ADOM is resurrecting once again...

Dear community,

it’s been a long time since I last posted something here — actually far too long. It’s time to slowly change that. ADOM has entered its eighth age (you can hear about the first four ages here: [dynamiclink href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3ZYDA2JVSM"]; the fifth age was ADOM on Steam, the sixth age the time of Ultimate ADOM, and the seventh age the void that followed that dismal failure).

So what’s new?

All rights to ADOM (but not Ultimate ADOM) have recently reverted to me, Thomas Biskup, the original creator of ADOM. This also means that I once again feel motivated to maintain the game more actively and to begin a new development effort.

I intend to release a new version of ADOM in late 2026 or sometime in 2027 — more likely the latter. While this may not sound overly exciting, it does mean that I will try to breathe fresh life and many new experiences into the game. Therefore, now is a good time to post ideas, wishes, and feature requests. If you feel particularly motivated, you may want to use our ticket system at https://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?projectid=2 which is still in use and will most likely serve as my reference library when planning future improvements.

The reasons for my long silence have been manifold, one of them being the failure to bring Ultimate ADOM to success. Beyond that, I went through extremely stressful work phases, helped grow my company to more than 650 employees, eventually sold most of my shares, retired, and took time to regenerate while spending a lot of time with my wonderful family. None of this left enough room or energy to actively work on ADOM.

And to address the elephant in the room: for the foreseeable future, there will be no further development of Ultimate ADOM. We tried hard to make it a great game, invested a lot of personal money, and failed to turn it into what we had hoped for within the time available. We had a splendid team, and everyone pushed themselves to their limits (and far beyond) to create an amazing game. I am deeply grateful to all of them for fighting a battle against ultimately insurmountable odds. They gave everything they had and are not to be blamed for the result. The failure of UA — compared to what we planned to achieve — is solely my responsibility.

While I still believe the underlying engine is amazing, we tried to do too much too soon (that’s what “Ultimate” does to you) and never managed to correctly execute our 10+ year development plan for UA. We also raised the wrong expectations, and in hindsight I believe we would have fared better with a different name. But those times are over. Expect a full post-mortem around 2029 or 2030 — and that’s all I’m going to say on the topic.

These days I’m working on whatever strikes my fancy, and you can follow these various adventures at https://www.roguelike.games/blog

ADOM development will eventually be added there as well. I’m already in contact with my good friend Jochen to restructure our development environment and prepare it for the future — a lot has changed over the past decade, and it’s even a challenge just to get the system to build again. 😉

Finally, a note on sales and discounts: when we partnered with a publisher (a first-time experience for me), we followed their advice to increase discounts over time to boost revenue. This worked in the short term, but in the long run it confirmed my fears about devaluing and milking a brand until it no longer works. Therefore, the era of high discounts is over, starting with the current sale. The highest discount you’ll see from time to time will be the current -15%. Once we begin releasing new content, the maximum discount will drop to -10%, which I always preferred. Eventually, there may even be a small price increase, given that the price has remained unchanged for the past ten years. That said, everything depends on our ability to deliver interesting and substantial new content. We’ll see what happens when the time is right.

For me, ADOM has always been about value for price, not about being discounted just because it’s old. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong — but I have to trust my gut.

Thanks for listening. I wish you all a Merry Christmas (or whatever you may or may not be celebrating) — love and peace to everyone out there!

Thomas Biskup ADOM Creator & Maintainer