Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen’s Ashbreather Enclave and Smoldering Trenches update is coming June 11th. The team is detailing the Perception system and how they’re using it to rekindle a sense of personal storytelling and adventure in an MMORPG.
In a new devblog, Chris ‘Joppa’ Perkins elaborates on the system and the purpose that Visionary Realms has in implementing it. To start, he brings up how Today’s MMO is “less things to be explored and more of a curated conveyor belt of content”.
Nephele builds on that introduction with how Smoldering Trenches and Ashbreather Enclave will offer a taste of how the Perception system works. At the simplest level, “Perception is a system of character flags, checks, and triggers that let us make things happen in response to what you’ve done or discovered in the game, or even what you have not done or discovered”.
In Pantheon, they want your experience to be yours, so everything you do, enemy you slay, conversations, dialogue choices, and even the way you visit different locations could lead to an effect that another decision wouldn’t lead to. “We are quite comfortable with players missing out on something because they didn’t bother to look hard enough,” Joppa says.
In the upcoming update, they expand the system of triggers and flags to support a number of different scenarios that are possible. Given the deep lore in the update, you’ll experience the system firsthand with content that evolves in based on your actions. The devblog shows off branching possibilities.
This system could give reasons to return to areas or even replace certain storylines or objectives because your experience could be very different. In addition to making discovery more personal, it could also reduce dead zones if areas still have something to offer when you revisit.
