Happy New Years to all Defiers! We hope you have had a wonderful holiday season so far!

While our team is away on their post-Desert Reign break, we wanted to send you warm wishes and reflect on a challenging, yet rewarding and inspiring year in Early Access! Around this time last year, we were wrapping up a period of optimizations and QoL improvements and only just revealing our roadmap at the OTK Winter Expo with promises of new content to come. The game’s full gameplay loop at the time concluded with a handful of minor labors scattered about an otherwise empty map. The Temple of Athena was but a small, ruined shrine. The desert was a place for golems, ore, and little else.

We had not yet seen the new raid zones, the expansions of the Dark Forest and Ancient Desert with their new puzzles and challenges, the first legendary weapons and all the new gear, or the character creator (with the female player model we’ve been waiting for since release)! The Crossroads are a different place! It has been so exciting to see these goals realized throughout the months, and more exciting yet to look forward to next year where we will continue to fully realize our vision for Dawn of Defiance.

It bears repeating that Early Access would be nothing without our players and our supporters. Thank you for investing in our game, for trusting in our roadmap, and for offering us feedback along the way.

In this interim, we’ve bumped the statuses on a couple items currently on our roadmap feature list to reflect work from Desert Reign. At the start of this year, we'll be reviewing our plans to lock in dates for our next major update. Until then, we hope we’ve given you plenty to be excited about! I, personally, will be eagerly awaiting more news to share with you all!

Cheers to 2026!

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