Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen’s producer and creative director Chris “Joppa” Perkins has a lot of progress to mark for the developing PvE sandbox, which is the subject of his latest producer’s letter as it touches on hiring updates, development progress, and a few words from the testing front.
Perkins first starts off by lauding two new arrivals to Pantheon’s team — a new production designer and a new environment artist — along with the finalization of an assistant content creator position, which he says is “key to energizing our public facing marketing efforts and establishing a key component of our new approach to promotional content.” Expect the word “influencer” to pop up a lot, then.
The letter then moves on to development updates, noting the game’s recent developer stream that showcased enemy combat tactics; offering a few words on continued work on the Monk, Ranger, and Summoner classes; and outlining other updates made to the game like a new spell line for Wizards, the addition of the Shaman Vision combat resource, and the near-completion of a full pipeline for the game’s procedural terrain generation tools among other things.
The last noteworthy piece of the letter talks about testing, as Perkins recounts a recent 30 hour testing session with boosted XP rates to bring tester character levels into the high teens and early 20’s. Here, Perkins notes that the test’s length provided invaluable server and technical data, as well as an opportunity to observe player progression and migration in a much more natural way. The next test will focus on integration of the new NPC combat awareness AI and the Monk class, which coincidentally means there will be a wipe. Testing timing will be announced soon™.
