Greetings! It’s already more than half way through the year, and time sure flies when you are conquering! We wanted to take a moment to catch our breath & rally with the community – recapping what we have accomplished so far in 2025, and looking forward to what focuses we have for development for the remainder of the year.
Read on for:
- 2025 Release Highlights: 100th Hero, Greyjoy Rebellion, & More!
- Quality of Life
- Future Development Focuses
- And how to get involved!
2025 Release Highlights
Here are some our favorite feature release moments from the year so far:
100th Hero Celebration
This year marked the release of our 100th Hero: Criston Cole, The Kingmaker with the 100 Swords by Your Side event celebration to match!
Pyke Opens for the First Time!
After tempting us for nearly 8 years, the seabound Seat of Power (SoP) of Pyke was unlocked earlier this year with the release of the Greyjoy Rebellion event! It has been great seeing players out on the water for the first time.
March was packed with The Kingsmoot bonus arc events leading up to the release and opportunities to earn bonus Greyjoy goodies. Greyjoy Rebellion is now part of our event rotation, throwing an interesting new element into the balance of combat map control and allegiance dominance.
Claim Your Steak / April Fools
April 1st was all-out meat madness this year with Claim Your Steak. This punny take on Stake Your Claim involved a 24-hour event, livestock recipes, and introduced the fearsome Pink Dread march pawn.
We had a blast watching players compete and hope you all enjoyed the festivities too!
Quality of Life
Quality of Life, or “QoL”, has been one of the major pillars of our roadmap for this year, so we can not point to just a single moment so far this year.
QoL are typical small changes that make a big impact. We have set aside development time to tackle as many of these bite-sized player requests as we can in between our larger development projects.
These ideas are based on feedback from our community, and our goal is to reduce gameplay friction, respect our players’ time, and improve the overall day-to-day experience of playing the game.
Here’s the QOL highlights so far in 2025:
- General Quality of Life
- The Building Enhancement panel remembers the last selected tab when returning, and no longer kicks you out after enhancing a building.
- Basic Resource Flux Recipes are permanently available in the recipes tab of the Inventory.
- Added the ability to view the opening cinematic within the settings panel.
- Test Your Mettle rewards have had improvements and brackets adjustments
- Crafting Quality of Life
- The ‘Manage Equipment’ panel now communicates which materials are missing when attempting to craft.
- The Crafting Materials panel in the Smithy remembers where players left off when viewing crafting recipes, or after navigating away from the panel.
- Event Gear and Trinket Armory tabs save what was last selected if you navigate away from the panel.
- Added the ability to sort Crafting Materials by Gear Season or Trinket Flux.
- Added the ability to filter the Armory by Gear Season.
- Added the ability to downgrade the rarity of Crafting Materials in the Materials panel. The panel UI was also updated to support the consistent upgrading & downgrading of materials.
- Additional Crafting Improvements: Coming in August!
- Tapping the ‘Forge Now’ button in the Manage Equipment panel will automatically collect the completed piece of gear.
- Players will be able to seamlessly switch between downgrading and upgrading Crafting Materials in the same popup.
- In the Upgrade Equipment panel, identical pieces of Gear will automatically populate in the ‘Select Equipment to Destroy’ box.
- Hero Quality of Life
- Hero Shop Improvements
- Slot 1 guarantees a Mythic hero on every refresh.
- Improved the odds of unlocking a Mythic or Heroic hero in the Hero Shop in slots 4 & 5.
- Rares appear less often.
- Uncommon heroes have been removed.
- Added one additional preset slot to Hero Reserves preset panel.
- Added Daily Quest rewards for Hero Summoning
- Hero Shop Improvements
- Combat Quality of Life
- Extended the duration of the Extra March Slot Instant Boost earned from from 8 hours to 24 hours.
- Added 4 additional Preset Builds, unlocked via the Maester’s Tower.
- Stamina can be bulked purchased at higher amounts.
- Battlegrounds Quality of Life
- Battlegrounds can now be initiated every 3 hours instead of 12.
- Titans of the North will now accept 20 participants instead of 10.
- Seat of Power Stat Increase
- SoP Title holder buffs were increased by roughly 2x the value, excluding:
- Max March Size (includes Dragon Max March Size)
- Rallied Troop Capacity
- Certain Kings Landing title stats received an approximately 3x increase on:
- Forging Speed
- Owner Steel Crafting Efficiency
- Master of Coin Steel Crafting Efficiency
- And All Dead to Wounded stats were increased from 4% > 5%
- SoP Title holder buffs were increased by roughly 2x the value, excluding:
What’s Next?
We have had some great moments so far, but we are not done yet! Here is where we intend to dedicate our development resources for the remainder of the year.
Areas of focus for the rest of 2025:
Hero Updates
- We are looking at the Heroes system overall. We feel there is a discrepancy in how Heroes reward players compared to other investments, like gear, trinkets and dragon gear. We want to see if there are ways to improve the return on your investments here, without completely upending the ecosystem.
- We are interested in QoL related to Heroes too! Last month we released a suite of Hero Shop adjustments aimed at improving the experience of acquiring Relics. We have a few more ideas we are interested in pursuing after we hear back from players about the initial changes.
More PvE?
- We are in the process of experimenting with a new event, seeing if we can combine some mechanics that have not previously been used together before. If these investigations are successful, we would love to get players involved in the continued development to ensure we build something fun. Our hope is to preview the event before the end of the year so we can survey players about their experience.
8th Anniversary Celebrations
- Our anniversary is coming up in October, and we are currently working on some goodies to give away to thank you all for joining us for 8 great years! Stay tuned…
More Quality of Life Improvements
- We will continue to tackle as many quality of life improvements as we can in between bigger development projects! In particular, Crafting QoL is a continued focus, as well as tweaks to Hero Shop.
- The goal is to find small development tasks that lead to big impact for players, and the best way for us to identify these opportunities is understanding the player experience. You can get involved over on the official community Discord, by upvoting suggestions in the #gameplay-suggestion forum.
Rally Forth!
Thanks for tuning in to this mid-year look into development! It’s already been a great year, and our developers intend to keep that momentum up as we move into the investigation and early implementation phases of our next focuses.
If you enjoyed this, or want to chime in about your own QoL suggestions, please join us over on the official Game of Thrones: Conquest community Discord in the #rally-point channel!