BIG news for No More Room in Hell 2 - 1.0 coming in the first half of 2026

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Hello Responders,

As a studio we have made the decision to prolong our Early Access window past our one year Early Access release anniversary, and we couldn’t be more excited! Looking at the state of the game, community feedback, and our aspirations for the title, we’ve come to realize that October of this year won’t give us the time we need to launch the 1.0 version of the game that we envision. We still have a mountain of work that we want to fit into the game before 1.0 launch, which we’re now targeting for the first half of 2026.

Moving forward production and updates will look slightly different. Up to this point we’ve pushed to get big bulk features into the game as fast as possible in an effort to give players a “fuller” experience. The game is getting closer to 1.0 feature complete (we’re not there yet, more on that below!) and we’re now really looking to fine tune a lot of individual pieces within the game, and make the experience just right. Our new difficulty system is a great example of the type of changes we’re looking to make, and the levers we’re hoping to give our development team. Players should still expect monthly updates right up to 1.0 launch. Over the next few months you’ll experience a lot of changes to the game, and they won’t always hit the mark on the first pass. Our goals and expectations for the 1.0 version of the game are extremely high, and getting it right might take some experimentation.

As we continue our development of No More Room in Hell 2 in Early Access and move ever closer to 1.0, we want to confirm to the community that child zombies will not be present in the final product. Our top priority is the long-term success and growth of No More Room in Hell 2, and including child zombies would jeopardize that. Whether it’s losing opportunities to be featured in major game showcases, being unable to sell the game in certain regions, risking platform availability, or alienating prospective players, the risks are far too high for a game still finding its footing. We understand that some fans may be disappointed by this news, but we want to assure everyone that we're committed to portraying a gritty and grounded zombie apocalypse—and we're incredibly excited about what the future holds.

Core Gameplay Experience:

Since our Early Access launch in 2024 we’ve put a lot of work into getting the core gameplay of our original game mode to its most challenging and fun place, and the game has seen giant changes since its genesis iteration.

Zombie Spawning

We’re still hunting for the gold-standard of zombie spawning in No More Room in Hell 2. Our maps are very open and each is different, which makes creating the perfect zombie spawning system difficult. We took a big pass during August’s Spawn update, but we know there’s a lot of work left to do.

Difficulty Balancing

Difficulty balancing also saw a giant change with difficulty preference & difficulty 2.0 in Spawn. The changes feel promising, but moreso act as tools to help us further refine our difficulty tiers. Players should expect more changes to difficulty balancing in the coming months. We feel that zombie spawning and proper difficulty balancing are the most important keys to unlocking the full potential of No More Room in Hell 2 before our 1.0 launch

Progression

Progression in No More Room in Hell 2 is another aspect of the game which needs a fair bit of love, along with the economy system that accompanies it. Players should feel an added desire to play round after round of No More Room in Hell 2 because of short (perk system, permadeath), medium (more on this in the future), and long (nightmare levels) forms of progression, and all of these are currently not hitting the mark. Our economy system also lacks balance that allows us to properly reward players for their play while giving them ways to appropriately spend those credits, so players are currently stockpiling a lot of credits, and that removes a lot of the fun. When 1.0 launches and our new systems are properly in place we intend to perform a wipe of accounts, but also find meaningful ways to reward players for their time spent in Early Access and their earned nightmare levels.

We feel strongly that nailing these 3 initiatives will be the biggest driver for our long term success.

Game Health:

Setting our sights on a 1.0 launch also requires that we take a much deeper look into the health of No More Room in Hell 2. The last 10 months of updates have really transformed the quality of players' experience, but we know that glaring issues still remain. In the next 3 months we will have 2 “health” specific patches, and we expect to have more as we move closer and closer to launch.

Optimization

The current in-game building (left) has 250+ individual meshes. Through the use of our automated process we’re able to compress the same building (right) to just over 53 meshes, an 81% reduction!

Game health starts with optimization, the technical art of finding innovative ways to make our game run at its absolute best on as many PC configurations as possible. Our major focus up to this point has been getting the game close to “feature complete” but at times that has come at the cost of optimization. This work will raise players' FPS and lower frame drops. Moving forward, features will enter the game at a slightly slower pace, giving our team more time to optimize players' experience.

Bug Fixes

This adjusted timeline will also give our QA team more time to tackle some of the nastier bugs that have been prevalent in players' gameplay experience. New features eat up a lot of our team's time, and new maps, gameplay tools, and quality of life improvements usually need some extra polish when first introduced to the game. Gradually weapon animations, in-game interactions, progression feedback, our existing maps, and more should see a large reduction in technical issues, delivering a much more polished experience.

New Key Features:

We also feel like the game’s a few key features away from being a “complete” 1.0 title, and we’d be doing ourselves a disservice in launching 1.0 without them.

Game Mode #2

Very early work in progress image.

Another big change that will be coming to No More Room in Hell 2 before our 1.0 launch is a second game mode. We want to give players a new faster paced way to play No More Room in Hell 2 that pays homage to a specific game mode in the first game. We don’t have a solid hold on a due date for our second game mode, but we expect it to come near the end of 2025/start of 2026, and before 1.0 launch.

New Maps

We’re also excited to take this time to add more maps to our library! We know that maps are our strongest tool to add replayability to the game, and further showcase the active apocalypse that envelops our survivors. While we’re still figuring out the number of maps that we can ship before 1.0 (along with our designers and artists working on a second game mode) players should expect more than 1.

This is not an expansive list of everything new coming before 1.0 launch, and we have a lot more planned & in production. Stay tuned in the following months and find out even more of what’s to come for No More Room in Hell 2!

If you want to join the conversation, hop into our Discord, leave feedback in-game, or visit

https://NMRIH2.com/support

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