Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen recently kicked off its new seasonal model, with the opening of “Into the Pass”. A new community Q&A late last week, with Chris Perkins, Ben Dean, and Jamie Henry dove into the start of seasons, issues that came up, and a look into what’s ahead.
On the first day of the season, there were issues with both experience gain and loot. Some people were getting an extraordinary amount of XP for killing low level mobs and would sometimes even get great loot from rats or bats; things that were clearly unintentional. They’ve worked to address this.
When it comes to season access, the team also addresses access tiers and the approaches they considered on the way to the new model they’ve introduced. Among their considerations was the idea of a season pass for non-VIPs, but they decided against it at this time since making it fair and not devaluing the VIP level pledge support.
Looking ahead, we can expect updates to the lighting, including an intentionally more realistic lighting system, set against the very stylized design that’s now in place. Once in place, the lighting changes will also lead to visual effect updates, for both environments and player characters. The lighting changes and others connected to that are planned for Season 2, with a chance to happen earlier.
What you have now in Pantheon, areas and progression experiences will eventually be changed and be more difficult. The starting quest hub will eventually be spread out and each character class will have bigger starting areas. Travel systems like climbing or swimming don’t require a lot to get leveled for now, but the team wants there to be a significant time and effort investment required in learning them in the future.
The full Q&A is worth listening to if you are curious about the direction the team is going in. They answer a number of community questions and touch on some of their goals, like combat and UI upgrades, and more technical stuff, But mostly their Focus right now is on this pre-launch stage and continued development of the necessary systems, as well as lore and story, to create a fully fleshed MMO.
In order to get there, they have a lot of work that they are laying out, including the remaining classes they need to add, a loot system (coming when they add dungeon content), an auction house, retooling some of the class rules, and a whole lot more.
Watch the full Q&A above and head to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen for more.
