Hey everyone! Excited to share our first video update of 2015!
As we said at the beginning of this year: we are making a consciousness shift to raise the bar of Pantheon's visual quality, while not compromising performance. We have put a great amount of energy and research into making the Unity Engine give us everything its got! We've purposely not shown much of the game during this time until some of these visual overhauls had been completed and streamlined. Now we're ready to share some of the fruit of this work in today's update. This video is focused on highlighting our new World Building and Environmental Art workflow, and the visual improvements of this new pipeline.
This video is meant to be fairly concise and informative - we hope you enjoy it! Stay tuned for a more gameplay-focused video coming out towards the end of next week!
I was shocked at how good it looks. I'm glad you guys went this route. The graphics look on par with Vanguard or even better, without nearly as much time or money invested in order to get it there. It's the right approach in my opinion. It should greatly assist in marketing and funding.
I do have one question though. Is Pantheon at this point more GPU or CPU intensive?
I have to admit it looks better then I really thought it was going to be. The previous movies made me think graphics could not be a selling point but I bet I could show that to someone who never heard of Pantheon and at least peak there interest now, which could not have been done with the old movies.
Xonth said:
I have to admit it looks better then I really thought it was going to be. The previous movies made me think graphics could not be a selling point but I bet I could show that to someone who never heard of Pantheon and at least peak there interest now, which could not have been done with the old movies.
It's something we take really seriously, and visuals will only continue to improve. Glad to hear your feedback, Xonth.
sajbear said:
Looks awesome! ^_^ I really liked the format of the video too, very nice have you guys talk about what progress have been made! :)
Thanks Saj, we want to mix it up every now and then, ya know? :)
I'm really impressed with the visuals. I can see I will need to get a new computer for this game so I can play at ULTRA settings again :) Keep up the great work you all are doing and thanks for the update.
It's looking great guys! I love that fog/haze going on. I can't wait to see the weather system!
Keep it up.
PS. Video ccommentating proves you guys are very organized. Not that I had any doubts.
Mistmaker said:
I'm really impressed with the visuals. I can see I will need to get a new computer for this game so I can play at ULTRA settings again :) Keep up the great work you all are doing and thanks for the update.
Actually, we are being *very* careful in this regard. You will *not* need the latest and greatest machine to run Pantheon. We are being very mindful of performance and stop every month and optimize. One of the biggest mistakes with VG was getting all excited about the latest tech and then pushing it into the game. When unfortunate events forced us to release 6 months early, most people, even on decent gaming machines, couldn't play the game and players left, most of them before even hitting level 2 or 3. We cannot and will not make that mistake again. Blizzard was brilliant with WoW and made sure average PCs could run the game. We are doing the same with Pantheon. In fact, the recent visual enhancements and tech we have just now revealed have *not* lowered the framerate at all. Same with the advances coming when we switch to Unity 5 -- we are not going to let performance get in the way of you enjoying Pantheon. No, you won't be able to use some ancient laptop you re-discover in your closet, but, likewise, you will *not* need to go spend a ton of money and have to have the fastest machine, CPU, GPU, etc.
I don't mind making new mistakes -- we're very adventurous and always trying out this or that. But making an old mistake again, releasing an unoptimized game that even the fastest game rigs choke on, is *not* an option for us. We're very sensitive about this, I hope you can tell :)
-Brad
Aradune said:Mistmaker said:
I'm really impressed with the visuals. I can see I will need to get a new computer for this game so I can play at ULTRA settings again :) Keep up the great work you all are doing and thanks for the update.
Actually, we are being *very* careful in this regard. You will *not* need the latest and greatest machine to run Pantheon. We are being very mindful of performance and stop every month and optimize. One of the biggest mistakes with VG was getting all excited about the latest tech and then pushing it into the game. When unfortunate events forced us to release 6 months early, most people, even on decent gaming machines, couldn't play the game and players left, most of them before even hitting level 2 or 3. We cannot and will not make that mistake again. Blizzard was brilliant with WoW and made sure average PCs could run the game. We are doing the same with Pantheon. In fact, the recent visual enhancements and tech we have just now revealed have *not* lowered the framerate at all. Same with the advances coming when we switch to Unity 5 -- we are not going to let performance get in the way of you enjoying Pantheon. No, you won't be able to use some ancient laptop you re-discover in your closet, but, likewise, you will *not* need to go spend a ton of money and have to have the fastest machine, CPU, GPU, etc.
