I’d like to welcome you, the RoM community, to this PM message. It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, but don’t worry: we’re working on a lot of cool stuff in the background while Darcoon, Celes and other colleagues take care of communication.
In today’s report, I’ll tell you what we’ve been working on behind the scenes and why we haven’t published anything new recently. A note in advance: As the title suggests, the following plans are aimed at the year 2026. Even though much of it is still in progress, I can already explain a few changes to the systems and prepare you for them.
As always, we look forward to your feedback and comments. This is one of the advantages of sharing our plans and ideas with you at an early stage: Thanks to your feedback, we can make important adjustments at an early stage!
What has happened since my last PM message?
Timeless instance III: Shrine of Pasper
An important milestone in 2025 was the release of “Shrine of Pasper”, just in time for our 16th birthday. All in all, I think the team outdid themselves with this third edition of our high-end dungeon. Well, and as far as I know, our community had a lot of fun fighting the Blackhorns!
In terms of implementation, I’m glad that we had to make far fewer corrections after publication: that encourages me to tackle bigger plans and tasks.
Balancing the classes
In the summer, we made further adjustments within the classes based on the first batch from 2024. This is to balance the performance of different combinations. We are aware that this work will never be finished and that it is not yet “perfect” – if there is such a thing as class balancing.
We will also keep an eye on this topic for our content planned until 2026, but will not make any major changes until then. This is simply because the upcoming changes are complex and we don’t want to change the balancing too often.
Okay, but what’s on the agenda for 2026?
New map: Oneiros
Yes, we are indeed working on a brand new region – with a new max level, new storylines, new crafting materials and recipes, new daily playable content and much more!
As you can imagine, this involves a lot of planning and design work, which is why we’ve been so quiet over the last few months. We are far from finished, which is why I can’t promise you an exact release date. Keep that in mind with the following plans, ideas and thoughts. I will therefore deal with the more concrete points first and address the rest in a second message next year.
Here are a few visual impressions to get you started:
Perhaps a new city center?
I’ve been lobbying hard internally for this to become something of a summer bar … Let’s see if I can get my way.
Honestly? I have no idea. At least it doesn’t look healthy…
I wonder who lives in this huge ice castle… Perhaps an important opponent?
New maximum level
We have a concrete plan (and internal preparations) for how we want to proceed in terms of the maximum level itself and how we will deal with summit levels in the future. However, you should be aware that changes may still be made (also based on your feedback) before the release.
Maximum level
The current max level of 100 will be increased to 108 with the new region. While this is not the “usual” increases that RoM has made with new maps and stories, all content and systems being added this time are being created by Gameforge with support from the original developers. There are reasons for this different approach.
Firstly, it’s been ages since we made any progress in this respect. Secondly, we needed a bit more leeway because of the changes to the summit steps. And thirdly … honestly, I was in favor of 110 to have a round number, but 108 is a good compromise to not increase too quickly 😊
Summit levels: Intentions
I already mentioned this at the beginning of 2024, but the scaling of the summit levels and the difficulty level is unfavorable and had to be changed back then to avoid problems with the hit rate and dodging. It was also not well balanced – it felt like you could hardly complete it in a reasonable amount of time.
Still, I like the idea behind the summit level system: it gives you a goal to aim for alongside the new content, and it makes the existing content and systems more interesting by giving them a long-term meaning.
With our planned changes, we want to maintain both to a certain extent: We should still have a system that gives you a purpose after reaching the new max level – and a small advantage for daily activities. At the same time, it should not be “infinitely scalable”, but doable within months, while not resetting too often to avoid it getting out of hand (or losing its actual purpose).
Summit steps: What does that actually mean?
That’s what’s behind it:
- The summit levels only go up to 10 and are not necessary to actively play or unlock content.
- They work similar to a “Battlepass season” (I can’t think of a better term right now). Basically, progress resets every x amount of time (about once a year, give or take a few months, depending on the content), and you get passive rewards as you progress “in season”.
- As soon as you reach a new level, you will receive a new currency that you can collect and exchange for exclusive rewards (e.g. mounts, skin sets, titles, consumable items, etc.).
Will I lose my summit levels when I switch from “old” to “new”?
In short: Yes. With the release of this new system, the peak levels of all characters will be reset to 0.
But since we know how much time and effort you have put into your summit steps, we want to respect that. The plan is as follows:
- By resetting/changing the system, we divide your current peak level by 4. The result is the level advantage with which you start at the new maximum level.
Example: You are currently at peak level 8. When the new map is released, you will start at level 102. If you are at peak level 20, you will start at level 105. - We also see this as the “first season”: So you’ll get the appropriate rewards depending on how high your peak level is at the time of the changeover. The exact details will come shortly before release and will include something like race titles.
We hope you see this the same way we do: as a drastic but necessary change for the long-term future of Runes of Magic. We are committed to enriching the game with fun and balanced content.
Collect & Craft
With the new maximum level for your classes and the new zone, we also want to increase the current crafting system by another rank (i.e. level 101 to 120), add new materials to gather and new recipes for crafting good things.
Collect
Our ideas revolve around the following three points:
- Gathering should be rewarding again (at all levels) instead of making dungeons the measure of all things. This will mainly happen with new gathering tools that you can further improve to get more materials per gathering process and/or rarer materials.
- Oneiros gets new collection points, which are needed for high-quality crafting.
- The gathering abilities of companions will be improved (in terms of level, not in terms of amount of materials).
Crafting
For our craftsmen, we want to leave the system largely as it is and expand it so that it also fits the new maximum level and the new map:
- A new highest rank that you can achieve either by collecting or crafting (yes, “or” is correct here).
- New recipes up to level 108, for which you need old and new materials.
- Probably new crafting tools to specialize even more in a certain area (to be confirmed).
A few final words
Of course, there are many, many more topics surrounding this update. As I said at the beginning, there also needs to be new adjustments to class balancing, because no self-respecting MMO should introduce a new max level without providing some awesome or improved abilities for your class and your class combination. On top of that, all the villages, enemy camps, daily side quests, farm spots, quest lines and boss fights need to be planned and populated. Work is well underway, but we’re nowhere near ready to test the game, even internally.
It will take a few more months until everything is live. Unfortunately, it will take longer than originally planned because the creation of the maps was quite complicated at the beginning. But I hope that I was able to give you an insight into my work and that you continue to trust that we will continue to work actively on Runes of Magic in the coming years.
This report should also explain why I will be going underground again for a while: Because I’m continuing to work with the team on this update. Next time I get back to you, there’ll be plenty of updates on the backstory of Oneiros and the systems in this expansion!
With this in mind, I wish you all a nice spooky weekend (I’m writing this just before Halloween), happy holidays and a good start to 2026!
Patrick
0 Comments