Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen December 2018 Newsletter

Last month, the team over at Visionary Realms launched a new pledge drive for their upcoming MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in order to hire some additional developers. The pledge drive was a success, and so this month’s newsletter tells us what the newly acquired talent will be working on, goes over the lore behind Pantheon’s tree-like Spriggans, and shares a number of first-hand pre-alpha impressions.

Some additional details:

THE TEAM GROWS

First, let’s talk about the team expansion!

We’ve brought on a brand new lead animator who will be joining us next week. He’s got oodles of experience in animating, leading animation teams and MMO-specific animations so he’s the right person for the job. We’re very excited to get him on the team. Be sure to keep an eye out for a formal introduction soon.

Additionally, we are bringing on another concept artist who will help the rest of the art team to get new work into the development pipeline.

Finally, we’ve got a new character artist.

We are also posting a few new jobs soon. These are for a VFX artist, a web developer and a position in Development Operations.

PROJECT FAERTHALE

So, what are all these positions pointing to? Why an exciting new Pantheon build of course!

For the first time since development started we are bringing together the full Pantheon experience, with all of the systems, animations, models, sounds, and effects one would expect to see in a modern game. With the end of Pre-Alpha 4 coming up in a couple of short weeks, we are happy with the state of Pantheon and it’s time to really flesh out the concepts and systems we have in place. We also aim to add in a few new systems we have talked about but haven’t quite worked into a Pre-Alpha build.

This project, dubbed Project Faerthale, will show Pantheon as it is meant to be experienced. Notice I said “experienced” and not “played” because we believe this next iteration will be much, much closer to our goal of creating a full world, a home, not just a game. It will be the culmination of awesome systems complimented by thoughtful visual effects, animations and sounds. It will be representative of the minimum caliber of game we are targeting for launch. It will also include some exciting new NPCs and at least one significant boss encounter, which is where our new character artist comes in.

This will require intense, sustained focus from all departments, from programming, to tools, to art and animation, to lore, to design, to tech and db… and everything in between. Most importantly, this is going to take time.

This massive milestone means that after Pre-Alpha 4 wraps up, we won’t have another client out for our testers for some time. We will keep all of our community up-to-date on the state of Pantheon and Faerthale, but expect a delay before the world opens to play again. We are quite confident you’ll agree it will have been worth the wait.