Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen September 2022 Newsletter

This month’s newsletter for Visionary Realms’ MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen brings us a producer’s letter with a few paragraphs on the game’s latest pre-alpha session and an overview of some upcoming new features, and the month in review section with links to livestreams and media coverage.

Here’s the letter:

Pantheon Community,

The time is finally here! Our pre-alpha sessions resume this weekend on October 1st, and we can’t wait to welcome our testers back into Terminus. We’re so excited in fact, that this month we’re sharing the high-level highlights, a breakdown of our combat enhancements, and patch notes covering the additions and changes to the game since our last pre-alpha, with our entire community. For those unable to join our pre-alpha sessions, we hope this additional glimpse behind the curtain will help shed further light on the ongoing development of the game, and we plan to continue offering these updates in future newsletters as our pre-alpha sessions resume.

Of course, development continues apace beyond the scope of these highlights. In this month’s livestream, we revealed that character artists and animators Duarte, Tara, and Phillip are hard at work on bringing our player character and armor models up to final art standards with improved support for rigging, armor fitting, and character customization. The Human Male and Female Models have already completed this process, and we are now fully entrenched in the Dark Myr, with more to follow.

Speaking of final art, we’re expanding our art team once again with the search for a Technical Artist (VFX) to assist us in building out environment and character shaders, weather effects, spell and ability VFX, and more. If this sounds like you, we encourage you to apply with your portfolio! If you’re more inclined to put out fires than create fireballs however, we’ve recently posted our search for a Community Manager as well.

Meanwhile the design and programming teams are heads-down continuing to prepare additional systems and content as we look to what lies beyond this weekend’s pre-alpha. While not an exhaustive list, our current focal points across both teams include:

• Outstanding post-ViNL functions including cross-zone persistence of groups and chat, as well as seamless loading between zones.
• Mapping weather and time-of-day to spawn events and climates.
• Adding support for swimming.
• Introducing additional tasks and storyline content.
• Further expanding player and NPC ability loadouts, and preparing the Warrior for implementation.
• Completing layout and population revisions in the Avendyr’s Pass PoIs Hanggore and Madrun ahead of art team passes, then moving on to our next zone!

Expect to hear more about these additions and more in the near future. For now however, it’s time to grease the hamster wheels ahead of the coming test. Onward and upward!