Dev Blog #3: Roadmap

Hello everyone! Welcome to our third Dev Blog, a post release roadmap for Elements Divided! We’ve seen many of you give us suggestions and feedback since release 1 month ago, and we know you’re excited to hear what’s coming next. 

We decided to go over what you might see during the rest of the year. Keep in mind, this is what we hope to get done, and could change over time. It’s not promised that everything or anything in this roadmap will happen. 

Sub-Elements - Fall or Winter 2025

We’ve seen your emails. We’ve seen your comments on YouTube. We’ve seen your comments on TikTok. We’ve seen your Discord messages. We’ve seen COUNTLESS Discord threads. Hell, at this point I’m almost expecting a snail mail to show up asking for the #1 most requested feature… Sub-Elements. It’s officially confirmed, Sub-Elements WILL COME to Elements Divided! Alright, you get 5 seconds to freak out… Okay, okay, stop your screaming. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

To start, here’s what we can confirm - Sub-Elements are coming, and we can tell you the first one right now… It’s Metal! I can’t share too much about Metal yet, as it’s still very much a work in progress, but here’s what I can say; Metal refines earth into sharp, precise weapons, trading brute force for lethal speed and piercing power. It's faster and harder to break than raw stone, but it loses earth’s overwhelming mass and broad defensive strength.

Now, unfortunately, I can’t confirm any other Sub-Elements at this time. And that’s because we need your help to vote on which ones we should make! We’ll be running a series of polls in our Discord over the next few weeks having you vote on your top favorite Sub-Element ideas. Join our Discord now and check out the #polls channel, this is your chance to be heard!

Some examples of what we’ll be including on these polls are highly requested Sub-Elements like Blue Fire, Blood, Lava, Lightning, and more. If you want to see your most favorite idea come to life in game, make sure to vote in our Discord! And with that, let's move on to our next feature, Custom Game Modes.

Custom Game Mode Settings - End of Summer 2025

One thing we’ve noticed as another top requested feature is the ability to customize your gameplay experience. For instance, many players choose to respect not “capping” the capture point in the middle of the map, and are frustrated that they can’t turn it off. That’s just one example of many ways that you all want to play a bit differently than we originally intended. So, we want to give everyone the ability to play the game the way they want to. Coming soon will be customizable game mode settings. Some examples would be (final list may vary);

• Control lobby player count (no higher than 8 players)

• Number of Stocks

• Number of Rounds

• Time Mode duration

• Enable / Disable Control Point

• Enable / Disable Damage Zone

• Pick your own list of maps for Random

• Enable / Disable the ability to respawn yourself at will 

• Enable / Disable certain Techniques

• Enable / Disable certain Elements

• Percentage Power modifiers

• Percentage Knockback modifiers

And possibly more. Alongside this we’d also like to implement a Server Browser, so you can find other likeminded players, though we’re not quite sure yet if our network code architecture will allow us to make a Server Browser, so that’s tbd. 

So we’ve talked about Sub-Elements and Custom Game Modes, the largest changes coming soon. But we’re not done yet, we’ve got some other smaller changes and improvements coming as well. Let’s talk about balance changes next.

Balance Changes - Ongoing

Balance. It’s a finicky thing. Everyone has a different perspective on what is or isn’t balanced when it comes to PvP games, but sometimes you can find common patterns of opinions. While we work on the big new features, we’re also going to continue to take a look at what the most common balance concerns are between the current 4 Elements. This will look like smaller balance changes over time, some tweaks here and there. Our goal being to try to address the biggest pain points that come up, especially on our Discord server. Our Discord server is the best place to get in touch with us regarding suggestions, feedback, bug reports, or even receive customer support, since it’s often just not very feasible to keep track of comments on YouTube or TikTok, for example. 

We know especially players have problems with Air being too strong and Fire being too weak, and we definitely want to try to address these issues in a way that balances them more closely with the other Elements. While I can’t promise any specific changes here, we are going to be thoroughly reviewing your suggestions and feedback in our Discord server to try to find the right balance overall. And don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about Water or Earth either, they’re likely to get changes too, especially after Air and Fire get changes. 

It’ll be an ongoing process for the lifetime of the game. If you’re familiar with a small indie game called League of Legends, you’ll know they do a balance patch every few weeks, because the meta can change all the time. There’s unlikely to ever be “perfect balance”, we can only continue to try to improve it over time, which might mean some missteps occasionally. We hope you’ll continue to have patience with us as things adjust. And now, for the elephant in the room.. Competitive multiplayer.

