Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's latest newsletter rounding out the month of September announced that the MMO is bringing back its pre-alpha sessions for those backers who have testing access. This small delay to the beginning of October was anticipated, as the team announced earlier this year. Additionally, to celebrate this, the team at Visionary Realms is releasing previously under wraps notes and enhancements to the community to peel back the veil on testing.
It's been a year since testers were in the world of Terminus, and a lot has changed since then. The post highlights some of the major updates since that last test, including the introduction of Unity's High-Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP), which the team states is one of the major reasons why the pre-alpha tests have been so long in coming. New weather profiles were added to the MMO, as well as flora systems, seamless overland transitions, as well as initial time of day, water, sky and weather systems in the MMO.
The Producer's Letter posted to the site today also breaks down some of the development highlights on the MMO, including work being done on the player character and armor models. The team also announced it was looking for a new technical artist in the update, as well as a new Community Manager role being offered.
Combat enhancements have been made since the last pre-alpha test, including increasing the role of auto-attacks in combat, adjusting the formulas that govern basic combat mechanics, such as hit, block, dodging and more. Spellcasting can now be interrupted by melee attacks, as well as tweaks to how spell potency is calculated and scaled.
You can check out the full details on the Pantheon website. You can also check out the full patch notes for the alpha here.
