There are some important changes coming to our development plans. We know that hearing the words “roadmap changes” can be a little scary, especially when some of you have been eagerly waiting for particular features. So we want to explain exactly what is changing, why we believe it is the right decision for Eterspire, and what you can expect from us over the coming months.
This is going to be a long post, so brace yourselves! But first, a helpful TLDR for those who just need a quick rundown:
TL;DR
We’re adjusting the Engineering side of our roadmap so we can spend the next few months improving some of the most fundamental parts of the Eterspire experience: Moment-to-moment gameplay, engaging encounter design, and performance, all with the goal of drastically improving our retention.
This means that several previously announced Engineering features will be released later than originally planned. Woodcutting is still planned to be released on schedule. The Daily Quest system is also still coming, but we want to release it after we’ve addressed some of the core issues that could prevent it from being as effective, or as enjoyable, as it should be.
All of the other points in our Roadmap for July and August 2026 will be moved. They are not being canceled. We still want to release them, and we still believe they are important. They simply won’t be released with the timing we previously expected.
Most importantly, we’re not changing plans because we no longer care about the features on the roadmap. We’re changing them because, for Eterspire to be healthy in the long term, we need more players to enjoy the game, return frequently, and stick around. This is absolutely fundamental for an MMORPG like Eterspire.
Within the next week or two, we’ll publish an updated roadmap covering the rest of Q3 and part of Q4. It will reflect these new priorities and give you a clearer idea of what we’ll be working on over the next few months.
With the TL;DR out of the way, let’s get right to the bones!
The Year of Retention
At the beginning of 2026, we internally named this “The Year of Retention.”
Retention, in very simple terms, means giving players reasons to continue playing, return more frequently, and remain part of the game for longer.
Retention is important for any game, but it is particularly important for an MMORPG. An MMO lives and dies by its community: the people you meet in town, the players chatting, trading, making parties, showing off their gear, and making the world feel alive.
After a 2025 in which Eterspire grew exponentially, we knew we couldn’t rely forever on enormous waves of new players (like the ones we saw that year) to keep the game growing sustainably. We needed to become much better at keeping those players once they arrived.
Eterspire already has a wonderful community of long-term players. Many of you have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours in Aetera. You’ve made friends, built characters you’re proud of, collected everything from fish to EX 100% endgame gear, and tackled every challenge the game has put in front of you. We love that, and we're very proud of having so many dedicated players.
But we also know the game doesn’t always do enough to encourage the average player to reach that point. After a certain stage, Eterspire can stop giving players clear reasons to keep playing regularly. And long before that, some new players leave without ever discovering the things that make the game special.
Throughout the year, other aspects of development gradually began taking priority. We were still thinking about retention, of course, but many retention-focused changes and systems lost ground to other highly requested features.
That shift also made its way into our roadmap. As you might've noticed, aside from the Daily Quest system, most of the roadmap was focused on adding individual features rather than improving the fundamental reasons players return to the game.
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So we took a step back. We analyzed our metrics. We collected feedback. We tested different parts of the game. We played a lot of Eterspire. We discussed the problem in endless in-person meetings. And after looking at the issue from every possible angle, the answer we reached was surprisingly simple:
Before anything else, the central Eterspire experience needs to be more fun and more engaging.
Like Lartu once said in our first devlog: "This is a game, people! It’s supposed to be fun!"
A Change in Plans
We’re going to be completely straightforward about this.
Everything currently on the roadmap other than Woodcutting is being moved to a later date.
The Daily Quest system is also still coming, but it will be released further down the line, after we’ve completed the most important parts of the work described later in this post.
We know this will be disappointing for some players.
Every feature on the roadmap matters. Some of them have been requested for a long time, and for certain players, one of those features may have been the update they were most excited about this entire year.
We’re not dismissing that excitement, and we’re not pretending these delays don’t matter.
But we also have to make decisions based on what Eterspire needs as a whole. And right now, making the game substantially more enjoyable to play is more important for its long-term health than releasing every previously announced system according to the original schedule.
Adding more things to the game is valuable, but those additions become much more valuable when they’re being added to a core experience that players already love returning to every day.
So, to be absolutely clear:
None of the features we’re moving are being permanently canceled.
They are still part of our plans. We will work on them. We’re simply giving ourselves the time and space to prioritize changes that we believe are essential for Eterspire’s future.
Eterspire Updates: A Tale of Two Teams
Before explaining what we’ll be working on, we want to clarify how Eterspire updates are developed.
For quite some time, our development team has been divided into two areas: Engineering and Content Development.