Tournaments and Competitive Scene

Alright so, we’re not purposefully obtuse. We know you’ve been asking for ranked matches, ranked leaderboards, skill based matchmaking, etc.. While all of these things sound great in theory, and we know y'all really want it, we just can’t build this into the game right now. “But why?” you may ask, “It’s not impossible to program”, you say. You’re right, it’s not impossible to physically do, but there’s an issue here… Player count. While Elements has been fairly popular so far, its overall playerbase numbers will struggle greatly in comparison to your average “flat screen” multiplayer PvP game like Valorant, League of Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch 2, and so on. The VR market is just so much smaller overall. 

Which means we run into a problem if we try to directly implement any sort of Ranked mode or skill based matchmaking, in which you won’t be able to find people to play with a large majority of the time. You’ll queue into ranked, wait 5 minutes… wait 5 more minutes.. wait 20 minutes… annnd you just don’t find anyone to play with. That’s also not considering the issue of server region differences, which will cut down your ability to match with people even further. It’s a really cool idea, but honestly we just can’t do it right now.

So, what are we doing instead? Well, for those of you who really really want a ranked scene, we’ve opened a second Discord server, the Ranked Elements Divided server or R.E.D. Here you can queue into ranked 1v1s, join or create a 3v3 team, try out speedruns, participate in different styles of monthly tournaments, all hosted officially by the developers of Elements Divided (that’s us!) and our dedicated community staff members.

We know this isn’t quite the same as implementing it into the game, but we hope you understand our explanation for why that’s just not possible right now. Now granted, if we ever blow up to Gorilla Tag esque numbers, then maybe we can reevaluate. But for now, let’s go on to the rapid fire small features list.

Other Features - Ongoing

For some smaller features we’re working on alongside all of the bigger updates, we’ve got the following in no particular order;

• New maps

• More Character Customization Equippables

• More Ultimates

• More Techniques

• Quality of Life changes

• Moderation improvements

• Many are based on YOUR suggestions and feedback!

To expand a bit on moderation improvements, we’ve seen your feedback about our automated moderation tools in game, including adding Reports and adjusting VoicePatrol. We’ll continue to make adjustments and improvements to both of these as time keeps progressing onwards. 

We’ve already made changes since release. VoicePatrol is now less sensitive to certain topics, and requires a much higher threshold of reports before that sensitivity is increased. We’re also working directly with the developers of VoicePatrol to make suggestions to help improve their AI detection overall. 

It is also important to note, VoicePatrol has never and will never apply any Online Multiplayer Bans. VoicePatrol only applies “voice bans”, that’s to say, it only mutes your microphone or deafens you in game. If you, or someone you hear of, is Online Multiplayer Banned, it was applied manually, by a human, after careful review, only when necessary to prevent player harm. We have no automated processes that apply Online Multiplayer Bans, it is simply too risky that it could end up being incorrect. We also have an appeal process for voice bans and online bans, by simply emailing us at bans@locomotiondevs.com (be sure to include an in game username!). 

We know our moderation system isn’t perfect, and we do apologize for some false positives or missed toxic statements in regards to VoicePatrol. Our hope is always to overall reduce and improve levels of toxicity, but it’ll never be quite possible to 100% remove it. If you’re a member of our Discord server, you know we also have a form you can fill out to report players more directly to us with more information. We again thank you for your patience. Now, on to something everyone always is asking us about, update frequency.

Update frequency

If you’ve been around for Elements Divided development for a while, you’ll know we’re pretty regular about releasing updates. On average, we release some kind of update about every 2 weeks. This could be anything from a larger content update or just some smaller features and bug fixes. On occasion, sometimes this can be a tad longer, around 1 - 1.5 months, if there’s a particularly large feature we’re primarily working on, or a holiday / vacation time mixed in there. 

We’re putting this out there to say that our goal is to be regularly working on and updating Elements Divided. We know some other VR companies tend to shy away from discussing updates, preferring secrecy, or their game may not be their main focus (I.E, hobby or student projects). There’s nothing wrong with that, but we want you to know that Elements Divided is absolutely our main focus, it is our job, and we will continue to work on it for as long as it makes sense for our company to do so. 

And alongside that, we want to be open about what’s going on, why is a certain feature taking so long, when are we adding x y or z. Now to be fair, we can’t tell you everything all of the time, but we do try to keep open lines of communication, especially once we know internally for sure that a certain feature is coming. We don’t want you all to be in the dark for months on end - that just doesn’t feel fair to anyone. 

That being said, the best way to keep up with us is to join our Discord server, this is where we can keep the closest relationships with our players. Have a question? You can ask there any time, and almost certainly you’ll get a response from either myself, or one of our community staff members within 24 hours (or sooner!). 

Beyond 2025

Whew, that was a lot of information. We’ll try to update you again after the beginning of 2026 to talk about what happens then. And we hope you are excited to see what's to come next with Elements Divided during the rest of 2025. If you want to discuss this dev blog further and ask the devs questions, join our official Discord and check out the discussion post in the #dev-blog channel!  You can also find us on other social media as well.