I don't mind making new mistakes -- we're very adventurous and always trying out this or that. But making an old mistake again, releasing an unoptimized game that even the fastest game rigs choke on, is *not* an option for us. We're very sensitive about this, I hope you can tell :)
-Brad
The video is really looking great! The new environments look much sharper and frankly look comparable or better than that majority of games out on the market. I have always been in your corner, but I can say that if you can make the gameplay fun, I'll be there on day one...or in pre-alpha testing hopefully!
I don't mind the usage of unity store assets in the environment, but I really can't wait to see the custom designed character models and equipment graphics. That stuff really has to be personal to Pantheon. Hopefully you can secure some funding soon and expand your team of artists.
I've said a few times before that I thought Pantheon needed to become immediately identifiable as Pantheon anytime anyone saw a graphic of the game - whether they played it or not. Much like WoW is instantly identifiable.
The last video you guys put out looked very reminiscent of VG - that is gone in this one. As I watched it, I was looking specifically for that sort of thing though... I was looking to see if it specifically reminded me of another MMO.
The answer was largely no - Pantheon is becoming distinct.
Great Job!
Krohm said:
Aradune said:
Mistmaker said:
I'm really impressed with the visuals. I can see I will need to get a new computer for this game so I can play at ULTRA settings again :) Keep up the great work you all are doing and thanks for the update.
Actually, we are being *very* careful in this regard. You will *not* need the latest and greatest machine to run Pantheon. We are being very mindful of performance and stop every month and optimize. One of the biggest mistakes with VG was getting all excited about the latest tech and then pushing it into the game. When unfortunate events forced us to release 6 months early, most people, even on decent gaming machines, couldn't play the game and players left, most of them before even hitting level 2 or 3. We cannot and will not make that mistake again. Blizzard was brilliant with WoW and made sure average PCs could run the game. We are doing the same with Pantheon. In fact, the recent visual enhancements and tech we have just now revealed have *not* lowered the framerate at all. Same with the advances coming when we switch to Unity 5 -- we are not going to let performance get in the way of you enjoying Pantheon. No, you won't be able to use some ancient laptop you re-discover in your closet, but, likewise, you will *not* need to go spend a ton of money and have to have the fastest machine, CPU, GPU, etc.
I don't mind making new mistakes -- we're very adventurous and always trying out this or that. But making an old mistake again, releasing an unoptimized game that even the fastest game rigs choke on, is *not* an option for us. We're very sensitive about this, I hope you can tell :)
-Brad
Can you guys give us an idea of the specifications of the computers you guy are playing on now or due to development are we going to have to wait for min specs to play to be released?
It's tough to give min specs this early mate, plus we all run the internal builds on different PCs, personally I have a pretty high end gaming PC (i7 3970 6 core Extreme @ 4.2, 32GB RAM, 840 Pro 256 SSD, Win 7 Ultimate, GTX 690), but I know our machines vary a lot so we can't really give an accurate example of a min spec PC but I can tell you that I run the internal client at 120+ FPS and smooth as silk, except in a couple of the very new zone which have not been optimised properly yet, as you can see in the video with the Forest zone (which is one of my favorite zones too btw!) I get slight hitching there but again, it is way too early to worry about that and that zone hasn;t been fully optimised or performance tested, so when that happens, you will see a big difference.
The guys do a performance pass at the end of every month usually, so once that is done, everything seriously runs so smooth, I was actually quite surprised when I first logged in on how well it runs, I was expecting a big performance hit but it never happened. I can run around using Dev hacks to explore every zone and rarely drop below 80 FPS :)
Zlambit said:
looks nice, but why cant i see it on the landing page, to good to be hidden in the forums with a link :)
That should be fixed now, sorry about that, I had to head out for a family thing a few minutes after Chris released everything, so I didn't get a chance to post it as a blog from the staff announcement account until I got home a little while ago but that is done now :)
bla it ate my post when trying to quote you, thank you for the information on specs of your rig and how it runs for you.