Broadly speaking, the Engineering team is responsible for making the game function, feel, and perform properly. They build new systems and features, improve the underlying technology, and create tools that allow the rest of the team to work more effectively.
The Content Development team is responsible for, you guessed it, creating content.
That content can include maps, characters, quests, lore, bosses, enemies, items, cosmetics, and many other things. The Content team can also build some simpler systems using tools provided by Engineering, but its main purpose is to expand and deepen the world of Aetera while giving players new things to discover and do.
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This distinction is important because we sometimes see understandable confusion around how our updates are made.
For example, we might release a new quest while a highly requested feature is still in development. From the outside, it can look like the feature was delayed because we decided to spend that time making a quest instead. In reality, those two things are being developed in parallel.
A quest being released doesn’t mean Engineering stopped working on a new system. Likewise, an Engineering feature being released doesn’t mean the Content team stopped creating quests, areas, or content for a new lifeskill.
Different people, with different skill sets and responsibilities, are working on these things simultaneously.
The roadmap changes discussed in this post mostly affect Engineering. We need to create space for that team to implement the improvements and systems that can significantly increase retention while drastically improving how Eterspire feels to play.
These changes do not mean our Content Development team will stop producing content.
The team will continue creating quests. Woodcutting and its related content are still coming. We’re working on improved Hunts and new high-level Hunts. And we’re also experimenting with a collectible card system, with cards hidden throughout the world featuring original illustrations and pieces of lore. Think of the collectible cards from the old Harry Potter games on PC!
I've gotten sidetracked thinking about old PC games, but the important takeaway here is that seeing new content released does not mean Engineering has abandoned these new priorities. Both efforts will continue at the same time, carried out by different teams.
What We’re Working On
Now let’s go point by point through the areas we want to address over the next few months.
All of these changes are directly or indirectly connected to the same goal: making Eterspire feel much better to play and giving the average player more reasons to stay, return, and enjoy every session.
Making Combat Feel Better
Combat is the activity players spend the most time doing in Eterspire, which means even relatively small problems with its feel are repeated thousands of times throughout someone’s journey.
We want attacking and using your class abilities to feel smoother and more responsive. We want animations to flow better, controls to react more reliably, and players to feel like they are fully in control of their character during a fight.
This isn’t necessarily one enormous feature that will suddenly appear in a single update. It’s an area we intend to keep improving through multiple changes and iterations.
Making Enemies and Encounters More Interesting
At the moment, too many enemies, and therefore too many encounters, feel essentially the same.
Their models and numbers may change, but the way you approach them often doesn’t.
For some players, this causes the game to feel stale after enough time. Hunts can become repetitive, and moment-to-moment combat can start feeling like something you perform automatically rather than something that demands your attention.
Until recently, we hadn’t dedicated enough time to actual enemy design: how different enemies behave, what makes one encounter distinct from another, and what players have to react to while fighting.
We want enemies to have more varied mechanics and abilities. We want different encounters to present different situations, include occasional surprises, and make the decisions you make during combat more meaningful.
Not every creature in Aetera needs to feel like a boss in a FromSoftware game, but fighting one enemy shouldn’t always feel exactly like fighting every other enemy with a different hat.
Better Hunts and Enemy Scaling
Hunts are an important part of Eterspire's progression, but we know they can become tedious and repetitive during certain portions of the game. One idea we’re working on is enemy scaling for Hunts and quests that are significantly below your current level.
While completing a specific hunt or sidequest, its enemies could temporarily scale closer to your level, becoming stronger and potentially gaining additional abilities.
This would allow older Hunts and newly introduced sidequests to remain interesting for experienced players. It could also allow future endgame Hunts to send players throughout Aetera instead of limiting meaningful challenges to a handful of high-level locations.
We want the world we’ve already created to remain relevant. There are many incredible areas throughout the game, and we’d like to give players real reasons to return to them.
Controller Support, Apple TV, and Steam Deck
We're also continuing to improve Eterspire’s controller support.
Our Apple TV version is scheduled to release on August 3. This launch is particularly important because it also comes with valuable official marketing opportunities from Apple.
Bringing Eterspire to Apple TV also required us to ensure that the entire game could be comfortably navigated with a controller, which, in turn, brought us roughly 95% of the way toward becoming Steam Deck Verified, so we thought of it as a two-for-one development effort.
Our long-term goal is for Eterspire to have one of the best controller experiences available in an MMORPG, regardless of the device you’re playing on.
Performance Improvements
We’ve identified several areas where the game is considerably less efficient than it should be.
