New Areas, Polishing Systems, and Ever Upward Hello all, Well, it’s time for another ‘State of the Game Update’! First I’d like to welcome all of the new Pantheon team members who have come on board recently! You can read all about them here. With the reinforcements to the World Building team we are currently engaging the continent of King’s Reach on all fronts. Avendyr’s Pass which we showcased in the Twitch demo is being finalized and will include an overland dungeon called Black Dagger Keep. Wild’s End, Faerthale, and Thronefast are well underway and the Steppes of Ru’Lun and the Roans (where the Silent Sanctum is located) have been started. The next region we plan on showcasing will be Black Dagger Keep, which you can see in the included screenshots. You will see more of this next month.



As for programming, design, and game mechanics we are wrapping up combat 2.0 which is our first major revision and tweaking of the combat system, taking into account what we learned during our first major milestone as well as more recent testing. We are quite pleased with the results thus far and are setting up our tools so that the designers can more easily tweak and test core values like ‘how long should an average level 3 fight last’, ‘how often should a level 7 miss when fighting a level 10’, and so forth.



Mana Climates and the Atmosphere system are further along and becoming more robust than what we showed during the Twitch demo and at GDC. The remaining classes, levels and abilities are being spec’d out. Our scripting language that will allow us to create NPC Dispositions and Behaviors is now ready for us to start testing. Lastly, the Perception and Quest systems which we showed at GDC and the tools necessary to efficiently create them are really coming together.



It’s an extremely busy time but also a lot of fun! As the tools and content creation pipelines are maturing we are able to get things done even more quickly than in the past. Add to that the positive impact of the recent team growth and the result is that not only is more work being accomplished but more tasks can be worked on in parallel.



All that said, we are still actively pursuing additional resources so that we can continue to grow the team, especially the World Building team. As I’ve mentioned in the past we need to make sure that not only the game is ready before we start any external testing but also that there’s enough content. While we don’t need to have the entire world of Terminus built, we’d like to have King’s Reach playable, preferably with both overland and dungeon content for levels 1 thru around 40.



What is the timing on getting our pledgers in game? It’s still too early to set anything in stone. It really depends on when we get the resources we need – there are a lot of variables, but you can be sure we are working hard and that the project is moving forward nicely. We’d love to start testing at the end of the year or the beginning of the next but again the game has to be ready and the content created and so we continue to ask for your patience and understanding. As excited as we are and you are to experience Pantheon we also all know that it serves no purpose to bring in people too early. But we will certainly keep you updated. Well, that pretty much sums it up. We’re looking forward to the next reveal, the next showcasing of the world, and we’ll definitely be doing another Twitch demo once we have a couple of these new regions ready to play in internally and also a few more of the Pantheon Differentiators demonstrable. Thanks all,

-Brad “Aradune Mithara” McQuaid