Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen’s news toddler has tripped on the sidewalk and cut open its knee, oozing out all sorts of information and probably crying really loudly at the same time, so while we give it a Hello Kitty bandage, here’s what followers of the sandbox MMORPG need to know.
First, a new fixer-upper patch is out that crushes another series of bugs and makes some adjustments to things like class skills, visual effects, crafting professions, and more. There aren’t too many heavy-hitting features here, but then an early access game getting tweaks is still important to note.
Next up, Visionary Realms’ Chris “Joppa” Perkins held a quick PvP-focused stream where he talked about general plans for more “curated” PvP servers down the road that have some more protections, RvR, or survival extraction (like in the ill-advised 247 test), or introduce features like letting guilds to control towns to make them safe areas while collecting taxes. He also discussed managing how low-level and high-level characters change PvP fights (providing support for others like healing was a given example), confirmed PvP-specific stats and numbers, and chatted about the current server’s “raw” nature.
For those who are regularly playing Pantheon, Visionary Realms is asking its Discord community for stats and gear feedback, asking questions about what attributes players find useful, the kinds of stat choices they would make (like attribute versus rating bonuses), and whether gear with resist bonuses are used. It’s not really a poll so much as an open discussion thread. You know, like you used to have in forums before Discord subsumed them.
Finally, some maintenance that occurred yesterday has prepared the MMORPG’s backend for what it calls “potential server merges”: The number of shards for some of the larger servers have been scaled back, and Visionary Realms says it will be taking population snapshots “over the next few days” to evaluate what server merges need to happen and where. From the Steam numbers, at least, it does look as if the playerbase has dipped since the early access launch.
Additionally, the earlier plan for a weekly patch cadence is now being reeled back to “periodic updates, much like [the game’s] seasonal format.” These periodic updates will still fall on Wednesdays and the studio plans to have a production roadmap as well as server merge details once everything is ironed out.
