Dominus Automa

In Dominus Automa your character fights without you. You don't steer it hit by hit; you program its behaviour through the Combat Matrix, a set of conditional rules along the lines of fire the AoE when five enemies stand within five metres or disengage below this health threshold. Sitting above those rules are long-term priorities: how much PvE, how much PvP, how much exploring, how much crafting.

With the rules set, your hero stays on the server around the clock even with the game closed: fighting, gathering, crafting. It also takes voice and phone commands, so you can redirect it without opening the client. Everything built around that automation is a by-the-book MMORPG, with guilds, dungeons, bosses, territory wars and a player-run economy. What changes is how you give the character orders, not the world it lives in.

The business model is still unannounced. Its Steam page lists the game as coming soon, with no price and no date, and flags in-app purchases among its interactive elements. A thread on the game's own forum has been asking since April 2026 whether it will be buy to play or free to play, with no public answer from the studio. Several genre databases file it as free to play, but that is a third-party label.

Development, meanwhile, is funded outside the game. Metashift Labs closed a pre-seed round of roughly 1 million PLN in February 2026, against a projected total budget of some 8 million, and runs a Patreon with tiers starting at $5 a month.

In development, with no release date. The furthest it has gone so far is the multiplayer playtest of August 2026: level cap 25, 24 abilities, 10 zones, 20 enemy types, 3 bosses, the debut of the Paladin class and progress that carries over between sessions. A stress test in June wrapped with more than 100 concurrent players and no crashes, according to the studio itself.

Plenty is still missing: full itemisation and several classes remain unfinished, and early-2026 builds had no persistent saves, no inventory and no gear progression. The plan announced in February pointed to a Steam demo in Q4 2026. Metashift Labs posts monthly devlogs on Steam and keeps the community on Discord; the official site gathers the links.

The studio is explicit about its target: players who drifted away from the genre after thirty and can no longer commit to a weekly raid. If you want to progress in a persistent world but your actual play time comes in twenty-minute scraps, the pitch explains itself. If what you love about an MMORPG is moment-to-moment control, here that is handed almost entirely to a rules engine.

The risk is out in the open: a small studio, no date, no confirmed model, itemisation and several classes still open. Previews from early 2026 reported technical failures in the voice control and thin content, and a game that plays itself needs a lot of content behind it for those rules to have anything to do. Interest is there: the August playtest gathered more than 6,500 sign-ups before it opened.