The developers of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen are pretty excited about their progress so far. More specifically, producer Benjamin Dean is, as evidenced by his letter for May in which he’s effusive about the work that has been completed to date.
For one thing, Dean lauds the addition of a node-based ability system, which gives the devs more control over PC and NPC abilities. This new core system, which was outlined during April’s livestream (and completely overshadowed by the desire to make coin weight matter), has been completed and the Dire Lord class integrated with it, while work on adding mastery abilities continues.
In addition, Pantheon’s programmers have created tools to help the game’s designers more easily add quests, storylines, and dialog, and there’s the addition of UI improvements from both a visual and mechanical standpoint.
All of these pieces locking together means that the game’s next milestone will be ready by this summer, with the next round of pre-alpha testing coming very soon before that. “We can now schedule a solid date for the next round of game access for pre-alpha pledges. We have the internal target date and will share it with our Fantheons when it is a few weeks away,” writes Dean. Testers should expect each testing round to have a specific focus, and patch notes for the latest build are ready to read.
So very ready for this, but need it to be done right and well.
I really want this game to succeed, I really, really do. But with what seems like the snail’s pace of development, I fear that by the time it’s released, it will be so obsolete that nobody will buy it.
I think that’s the point honestly. The game is purposefully obsolete to achieve the niche that wants to go back to MMO roots.
I’m ok with it.
I think the people that are it’s target audience will buy it, no problem. What I don’t want is for it to be a cattle call like WoW. That level of “success” will bring folks that never heard of it before launch and get there wanting them to change systems to be more generic and WoW. We have enough “WoWs” out there. More variety in play style is needed. More shared dungeons, no swift travel and more group reliance.
I wish they would stop with the “Fantheons” thing. It’s heavy cringe.