Community Q&A Part Two

We are shifting to a first chair and second chair arrangement for major game systems, rather than expecting a single developer to handle everything from the initial concept through implementation and ongoing maintenance. First chair will lead, second chair will support and provide balance and input and be available to take over if first chair needs to move on to another system.

The system is largely designed. Our aim is to create a system with its own depth and rewards that also connects naturally with the rest of Pantheon.

That means designing crafting to work as an integral and balanced part of the economy which also includes adventuring progression, exploration, and loot/itemization.

We are evaluating several options for long-term revenue, but for now, the revenue model remains a simple purchase-once-and-play model during Early Access.

We may opt to stream again in the future if we can manage to keep them with little overhead cost to development resources. There are no immediate plans for streams.

Pantheon’s original Vision and High Level Design Document was written in 2014-2015 by Brad McQuaid and Chris Perkins and remains our design North star to this day.

We are building Pantheon for MMO gamers. We believe in the tenets that made the early MMOs great. But we also feel there is a whole new audience who has yet to experience MMOs for the first time and we want to embrace them as well.

The time required depends on a zone’s size and the amount of content needed to make it engaging. We continue to look for ways to shorten that timeline while maintaining quality.

During planning, we identify which existing assets and content can be reused and what needs to be created from scratch. We then review the schedule to determine what we can realistically include and where cuts are necessary. Those decisions are a standard part of each zone’s development.

Zone releases are often paired to release simultaneously with other features. To speed up development, we are almost always working on two zones at once. Once worldbuilding finishes on one zone, they move on to the next, then Design steps in to populate the zone and finish it. Resources are allocated so the zone is completed in time to release with other parts of a release package at the same time.

We don’t plan to descope any major parts of the world at this time. If needed, some areas less central to the core gameplay and story may need to be deferred until after launch, but we haven’t determined that yet.

Unity and the Unity Store allowed us to start quickly and get a handle on core systems for the game. Like any game engine, out of the box it’s not built for MMOs so it lacks certain functionality such as high- capacity multiplayer networking that MMOs require. Where it lacks, we had to build custom solutions.

The two major game engine candidates for building a game are Unreal and Unity. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. Also, they have different licensing models which you may want to consider.

We have had tremendous personal technical support from Unity and appreciate their passion for our project and the support they’ve given us.

We are not anti-AI.

As a tool to process and organize information, when used correctly, it can be very valuable. It can help with simulations around stats and balancing, but only if a human designer has established clear designs, design goals and desired outcomes. It doesn’t design the game, it helps evaluate it. We use it for this purpose.

We do squarely reject the use of generative AI as a substitute for human creativity. We oppose art creation that relies on AI generation to replace the human role in creating an original concept, or that performs the entire process from end to end.

In our Art Channel on Teams, an artist recently asked if we would be doing “AI Driven Artwork.”

The response from CEO Chris Rowan, verbatim, below:

We will not be doing “AI Driven” artwork. This is one of the major themes I want to cover in this [upcoming] meeting.

It is critical that we produce original, human creativity-driven artwork. AI may potentially be used as a tool and creativity force multiplier to accelerate repetitive tasks or to more efficiently realize a human conceived concept.

But I am not interested in art born from silicon.

Our artwork needs to come from human brain matter, human taste, human creativity and human soul.

As long as these rules are honored, we allow our artists to use AI if they so choose.

We have submitted an updated disclaimer to Steam.

Unfortunately, we don’t think any company could meet that expectation. The reality is bugs come in many shapes and sizes. Big, small, reoccurring, false positives, simple, complex, single system, and systemic. Some can be fixed within a few minutes of being reported; others can go for months without a consistent or reproduceable cause. MM O’s often house the hardest bugs to find and resolve because of the number of systems present. Is it an issue with the database, network, programming, game engine, client, design, graphs, nodes, logic, conditional, consistent, self-contained? We can commit to doing our best to triage the bugs that impact players the most as quickly as possible.

We also want to go back to our Season’s approach, and triage any uncaught bugs for two weeks in PTR before pushing a production build and there will be a window after the production build where we will fix critical issues as immediately as possible.

We make a real effort to read and consider as much feedback as we can. That feedback informs our decisions, while our vision for Pantheon remains the guiding principle. Ultimately, we are building the game we set out to create.

Yes, there is still a character wipe planned for the next update to the Early Access servers. In addition, there will be at least one more character wipe prior to the official launch. We try to limit the use of a character wipe but if another is needed, we will announce it.

Our current goal is to prepare a build that is suitable for justifying a wipe on the EA/Production servers. That means having the proper support and tooling to do our best at preventing the technical NEED for a wipe. It also means having new content, complete class kits, unified NPC’s, among several other systems ready. We can’t commit to no wipes until we are a bit further along in the process, but we will try to structure development to reduce the number of future wipes as much as possible. That would give us the power to launch ‘fresh start’ servers, rather than forcing a wipe on all servers.

You are welcome to play either one. While the Public Test Realm gets the most recent updates, that can also mean you can run into more bugs and potentially can experience more character wipes as content is being tested. Many players play in both environments and we appreciate those players who are able to contribute to testing on our Public Test Realm and help us find bugs and provide feedback on gameplay and content.

Pledge perks, or rewards, will be fulfilled close to or at the official launch when we come out of Early Access. Currently, we have fulfilled some rewards including game keys and have opened character name reservation. When a reward is ready, we do contact our pledges via the email address we have on file so make sure your email address is up to date. In addition, you can see all of your pledge rewards by logging into account.pantheonmmo.com and selecting your game account.