Rubius here from the Return of Reckoning team. Today we’d like to take a moment to share with you all our upcoming PvE and Dungeon Roadmap through 2025. To start, I’d like to take a quick moment to say thank you to the team for all their hard work last year - the amount of work was massive!
2024: One Year, Three Raids, Six Dungeons
Last year was busy for us, because the arrival of the new ability system meant that almost all Dungeons in the game had broken, and few (if any) mechanics would work. We spent the beginning of last year rebuilding dungeons like Gunbad, Bastion Stair, and Hunter’s Vale. This meant rebuilding most of the mechanics and abilities for every boss and every mob in the new system, and it was only thanks to many of you helping us test these that we got the Dungeons up and running again quickly. So first, to all the testers: Thank you!
As we arrived at re-launching Order’s Sigmar’s Crypts Dungeon and Destruction’s Bilerot Burrows, we decided to take what we’d learned from other Dungeons and start implementing changes that we hoped players would enjoy. We slimmed down the Dungeon time for Crypts so it was closer between factions, rebalanced mobs, added brand new Bosses, and implemented new mechanics on top of the old for almost all bosses. The result was a mix of some old code and mostly new scripting, which we created in Lua.
When feedback to these changes came back positive, we took it to the next level for the 24-player Chapter 22 Raids, and stripped out all of the old code entirely. We built these from the ground up, with brand new mechanics like the emote mechanic for the Greenskin and Dwarf PQs, rebuilt and enhanced the Onslaught Gear sets, and used tester feedback to streamline all the mechanics and make sure they were understandable and that difficulty was in a good state.
After months of work on Chapter 22, we had one more surprise we wanted to unveil. This was something entirely new, and with custom voice acting, scripting, and secrets unlike any other Dungeon in the game - Dragonback Pass, which launched at the end of 2024, was our first Dungeon built largely from scratch.
It may seem strange to focus on improving PvE in a game so known for its large-scale Realm versus Realm battles, but 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 means a healthier game for all, no matter your playstyle.
Next, we’d like to share with you 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!
Here's a look at what's coming up in the Spring/Summer timeline on the PvE front.
There's a lot more to share, so let's dive right in:
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 that 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 to warn players of important elements. 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 (!), so 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: https://forms.gle/dgHkD28sSekFsgSh7
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, too. 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. Additionally, 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 squashed. If you haven’t seen it yet, 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. (On that note, 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.
As an 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 later half of this year.
Tomb of the Vulture Lord
Bet you almost thought we'd forgotten about this one. 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 though, 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 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 going: “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!
) Of course, our goal is always to add interesting items that can be useful, but we have a pretty clear stat balancing form we use. Last year's Onslaught Set re-work is a good example of how we aim to make a set unique or compelling while still respecting the Sovereign sets as the roof of our gearing progression.
