Readers surely already know that Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen will be an open world MMORPG, which in turn arguably carries quite a lot of emotional and mental baggage for genre fans. That open world design and what it means for the MMORPG is touched on in the game’s newest Parting the Veil video.
The video once again features creative director Chris “Joppa” Perkins, who opens by talking about the change to an open world as a result of technical advances and a broad strokes look at how that shift has changed the overall design. Perkins then gets into some of the finer details as he discusses changes to mob leashing (which will be more individualized), making sure players with limited time still have fun and triumphant moments, and how non-instanced dungeons can still be as interactive as instanced ones.
On the subject of instancing, he takes a great deal of care in talking about how Pantheon will apply it, particularly when the game launches and areas will be sharded to account for rises and dips in population. Otherwise, the only major instancing will be in dungeon boss rooms and raid zones; dungeons will have a hard zone line but are still their own little open world, with other players able to enter that same zone.
