Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen January 2022 Newsletter

Visionary Realms brings us a new development update for their party-focused MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in the form of this month’s newsletter. As usual, we get a producer’s letter, a month in review section, a quick Q&A with the game’s QA lead, and a community spotlight.

Here’s a decent chunk of the producer’s letter to get you started:

Greetings once again, dear Pantheon fans. Another year is upon us and 2022 is shaping up to be a big one.

First and foremost, 2022 continues our push towards an Alpha release. As the High Definition Render Pipeline work finishes up we have only a few more systems to integrate on a basic level this year and the rest of the work is focused more on building out the world. This is incredibly exciting all around. Expect staffing to bulk up a bit this year to tackle this work.

The Pantheon team has already expanded in December with the addition of Holly LeMay as an Associate Concept Artist. Over the past month, Holly has helped tremendously to expand our backlog of concept art that will be used to inform NPCs, characters, armor, and animations, and we look forward to sharing her work with the community in the near future.

Also exciting is that we intend to increase awareness of the game this year. Obviously, we have been doing this all along, but it will be a key goal as we get closer to Alpha and the game gets into a more fleshed-out state that can be enjoyed by a wider audience. More specifically, we aim to invite more streamers and influencers, and tell our story to more websites than we have over the past few years. Alpha is a thrilling prospect and it will soon be time to share the game with more people worldwide.

Internally, things are evolving here at Visionary Realms too. With the addition of a dedicated HR staff last year, this year they are preparing for team-wide expansion and setting up the infrastructures, policies and procedures to support more people coming in. They are working hard to ensure that Visionary Realms is not only a fun place to work, but also a fair, humane and thoughtfully-structured experience.

On the technical end, our tech team has big plans for 2022 as well. They are currently working on solutions to improve the Pantheon store and user experience. Expect to see marked improvements this year in navigating, pledging, and interacting. Back-end improvements continue too, setting the foundation for the game to operate cleanly and efficiently and connecting all of our data reliably, securely and competently.

QA is hard at work, currently fleshing out updated test plans for the new HDRP client and beyond. This department, too, is organizing themselves into a solid, scalable structure so when the time comes, they’ll be able to add more to their team and get them up and testing quickly and painlessly. Be sure to check out the Q&A with QA Lead, Kim Morrison in this newsletter to read more on QA’s plans and activities.

Business Development is also running at full steam as we head into 2022. Discussions with potential partners continue and there is a lot of positive momentum for this year. Expect to hear more as these relationships develop.