Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen March 2022 Newsletter

Visionary Realms recently converted Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen to Unity’s High Definition Rendering Pipeline, and as a result, this month’s newsletter for the MMORPG mostly focuses on that particular development. We get a producer’s letter, a month in review section, a screenshot gallery, and the usual community spotlight.

Here’s this month’s producer’s letter to get you started:

Earlier this month, we unveiled Pantheon’s conversion to Unity’s High Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP) in our monthly development stream. Featuring terrain, flora, sky, day/night, and weather systems, we gave our fans an early first glimpse at Pantheon in a post-greybox state. While there is work remaining to be done to create additional art assets and perform detailing, we are proud to mark the conversion milestone as ‘complete’ after months of hard work from across the team.

With HDRP conversion out of the way, the team is now turning its attention to readying the game for more robust playtesting. Our QA team has been evaluating the revised early play experience in Thronefast over a number of iterations now, and we continue to address bugs, respond to balancing concerns and feedback, and make adjustments as needed to ensure the experience is meeting our design goals for alpha and beyond.

This process has also led to a number of preliminary improvements to the user experience in the form of UI updates and combat feedback. While these aren’t revisions to the user interface itself, it does mean we have begun to make adjustments to where and what kinds of information is being presented to the player in the context of our existing UI, in support of a stronger onboarding experience for players and better readability of events in combat.

Our push toward being playtest-ready also includes more wholly dedicating our programming resources to our next major milestone: the long-awaited integration of networking. Once our new networking solution is in place, we will have the fully scalable infrastructure ready to handle the player loads of Alpha, Beta and launch. This is a major milestone for us and we couldn’t be more excited to announce that this focused work on networking has begun and will not stop until it is finished. As a side note, in addition to the massive improvements in player-load scalability, performance and stability, completing this networking phase will allow for several other aspects of development to be finalized, including our pet system, charms, full-scale ranged combat mechanics and the rest of the Classes that have been on hold due to their dependence on better networking scaling. Exciting times indeed!