What does Alpha One mean when it comes to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen? In the latest Producer’s Letter, Ben Dean, Project Producer, addresses exactly that.
Development is a journey. In the Producer’s Letter, Dean doesn’t want to mince words too much when it comes to players’ expectations of what they should expect in the first Alpha. Alpha, in the case of Pantheon will not be a launch ready, or near-representative of the launch ready product. It will not be an early-access title, or a faux-developmental, promotional launch. The Alpha will have several phases, and testing will be targeted to a laundry list of features.
“Let me also be clear that the goal is not for Alpha to be representative of launch-ready, but Alpha needs to be much more polished than a traditional Alpha would otherwise require. Do not consider it early access. Unlike early access titles, only a small portion of the game’s content will be available for Alpha One, and several of its systems will only be available as a first iteration.”
-Ben Dean, Project Producer, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
Some of the features that players will be tasked with testing in Alpha One are, Classes, Pets, NPC Combat Awareness, Guild Functionality, Banks, Harvesting and Crafting, and much more. Not everything will be available initially in Alpha One, but as the journey to Beta progresses, all of these will be touched on in some form. One such feature that the team is working on, the Perception System, is something that the team is currently in the process of fleshing out. In preparation of this, they’ve brought on Game Designer Adam Mostel, to work on “systemizing and propagating” the perception system, which players will likely see pieces of as it comes together through the course of Alpha.
The letter ends with a look towards the next Pre-Alpha test sessions. Saturday, April 10th and Sunday April 11th have been scheduled as the next dates for testing. Testing during these sessions will include playing the Enchanter, the Dire Lord, the Rogue, the Wizard and the Shaman. Further tuning of combat, itemization and stamina will be on the docket for these testing dates, of which you’d have to purchase a pre-alpha VIP pledge to attend. (VIP pledges start at 1000 dollars). If you want to know more about Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, the team at Visionary Realms has a recurring roundtable discussion that will give you insight into developmental features like crafting, and the environment.
