Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen had its September dev stream on Friday, and with the stream came a new dive into the classes getting some tweaks in the road to pre-alpha, along with updated character models, armor, and animations.
The Cleric, which is the newest testing class, the Rogue, and the Enchanter will get ability tweaks and adjustments for their focus in pre-alpha testing. The Pantheon team wants to preserve the feel of the role and class importance, so they’re also working towards their goal of balance too.
Members of the art team joined the stream to discuss armor fitting and improvements, alongside aesthetic tweaks to the character models. The older character models were made in such a way that It wasn’t easy to make sure that a single piece of armor fit every character model as it should. The improved system makes it so that they don’t have to do each piece of armor individually on every character model type, making things just look better. Since MMORPGs mean there will be lots of gear, their putting together a new system for armor fitting is one way to make things work reliably, and faster.
During this process, they also improved both the existing models and textures. Another improvement they were able to do is to their system that will enable smoother animations. Textures are smoother and the team made changes to make each new model better fit the aesthetics for each planned race. One of the ways was to reduce the bones in a character, and also the size of each model. Reducing these made sure that they can continue making new animations for characters and creatures, while spending less time doing so.
Finally, there was some example footage to show off some of the animations and changes in the models, along with some older ones for comparison.
As Visionary Realms heads towards another pre-alpha period, seeing this kind of progress come together, along with more class changes, should give a taste of what to expect.
For more, head to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.