Lords of the Fallen Roadmap has been revealed, and it’s impressive! The game has been out for less than a month, but the developer team have already demonstrated refreshing commitment to their craft by not only releasing over 10 incremental patches that focused on community feedback over the past few weeks, but they have now also announced a fantastic amount of free content that they have planned for the game.

Lords of the Fallen Roadmap Free Content 2023

The Free Content Plan for Lords of the Fallen divides the upcoming goodies into “weekly enhancement” and “development work”. It is clear from the announcement post, which you can find on Steam, that the Hexworks team is very passionate about the game and wants to continue to improve the experience for all players.

The development work focus on adding new stuff like the Halloween event, new weapons, new game modes. I’ll go into those after we see what you can expect in the “weekly” version.

Weekly enhancements promise to focus on

• Stability – The game is not necessarily prone to crashing, and a patch in Mid-October addressed the most egregious ones, but ongoing stability is a point that any player can appreciate.
• Performance – The game’s performance had issues on consoles and some PCs at launch, and it has already been greatly improved, but the developers will continue to fine-tune this aspect. This is excellent news for fans as one of the most frustrating aspects of modern gaming is subpar performance holding back otherwise excellent games.
• Save Game Fixes – This means they will continue to address issues associated with save game corruption. These are not overly prominent, and some workarounds have been found online, but it’s certainly a priority as losing your progress is an awful experience. If you have ran into such issues, make sure to reach out to the developers via their official contact and report it so they can work on it!
• Co-Op & PvP Improvements – Multiplayer is the lifeblood of soulslike longevity, so addressing Netcode, connectivity issues and the overall multiplayer experience is a must. I really hope they can focus on this aspect as I very much enjoy the coop of the game and it does need further fine-tuning.
• Balancing – The developers will prioritize PvE to tweak balancing and address some overpowered and underpowered elements, which has already been in the works as of the most recent patch, that rebalanced some spells and also made boss weapons upgrade to +10 instead of +5. I am working to get all these changes into the wiki, but if you find anything that’s missing or has been tweaked please feel free to edit.
• Increased Boss Difficulty – Some players feel the bosses should be tougher, and it sounds like the Hexworks team plans to improve this aspect as well. I personally didn’t feel the bosses were too much of a pushover, but more challenging encounters could lead to more nuance in Builds and approaches, and also more multiplayer.
• QoL Tweaks – There are many small things that can be improved for overall quality of life, and the developers are listening to player feedback to get these into the game. Make sure to share your feedback often!

Lords of the Fallen Free DLC 2023

Other milestones of the roadmap focus on actual free extra content that spices up the game, extends its longevity, and improves your overall experience. These are planned for November – December but will extend into 2024, with developers stating they don’t plan on slowing down:

Halloween Event – Already launched, this special event allowed players to do a special in-game treasure hunt and quest to obtain a unique and limited Helm.

Mob Density Reduction – This is also already launched. Being overwhelmed by hordes of monsters was a common complaint for many players, so the number of spawns and the “leashes” of monsters have been adjusted. This was done in Patch 1.1.224 by reducing the number of enemies present in areas where players most struggle. These enemies are removed in your initial playthrough, but remain in NG+, in keeping with the more challenging experience players are seeking.

Inventory & Stash Expansions – Plans to increase inventory are now formally announced. Whether this means the NPC shops will have more goodies remains to be seen, but given its separating “inventory” and “stash” I certainly hope so! I would very much like to get to buy more things from vendors after a certain point in the game to facilitate experimentation with builds. There’s also the added desire to carry more of everything, but we’ll see how it pans out as developers make their plans clear.

New Spells – Divided into two packs, the roadmap promises to bring new spells. This would be an excellent addition as there are currently 59 spells between Umbral, Radiant and Inferno and it would be amazing to increase that and improve build variety. It would also impact the depth of your commitment to a specific line, and perhaps give more incentive to increase your Spell Slots. I assume that the new spells will likely be associated with new questlines for thematic consistency, but they may also be added as treasure or boss exchanges.

New Armor Sets & Questlines – Special new questlines and rewards of an armor set for each Radiant, Rhogar and Umbral has been announced. This is something I’m actually quite excited for as I love collecting armor sets, and the previews of the armor look amazing. The fact they will be quest-related also means added exploration and complexity to my playthrough, so a big plus for existing and new players. These new quests may also include new mini-bosses, and perhaps impact the rest of the game in some form.

New Grievous Strikes – These are the “critical” moves of the game, so I assume this means there’ll be new movesets to be performed when executing them. Considering there are 12 different weapon types, I hope they each get their own unique new flair.

Additional Secret Boss Weapon Abilities – Some specific boss weapons gain unique abilities after performing a certain amount of steps, and when used in a certain way. Discovering these is fun for explorers and can really change your gameplay, so adding more is certainly a plus, but there were very few boss weapons with this mechanic so the hype around it died quickly. It’s great to see the developers plan to expand on this aspect.

Split PvE & PvP Balancing – This is something that took FromSoftware over 10 years to figure out, so I’m very happy to hear that Hexworks is already working on it. There’s nothing worse as a player than having your PvE build nerfed because someone is abusing it on PvP encounters that you never do! It should also help optimize PvP encounters so there’s more fairness around fights and to create more creative approaches that skip the cookie cutter “OP” flavor of the week.

Gamepad Rebinding – This is a commonly asked feature and I’m very pleased to learn it’s in development, as being able to rework bindings can really improve your overall experience with any game.

New Game + Modifiers – This specific update had been announced as in the works earlier on, when developers tweaked the way Vestiges work in New Game Plus with Patch v.1.1.224. The NG+ modifiers will allow players to fully customize their NG+ experience, whether that’s retaining all vestiges, keeping just a few, or removing them completely. It will also include other fun modifiers like a “hardcore” mode (1 death = permadeath), item randomizers, enemy randomizers, etc. The feature set is yet to be fully defined, but the developer announced intention is to release the modifier system before the end of the year.

What else to expect for DLC or Expansions

Right now, the Hexworks team is working on optimizing the game and improving its stability, performance, and player experience. With new free content announced, it’s inevitable to wonder whether the game will also get paid DLC and Expansions.

Given Lords of the Fallen sold over 1 Million copies in 10 days, I think it’s enough of a commercial success to warrant paid content in the future. With the ongoing performance improvements and the inevitable winter sales that will add new users in December and January, the player base will increase and be significant enough that it could support paid content.

I personally would very much like to see some tweaks done to the game’s existing NPCs and questlines to facilitate progression and understanding of what gets locked out as you do what. I would also like to see a revision to the game’s endings, as they could feel quite underwhelming and even rushed after doing significant work to unlock them.

But besides those wishes for free tweaks, I think I would happily pay for more extensive content that allows me to explore new mid-game areas and unlock new spell types, new weapons and armor, or hopefully a contained small story that picks up after the game events.

So what would you like to see? Are there any specific tweaks and changes you are wanting or looking forward to? Will you be buying any paid DLC if it’s ever made? Let us know in the comments below.