Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Talks About Restructuring Work And Next Week’s Pre-Alpha 5 Tests
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen Project Producer Ben Dean talks about the state of the game as the team at Visionary Realms moves ever closer to a playable pre-alpha build called Project Faerthale. He also shares the history of the game’s development and the studio’s plans for Pre-Alpha 5 and beyond.
Dean goes into detail about the amount of work that went into shifting from an entirely hardcoded game into one that could rapidly be built upon with as less effort as possible. “We needed to move from hardcoded, inflexible implementations to more robust and scalable solutions. Otherwise, we would have needed to come back and redo the work again later – something that our small team could not afford to do,” he explains. “So we stopped hardcoding. We took this time to develop the actual foundation and pipelines that we were going to need to ship the game.”
“It added to the timeline of Project Faerthale, but it was well worth it. This is the architecture that will take us through to launch and allow designers – current and future, to be able to add content easily, efficiently, and effectively,” says Dean. “We are now working from the solid foundation of a well-architectured game client, and more comprehensive, efficient pipelines due to the work done during Project Faerthale.”
According to Dean, Pre-Alpha 5 is the culmination of all the work that went into Project Faerthale and will “encom the actual feel of Pantheon.” Pre-Alpha 5 will include most game systems and full progression from level 1 to level 50. He also reminds players that the game is still in pre-alpha phase and that some content may be missing or in a grayboxed state.
The Pre-Alpha 5 tests will take place over multiple session with new features or content to test for each session. “By the end of PA5 you can expect to see a 1-50 Pantheon experience with all classes available and most systems for launch in place,” he says. The first test is scheduled on Wednesday, October 21st and Thursday, October 22nd at 9am-12pm, 2pm-5pm, and 7pm-10pm PDT. Pre-Alpha testers should be receiving their time slots and realm assignments this week.
