March Pantheon Newsletter – Seasons Invites Pledges to Play
Hello Community!
We are thrilled to announce that Season 1 of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has been an overwhelming success! The player count exceeded our expectations and the testing data we’ve gathered has been invaluable. We’ve seen a lot of new players come in to test out the game, and some who stay logged in for 24 hours or more. We are extremely pleased to see Pantheon being received like this and we can’t thank you enough for your support and participation.
Now, it’s time to look forward to the next season. We’re excited to announce that Season 2, titled “The Mouth of Madness”, will launch on March 30th. This new season will bring a host of new adventures and challenges for our players.
The centerpiece of Season 2 is the release of Mad Run, a new overland dungeon within Avendyr’s Pass. This dungeon is designed to test your skills and teamwork, with content ranging from level 17 to 24. But be warned, lurking within the depths of Mad Run is a formidable level 45 world boss. Mad Run has been purposely hand-designed to be one of our most challenging content areas to date. We’re eager to see how you’ll tackle the bold and demanding trials that await within.
One of our major accomplishments heading into Season 2 was the completion of a game-wide lighting update. This has significantly improved our lighting across the board, including day time, night time, subterranean and player-held lighting. We believe this will greatly enhance your gaming experience and we are eager to hear your thoughts.
We continue to focus on enhancing our player animations. Players will notice several new or improved combat animations starting with Season 2, and animation updates will continue to trickle in over time.
Our next major Programming focus will be on re-integrating our Pulse system which governs our Perception system mechanics, allowing us to start getting Pantheon’s rich Lore and storyline mechanics back into the game. Additionally, our Programmers will be working on improvements to NPC reactivity in combat, giving us even greater control on how, and more importantly when, NPCs will perform specific actions in combat.
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We’ve also made important updates to several game mechanics:
- We’ve fixed several issues related to NPCs becoming stuck or unresponsive after leashing.
- We have reduced NPC flee speed so they are no longer sprinting when fleeing for their lives.
- We have lessened the amount of crit chance gained innately when attacking a lower level target, both for players and NPCs.
- The passive shield block skill no longer reduces incoming damage by 100% when successful. Now shields will have a new stat: Block Value, which determines how much damage is mitigated when shield block occurs.
- Major updates to the spell resistance system. The goal is to smooth out the resistance curve so that higher level enemies are slightly easier to land spells on up to 5 levels above the player (contingent on the player’s spell skills). This should also alleviate the amount of full and partial resists players experience when fighting equal level targets, or targets below their level.
- NPCs will only spawn with weapon techniques related to their main hand weapon. This will save some combat logic cycles by purging abilities that require a weapon that they do not have equipped, making NPC combat more responsive.
- Improvements to the pet follow code.
- Fixed a bug causing Warrior Battle Points not to update properly in the UI.
- Fixed several bugs related to groups, including: improvements to group functions related to members in different zones, fix to prevent older groups reforming when zoning, and players that leave a group will now be removed from the group if the other group members are in a different zone.
As always, we’re committed to providing you with the best gaming experience possible. We’re eager to hear your feedback on Season 2 and we’re looking forward to seeing you in Mad Run.
Thank you for your continued support. Stay tuned for more exciting developments in next month’s newsletter.
See you in Terminus!
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