Grab a mining pick and hunt down rare ores, or learn to smelt and refine them into metals.
• Hone your Skills, enhancing your combat proficiency through continued practice and unlocking new Techniques along the way.
• Join your friends and fellow VIPs on a single server; it’s time to put networking to the test!