Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has continued their ongoing VIP developer roundtable discussions with a March conversation, covering lore with Lead Writer, Justin Gerhart. The roundtable kicked off with questions from the forums and moved on to VIP questions later in the show.
The developer roundtable discussions have been a fantastic way throughout Pantheon’s development to gauge Visionary Realm’s philosophy on design, and what features players may be able to look forward to. In the latest dialogue, Gerhart touches on races and deities, and quite a bit more. The roundtable lasts just over an hour and a half and is packed full of information surrounding the environmental, historical and in some ways ideological aspects of the overarching Pantheon universe.
The roundtable definitely started off with a particularly well-timed question. “Will Visionary Realms make a PDF we can buy about the lore; it would be a great new way to support the project as well.” The question certainly hits close to a controversy that cropped up over the past week, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen started auctioning NFT art in a new fundraising attempt. While these NFT offerings would be a stark contrast to a widely available and purchasable PDF or physical book that would be available for die-hard Pantheon fans, the peculiarity of NFT offerings at all hasn’t exactly panned out the way Visionary Realms probably anticipated, but the possibility of a limited-run digital lore book is probably something most Pantheon gamers wouldn’t want to see.
For the moment, Gerhart states that, while he does believe something like that will be available in the future, he doesn’t control what is sold, which would fall to the marketing team. One of the more interesting answers from the stream delved into whether the lore will actually help players in the game, or whether the lore as a whole will do more than just be a “story”. Gerhart had this to say:
“Yes, lore will be more than stories in our world. Some of that is up to you all how much more it is, and how you experience that “more” because there will always be the option, undoubtedly, for you to look something up somewhere and find the answer. Once somebody figures out the most optimized to go through a fight, little tidbits like “the dragon’s susceptible to cold” will not be as impactful because far more depth has already been achieved, you can just look it up and find out what you need to do and how you need to attack him. But the goal is to have it mean more to those who want more from it.”
-Justin Gerhart, Lead Writer, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
Late last month, the Pantheon producer’s letter gave interested gamers some insight into Alpha One, and what that means for the evolving Alpha cycle as the game pushes out of pre-alpha status. The next pre-alpha session will start on April 10th.
