“Hi everyone,
Rubius here from the Return of Reckoning team. Today, we’d like to share our upcoming PvE and Dungeon Roadmap through 2025. But first, a big thank you to our team for their hard work last year—it was a monumental effort!”
2024: One Year, Three Raids, Six Dungeons
Last year was incredibly busy for us. The introduction of the new ability system meant that almost all Dungeons in the game were broken, and few mechanics worked. We spent the beginning of the year rebuilding dungeons like Gunbad, Bastion Stair, and Hunter’s Vale. This involved rebuilding most mechanics and abilities for every boss and mob in the new system. Thanks to many of you who helped us test these, we got the Dungeons up and running again quickly. So, to all the testers: Thank you!
As we relaunched Order’s Sigmar’s Crypts Dungeon and Destruction’s Bilerot Burrows, we implemented changes we hoped players would enjoy. We slimmed down the Dungeon time for Crypts, rebalanced mobs, added new Bosses, and implemented new mechanics. The result was a mix of old code and new scripting, created in Lua.
With positive feedback, we took it to the next level for the 24-player Chapter 22 Raids. We stripped out all the old code and built these from the ground up with brand new mechanics, rebuilt and enhanced the Onslaught Gear sets, and used tester feedback to streamline all mechanics.
After months of work on Chapter 22, we unveiled Dragonback Pass at the end of 2024. This Dungeon, built largely from scratch, featured custom voice acting, scripting, and secrets unlike any other in the game.
While our game is known for its large-scale Realm versus Realm battles, our small PvE team is working hard to keep improving and building new things for all players. Better PvE means more players, and more players mean a healthier game for everyone, no matter your playstyle.
Plans for the Future
Next, we’d like to share our plans for the future and where we’re headed this year with both Dungeons and PvE content!
A quick caveat: Schedules can (and often do) change, so please take what you’re about to read with a grain of salt!
Spring/Summer Timeline
Here’s a look at what’s coming up in the Spring/Summer timeline on the PvE front.
The Lost Vale
One of the most requested Dungeons for years has been the return of Lost Vale, the High-Elf themed Dungeon that takes your party in search of Alarielle, the Everqueen, and awards the Darkpromise set.
We’re happy to confirm that we’ve begun work on this Dungeon, and Lost Vale is planned to arrive this Summer, with testing starting soon!
Like we did with Crypts and Bilerot, the Dungeon will be a hybrid of original mechanics and design plus new improvements, new mechanics, and more user-friendly VFX and alerts. New voice acting and scripting, like in Dragonback Pass, will also be added, alongside new secrets and hidden things for players to find.
Testing for the Left Wing of Lost Vale starts this weekend! If you have a guild or friends who would like to join in, you can apply for the closed testing by applying on this Google Form.
Our plan is to test and polish the Left Wing in March, the right wing in April, and the middle wing in May, with June as our final window for balancing, scripting, voice-over additions, and extra secrets.
Improving Existing Dungeons
We’re also going to continue making improvements to the quality-of-life in our existing Dungeons. A few recent highlights and soon-to-arrive updates include:
- Bastion Stair: Teleports now work and can be used to jump to bosses you’ve already cleared. A teleport was built for the Kaarn fight for anyone who hits the portal bug. Many bosses were recently rebalanced, and a number of bugs were squashed. There’s also a shiny new map in this Dungeon, added last year.
- Crypts and Bilerot: Both of these Dungeons will soon be getting their Speed Run quests, allowing players to earn additional Champion’s Marks. They also received new maps last year. (A big thank you to our artists who put those together!)
- Gunbad: A new teleport was added once the Middle Wing’s spider boss is killed, so players don’t have to do the entire run down if they disconnect, crash, or accidentally respawn. Like Bastion, this Dungeon also received a new map last year. We’ll be re-working and updating many boss fights in Gunbad to squash bugs, rebuild all the old code, and enhance the fights starting this April.
- Hunter’s Vale: Like Gunbad, Hunter’s Vale will also get a facelift this Spring with new boss balancing and mob updates, bug fixes, and extra additions.
Unified Mechanic Visuals
We’re moving towards using the same visual markers in Dungeons as we go forward, so you can see clear visual indicators that generally mean the same thing each time. For example, a red beam over a player’s head will mean “This player is going to drop an AOE puddle.” A Shield icon over a player will always mean “Guard swap to this target” (as introduced in Dragonback), etc.
There’s still lots of work to do as we implement more of these this year, but this was recommended in our player feedback last year, and we agree with it wholeheartedly. The same visual hints you learn in T1 will begin to apply all the way up through the rest of the Dungeons.
New T3 Dungeon
As we finish Lost Vale, we’ll be starting work on another new Dungeon for players in the mid-tiers. Right now there’s a large gap as you go from Dragonback to Sewers/Sacellum up to Gunbad, and we plan to add another Dungeon in here to give players more options for gearing and more PvE content to challenge. We’ll have more news on this Dungeon in the latter half of this year.
Tomb of the Vulture Lord
While TOVL is still a ways out on our internal roadmap, work will begin on rebuilding the entire PvE LOTD Map, including all 18 PQs, the four Lairs, and TOVL, near the end of this year. It’s a huge undertaking, with TOVL marking the finish line on our work to rebuild and improve all of the original Dungeons from live.
T3 PvE Rework
We’re finalizing the rework of the Tier 3 quests and their rewards. All of the rewards are getting improved. Quests are being given completion text so that there is a logical connection between steps of a quest-chain, and in some cases, additional steps have been added to quests to flesh them out. Most importantly, we are ironing out any bugs in all of these quests (there are about 1000 quests to check!).
We hope to have the Tier 3 quest rework done in the coming weeks, after which it’s off to Tier 4!
Upcoming Live Events
Starting with the Daemon Moon Bleeding live event this past October, we have begun to (re)implement the achievements section for live events, so you can track all your progress. You can expect us to put the final polish on live events this year.
Coming up quite soon in March is The Wild Hunt, just in time for the Spring Equinox and the rebirth of Orion! For April, players can get their egg-baskets ready, for those pesky Eastern Wyverns are coming back. And to complete the Spring quarter and kick off the Summer grilling season, get ready for Sigmar’s Sizzling Sausages—only available during Sigmartag this May!
As we head into June, we welcome the Summer Equinox with The Feast of Shoika, which will arrive again with its epic branching quest and moral choices. In mid-July, we will see the return of special crafted rings with Twilight’s Tide.
That’s all for now!
And that’s everything from our side for now! I’m sure some of you are wondering: “Where’s the news about new ability reworks?” or “Where’s the roadmap for RvR?” These are handled by different teams, but we’ve seen them working hard, so it’s up to those respective groups to share updates once they’re ready.
Thanks for reading—we appreciate all of your feedback, as always, and we’re looking forward to building up the PvE experience even further this year!
Rubius, Return of Reckoning Team