These inefficiencies have a major impact on performance and, based on the metrics we’ve gathered, we know Eterspire runs poorly for a meaningful portion of the player base. In fact, while not as prevalent on iOS, close to 40% of Android users are experiencing some kind of perfromance issue, which is a serious problem that we need to address.
Low frame rates, freezing, overheating, crashes, and other performance problems can make an otherwise enjoyable game frustrating or even impossible to play. And naturally, someone whose first experience consists of their phone fighting for its life is much less likely to return.
We’ve already made many performance improvements, but there is still a lot left to do. We have a substantial list of problems and opportunities we’ve identified, and we believe Eterspire can run much better than it does today.
Faster Startup and Reconnection
Eterspire currently takes far too long to open. Around ten seconds might not sound catastrophic on paper, but mobile games are often opened in short moments throughout the day. Every additional second creates friction between deciding to play and actually entering the game.
This also makes temporarily minimizing the game to answer a message or switch apps a pain in the ass.
We want opening Eterspire, connecting, and returning to the game to be much faster.
Ideally, deciding to play and actually playing should feel almost immediate.
The Daily System
The Daily Quest system was originally planned for July. It is still coming, but we want to take more time to make sure it is worth releasing.
Giving players a reason to return every day is extremely important. At the same time, many daily systems, particularly in mobile games, frankly stink.
We don’t want to add a checklist that makes you feel guilty because you didn’t log in.
We want to create a system that provides clear, enjoyable goals and rewards without making Eterspire feel like a job. Something that makes opening the game feel exciting rather than mandatory.
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One of our main positive references for dailies, believe it or not, is Duolingo. (Lartu actually reached a 703-day streak today)
Our first version of the Daily system might not be perfect, and we will almost certainly adjust it based on how players use it and what feedback we receive. But we want its foundation to be good. And for a daily system to work, the game itself needs to feel enjoyable enough that players are happy to return once they get there.
Woodcutting
Woodcutting is still coming.
We believe it is extremely important, not only because it gives players another activity and progression path, but because it will create the foundation for much more content in the future!
Better Social Systems
We’re also continuing to improve Eterspire’s social systems.
When we reworked the chat to support Guilds, we discovered that the underlying work was considerably more extensive than expected. We ended up rebuilding large portions of the chat system behind the scenes, which delayed some of the player-facing improvements we originally wanted to include.
That foundational work wasn’t wasted. It gives us the opportunity to turn chat into a substantially better experience in every respect.
We’re currently exploring improvements to how conversations are displayed, how different channels are managed, and how players interact with one another through the interface.
Another improvement we want to introduce is a universal social menu.
Whenever you see another player’s name, you would be able to select it and open a menu containing useful actions: DMing them, viewing their details, interacting with them, and eventually accessing other social features.
This could also provide the foundation for player profiles. In the future, profiles could display trophies, achievements, rare rewards, or other accomplishments you’d like to show off.
MMORPGs are fundamentally social games. We want to create better ways for players to communicate, express themselves, and feel connected to the people around them.
A New Roadmap and What Comes Next
That was a lot! My fingers hurt from typing.
Over the next week or two, we’ll publish a new roadmap covering the remainder of Q3 and part of Q4.
It won’t be quite as rigid as our previous roadmap.
Instead of promising that every feature will arrive within one particular update, it will show the major areas and systems we’ll be working on throughout the coming months. Those improvements will be released as they become ready and as we become confident they’ll provide a better experience for players.
We understand that a less rigid roadmap can feel less exciting than a list of features attached to exact dates. But we believe it will be more honest and more representative of how game development actually works.
Once these improvements are in place, we believe the game will be in a dramatically better position!
New players will have a smoother and more enjoyable introduction to Aetera. Veteran players will have more interesting activities, better-feeling combat, improved Hunts, stronger social tools, and more reasons to return during every stage of progression. And when more players stay, everyone benefits.
A larger and more engaged community means more adventurers filling the world, more active conversations, more people to form parties and do trials with, more trading, and more players enjoying every new class, lifeskill, quest, and social feature we add in the future.
Retention might sound like cold corporate jargon, but what it ultimately means for Eterspire is simple:
More people discovering the game, enjoying it, becoming part of its community, and choosing to stay.
We’re incredibly excited about these changes. We know moving parts of the roadmap is not the most immediately exciting announcement, but we genuinely believe it is the right decision for the game we’re trying to build.
We’re still the same team you’ve always known. We’re still reading your feedback, arguing about design decisions in meetings, breaking things, fixing them, and working every day to make the best MMORPG we possibly can.
Thank you for trusting us, and for caring enough about Eterspire to read through this whole post! (I know it's long because I wrote it).
We have a lot in store for the future, and we can’t wait for you to try it out.
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