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Bellring Games Lays Out Mistfall Hunter's Season 1 Plan After One Million Players Join

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Key takeaways

Mistfall Hunter reached one million players in its first week after launching.
A solo mode for the Brandrgarde map arrives in Season 1 Phase 2 across both difficulty settings.
Season 2 will add a javelin weapon, exclusive gameplay, and a new seasonal progression system.

Bellring Games has released a detailed roadmap covering Mistfall Hunter's first two seasons, responding to community feedback just days after the extraction fantasy game launched. The announcement comes as the title reports one million players exploring its Elden Ring-influenced world — though the studio has not confirmed that figure represents paid copies sold. Either way, the numbers suggest a healthy start for the game, even as its Steam community remains vocal with criticism and suggestions.

The most anticipated addition in the roadmap is a solo mode for the Brandrgarde map, which will be available across both normal and cataclysm difficulty settings. Bellring acknowledged in the accompanying Steam blog post that introducing two new queue options will inevitably fragment matchmaking and create fresh class-balance challenges specific to solo play. The team says it will monitor these factors carefully and communicate findings to the community before committing to further changes.

Season 1 itself is broken into three distinct phases. Phase one introduces Einherjar mode — details still sparse — along with seasonal tasks and the Soul Harvest event, which tasks players with collecting soul cocoons, confronting a boss called Soulgnawer, and participating in a multiplayer showdown. A dedicated special shop will offer soul coins, moonlight nectar, and limited collectibles during this window.

Phase two expands the seasonal task roster and lets players unlock rewards such as the rare pouch and the Nether Ferry skin for character Pip. It is also the phase where the Brandrgarde solo mode officially arrives, accompanied by an Underlord speed challenge that rewards players for eliminating Underlords quickly. Phase three rounds out the season with a new monster called the Golden Woodling, a random in-match event called Ancestor Tree, and task completions that tease season 2 storylines.

Looking further ahead, season 2 will introduce a javelin as a new Blackarrow weapon, a fresh seasonal theme with exclusive gameplay, and a season-specific progression system. Specific details on those systems have not yet been shared, with Bellring promising more information closer to launch.

The bigger picture

Bellring Games' swift roadmap release is a smart piece of community management. Extraction games live and die by player retention in those crucial first weeks, and addressing a high-volume request — solo play — before the first season even properly kicks off signals that the studio is watching feedback channels closely. For a game carrying comparisons to Elden Ring's aesthetic weight, setting expectations early helps prevent the kind of 'abandoned early access' narrative that has hurt smaller studios before.

The decision to split Brandrgarde's matchmaking into solo queues does carry real risk. Extraction titles like Hunt: Showdown have wrestled for years with how solo, duo, and trio lobbies thin out the player pool, leading to longer wait times and skewed encounters. If Mistfall Hunter's one million player figure does not translate to consistently active daily users, those queues could feel barren by the time phase two arrives. Bellring's transparency about this tradeoff is welcome, but acknowledging a challenge is not the same as solving it.

The season 2 previews — particularly the javelin weapon and an exclusive progression system — suggest Bellring is building toward a live-service cadence that competes directly with mid-size extraction titles vying for the same audience. Readers should watch how the Soul Harvest event performs in terms of player engagement and whether the matchmaking concerns the devs flagged become a genuine friction point. The roadmap's ambition is clear; execution over the next few months will be the real test.

LagPing's take

We're covering Mistfall Hunter's roadmap because it's a useful case study in how a new extraction game tries to build momentum without losing the community it just earned. Bellring Games isn't a household name yet, and the window between a promising launch and player drop-off is narrow in this genre. The solo mode addition in particular is the kind of pivot that can meaningfully change who sticks around — solo-friendly options have revived interest in games that initially felt inaccessible to players without a regular squad. We're also keeping an eye on how the studio handles its own stated concerns around matchmaking fragmentation, because that's exactly the kind of thing that sounds minor in a blog post and feels major three months later when queues are slow. If you're playing Mistfall Hunter right now, this roadmap gives you a lot to look forward to — and a few things worth watching carefully.

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