Message from the Product Manager

A cheerful “hello” to everyone in Taborea!

The year 2023 is drawing to a close and I would like to take this opportunity to briefly introduce myself, give you a look behind the scenes and give you an outlook on the future.

2023 has been an interesting year for all of us – the hard work of the last few years has finally borne fruit and we’ve managed to release new content for Runes of Magic!

New Product Manager

I joined the RoM team in the summer of 2022 and have since been responsible for the direction in which our popular game will develop. But before I continue, I would like to thank my predecessor – much of what is happening in 2023 and is still in the pipeline for next year has been a long time in the making and would not have been possible without his hard work and planning.

So hello! My name is Patrick, I use smileys in communication whenever possible and I love to play MMOs, action adventure and music rhythm games. A few years ago … around 2009, when chapter 2 and the elves were released, I played RoM for the first time myself, with a combination of druid and mage on a German server. I stuck with this combination throughout my time in Taborea – even when the combination of druid and scout became increasingly popular

As a RoM player, I was of course also familiar with the company Frogster, which was behind it at the time, and when the opportunity arose in 2012, I joined the company – and am still part of the team today, even after various reorganizations. But enough about me! You are here because you want to know what happens next and what my plans are.

That was 2023

Timeless instance I

Our biggest success this year is clearly the “Timeless Instance I”, as we call the new endgame version of the Tomb City of Mirrors, which we released at the end of October to great enthusiasm from the community. Thank you for your many positive and encouraging posts and comments! It was really heartwarming for everyone on the team to have their hard work and dedication recognized in such a way!

And that is exactly what I would like to go into a little more detail about, because we have received many exciting questions about the creation of this new content. In short: Yes, the new mechanics and game design for everything related to the Tomb City endgame were created by people from our internal team. Our cooperation with Runewaker is still very close and the people there fully support the additional “cool content” that Gameforge wants to add to the game – both with the technical implementation and with the necessary knowledge and tools.

By the way: We are aware that there are still some problems and have made some internal fixes to resolve them soon. As our team is responsible for all of this, we naturally have some time constraints, so please bear with us.

World bosses (Public)

Helveta was another project that we realized internally and were able to publish as new content for you. We plan to keep introducing new world bosses in between dungeon-related content, and will also be reworking item acquisition a bit so that it will be possible to obtain stats & items from more sources and/or from new sources.

And just a few days ago, Lakishna also entered the battlefield!

Siege warfare (bug fixes)

We are aware that there is still work to be done in this area and that unfortunately not everything is easy to fix – but this year we have made some good changes and improvements to Siege Wars and fixed some of the most common issues.

We hope that we will finally get rid of the “Beta” label (maybe?) if Runewaker has time for some more support and checks. It was already beta when I played in 2010 …

Yes, I know we’ve said that in the past, only to run into numerous difficulties. I am confident that we can do better in the future, and I am committed to this “look forward and try again” approach.

A few hot topics

We are aware that summit experience points are an issue in the community and made changes earlier this year to address this issue. Thanks to the modified summit hunt missions, it should already be possible to catch up a little better in the lower summit levels. We will keep an eye on this, but as it is a longer-term goal, we will proceed with caution.

The team also wanted me to answer some questions in advance about other content that might come up – as you’ll see in the next section of this post, we have a lot planned – so here’s a quick rundown of currently unplanned topics:

• New maps? Not at first. We would also like to work on this, but the effort is of course much greater and at the moment we are still gaining experience with dungeons, world bosses and other necessary improvements.
• Reuse material? Our options are currently limited to what is already visually available. I don’t think that should detract from the fun – each boss gets new mechanics and new gameplay, so the visuals might be similar, but it plays completely differently.
• Balancing the classes? To be honest, the mere thought of tackling balancing is scary. Our current “2-class combination” system is undoubtedly very complex. Maybe we should look at the special cases, like we did with the Knight skill Threat Stance, which significantly affected dungeon design and kept tanks heavily geared towards that class.

Plans for the future

1. Anniversary

As you probably know, we will be celebrating the 15th anniversary of Runes of Magic in our region in 2024! I don’t want to play this up too much – there will of course be the anniversary celebration (5 weeks long!), and I hope we manage to realize my plans for Timeless Instance II by then.

What I really wanted to say is that RoM has been successful for 15 years and, as I hope you’ve seen this year, we’re doing everything we can to build on that success by enriching the game with new ideas and content!

We are very grateful to you, our community, for staying loyal to the world of Taborea for so many years, through both fun and difficult times, and we look forward to many more years to come!

Timeless instance II & more

As I have already indicated, more dungeons are planned! Yay! Timeless Instance II is currently scheduled for mid-March, and we are doing our best to make it happen.

However, I must also say that Timeless Instance I was originally planned for early summer 2023 (publication: October) and Helveta for early spring (publication: July). The timeline for Helveta also set us back a bit, as it was too close to the Pantheon update and caused the ring values for PvE and PvP content to not match.

We have learned a lot in the last few months and are becoming more and more confident in communicating in this area. I’d really love to publish the instance for you all for the anniversary – so wish us luck!

Apart from the timing … The dungeon we are customizing for the endgame this time will be the Mystic Altar (current level ~45). There are 6 bosses for which you have to come up with exciting new strategies, and the target level is summit 15!

Mini games

There are a number of mini-games (Haunted House, Daseins Labyrinth etc.) which were originally developed to replace missing new content and which have been played a lot and with pleasure in recent years. But now that we have new content in the pipeline, we are discontinuing these mini-games or offering them less frequently.

During the last internal reviews, we identified important aspects that we would have to adapt and reprogram so that the mini-games would have to be completely reworked. I’m not saying that we won’t ever see any of them again, but they will be put on hold for the time being.

A few final words

We have now reached the end of my first PM message – thank you for your interest and your patience with my writing. The whole team is very much looking forward to 2024, and I hope you can share this excitement with us with this insight into our plans and thoughts!

As we are fast approaching the turn of the year, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for a great 2023 and wish you a happy new year 2024. :tada:

Patrick & the RoM team

Note

All dates mentioned in this message are tentative – we are doing our best to achieve our goals, but please be aware that we may not make it. We want to be as transparent as possible and hope that you won’t be disappointed later ☹