Pantheon dev diary details skill-based mount taming system

Visionary Realms detailed the mounts and taming system coming to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in a November 28 developer diary written by creative director Chris Perkins, known to players as Joppa. Rather than selling mounts through vendors, the game will have players find and tame rideable creatures living in the world.

Perkins described the system as a non-combat, skill-based branch of gameplay built around progression, collection, trade and variety between individual mounts. Every mount rolls its own spread of stats covering speed, endurance, stability and more, and rarity runs from common creatures through rare, epic and mythical to what the diary called anomalous. Two horses of the same rarity, the studio said, can still feel very different to ride.

Learning to tame

At level 20, a quest grants both the Tame Mount ability and the Taming skill, and doubles as a tutorial. From there, sizing up a target is done through the consider command, which gains a Taming Difficulty line for tamable creatures and reports whether an attempt looks feasible, challenging or beyond the player's ability. That reading compares the player's Taming skill against the creature's Will stat; creatures that cannot be tamed at all simply show no such line. Wild horses will be the only tamable animals when the system launches, with other mount types planned later.

The attempt itself is a ten-second channel that damage does not interrupt, which matters because the creature turns hostile and attacks throughout. Endurance drains at eight per second, plus an extra point per second for every point of Will above eight, meaning higher-rarity mounts demand a deeper endurance pool. Only one player can work on a given creature at a time. Success leaves a 30-second window in which only the tamer can mount the animal before it flees and despawns; a failed attempt loses the creature outright. Bait items, ranging from fruit such as an apple to crafted meals and reagents, improve the odds and are pitched at players reaching above their skill level or chasing epic and mythic quality.

Stables and ownership

A tamed mount is not permanently owned until it is registered at a stable, a deliberate source of tension. Unregistered mounts survive zoning into an adjacent zone but are lost for good if the player teleports, tries to ride indoors, or takes enough damage to be forcibly dismounted. Registration happens by riding to a Stable Master and filling a stable slot; the first is free and further slots cost progressively more. Stables share one collection across the world, so a mount stabled in Demith is available in Sorhiryth, and players select a single active mount from the stable window.