Pantheon - Kickstarter Updates#15-18

Visionary Realms has released four updates for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. Now two of the updates are from before just updated so I will be skipping those.

All About Combat in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Combat in Pantheon will be built around a desire to change things up in the MMO space. Contemporary MMOs have become very fast paced and, for lack of a better term, spammy. While the combat is still reactionary in nature it tends to break down to focusing on your rotation while moving left or right. With Pantheon the desire is to shift things back to a slower paced combat where the frequency of ability execution is slower and your rotation is dictated more by your response to the encounter than just a sequence of abilities.

How will we accomplish this? By reaching into the past, and looking at games like EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and Final Fantasy XI, and focusing on fewer abilities, and a slower pace of combat. In these games combat involved longer ability activation times, and refresh. They focused on the player or group reacting to cues from NPCs and environment and reacting through the use of ability or position. Current MMOs retain this mechanic but if you stop to watch and react you are not focused on your rotation that fills the in-between time. This results in a potential loss of DPS which ends up taking precedence over utilizing your utility abilities. The values of these abilities is then reduced because they end up just becoming a part of a rotation unless a particular encounter is designed around using them.

Abilities like stun, slow, snare, and root have lost their usefulness. In games like those mentioned previously these abilities were important to manage or execute at the right time. With Pantheon we want to bring some of that back while mixing in some current mechanics that exist in today’s MMOs.

I also have a new community Q&A Video.

Brad McQuaid answers more community questions about Pantheon.