Gotta disagree. Things are going on behind the scenes that are equipping VR with the tools they will use to accelerate development dramatically when Project Faerthale is done. Perhaps this list I copied over from the official forums will give a measure of reassurance that things are indeed proceeding towards new testing phases in the foreseeable future. Just my 2cp.
September 27, 2019 8:01 AM CDT
Quote Report
Mathir said:
We shall see. It would be nice if they gave us an exhaustive list of what they work on each month like Camelot Unchained does.
Camelot Unchained does do that to a degree, but may or may not be what’s causing that project to delay to the point where people don’t know if it will ever release or if they’ll be getting what they wanted in that type of MMORPG.
Mathir said:
Hopefully, they’ll take the time to explain exactly what they have been doing for the last year at some point. I think the biggest issue is that nobody actually knows what they have accomplished, so it makes it difficult to gauge whether we are flushing money down the toilet or not.
They’ve given us details a few times as to everything that is going into Project Faerthale and how close it is to the completion towards the Alpha phase. If you mean the specific details within each of the systems, that’s something I would expect them to release when it’s finished as that would be a serious faux pas if their intent is to broaden the appeal and capture many more people. For that, you need to keep everything close to the chest. Think of it like a bag of stones. You can drop 1 in the water every week and the ripples hit the people who have already pledged or you can save the bag so it’s ful and drop it in entirety in the water to create veritable waves which will have a much wider outreach.
Mathir said:
We know the team is small and has serious limitations in manpower and finances…
We can speculate but we don’t actually know that for sure. We know they have a big team but they have bottlenecks. They have extremely capable programmers and with 5+ on the team, it’s more than enough for this project but they have an issue with art assets. You see, they need to replace (as in replace Unity or non-proprietary assets) and even create art assets for the game to include modeling. This is a hugely time reliant consideration given the relative detail in MMORPGs today. In the late 90s into early 2000s, MMORPGs were incredibly light in this area, especially WoW which had some of the most basic art assets to ever exist. Ultimately though, that would be much quicker with more hiring which is why they need to keep the cards to the chest with regard to Project Faerthale. The creation toolkits in place due to PF it would allow the creation and efficient transition into the game world allowing for zones to be hastily created or Kingsreach which would mostly be updated instead of created.
As for finances, we don’t know about their outside investments. Pantheon is currently and as stated a ‘partially funded by pledges’ project. We don’t know how much they receive through pledging and even less so through their outside investments.
Mathir said:
For example, I think it’s just a zone that will still have a ton of greyboxing, some animations for a few classes, and some new spell effects.
Going by the content they have been working on for PF over the last five to six newsletters, that would include…
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Dispositions and updated AI
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Perception to include the quest system
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All classes post level 40 to include the Summoner with much more finalized ability loadouts (Streams recently only detail the old listing which was a very limited spell or ability selection per class)
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Spell and ability effects
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Harvesting/Gathering system
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Basics of Crafting
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Climbing/Scaling/Spelunking system
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Climate and Environmental systems
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Further itemization to include armor, weapons and acclimation
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Animations
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Dynamic day/night cycles
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Raid Encounter (Island of the Infinite Storm)
To add and as per the Newsletters…
“With that comes access to another zone we’re super proud of — Faerthale. Not only will the area include the eventual starting city for our hardy and weathered elves, but adventures, dangers, and game concepts the likes of which our players have yet to experience.”
"This project, dubbed Project Faerthale, will show Pantheon as it is meant to be experienced. Notice I said “experienced” and not “played” because we believe this next iteration will be much, much closer to our goal of creating a full world, a home, not just a game. It will be the culmination of awesome systems complimented by thoughtful visual effects, animations and sounds. It will be representative of the minimum caliber of game we are targeting for launch. It will also include some exciting new NPCs and at least one significant boss encounter, which is where our new character artist comes in.
This will require intense, sustained focus from all departments, from programming, to tools, to art and animation, to lore, to design, to tech and db… and everything in between. Most importantly, this is going to take time."
Q&A with Brad McQuaid
Q: What has been the most challenging part of Project Faerthale?
A: The planning. As mentioned earlier, as our team grows, more planning and documentation is necessary. And while we know PF is doable, it is also one of the more ambitious milestones to date. So far the challenge has been to define the high level goals and then derive from them all of the various tasks. These tasks are comprehensive, prioritized and finally assigned to the task’s owner. I’m happy to announce, however, that we’ve recently planned and documented to a level where our team can get to work. PF is already taking form and it’s both exciting and gratifying to see and hear about what we’re achieving each and every week.
Also, here’s their standpoint with regard to a zone and the size as relative to Faerthale which is where this quote was taken from.
“We don’t want to put in big zones just for the sake of having big zones—they need to have content to keep them engaging. On the same token having too many pockets of content effectively shrink the zone. This is because the pockets stand out as unique experiences which are much smaller in size in comparison to an entire zone. The association then becomes much smaller in scope and effectively shrinks your zone. On the opposite side of things if zones are too big without enough content they feel like vast wastelands. So the trick is in the balancing. Our zones are technically “big” when looking at it from a pure landmass perspective. But that size is almost irrelevant once you start splitting it into the content pockets.”
To touch on that, Faerthale will comprise of these regions. Each of these regions have smaller areas or points of interest…
Redgrove
- Area of interest: The Reul Height/Adytum of Aellos
Faerthale Forest
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Area of interest: The Field of Fallen Stars
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Area of interest: River N’ylem
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Area of interest: The Lake of Morning
The Lucent Tree
The Mountain Aegis and Faerthale City
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Point of interest: Crown of the Anadem Council
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Point of interest: The Eternal Veil
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Point of interest: The Triarc Sun
Soul of Aegis
Lo’Thale
The Floor of Heavens/White Gate
Oldwood
The Murk
- Area of interest: The Fens of the Tohrn
The Island of the Infinite Storm
