Guns & Dragons: 100,000 playtest sign-ups, and one number the press release does not highlight

Korean studio ABUTTON has just wrapped the first public playtest for Guns & Dragons, and it is communicating with cheerful numbers: more than 100,000 sign-ups, more than 46,000 cumulative hours played, and the 80,000 wishlist mark passed on Steam.

Let us start with the game, which has plenty to attract you. Then let us look at those numbers a little more closely, because that is our job.

What it is

A roguelite FPS, playable solo or with three, in a magitech fantasy world. You descend into caverns, dungeons and even quaint villages to blast hordes of monsters with weapons that evolve over the course of a run.

The arsenal is the first argument, and it is generous: more than forty-five firearms and bows, revolvers, shotguns, longbows, sniper rifles, each with its own feel. You can even fine-tune your weapons' functions and settings before setting out.

Character building runs through combining runes, artifacts and skills collected in dungeons, with the genre's usual promise but well articulated here: no two runs are alike. Between expeditions you develop your base, unlock facilities, craft gear infused with arcane technology, and construct a magical companion.

The studio claims a team of veterans from the studios behind Dave the Diver, Counter-Strike Online, Blade & Soul 2 and AxE, with Kim Dae-hwon leading the company and Park Jun-woo directing the game. That is a business card we have no way of verifying line by line, but it is consistent with what appears on screen.

The playtest statistics, and they are interesting

One thing deserves credit: ABUTTON is publishing data most studios keep to themselves, and it is instructive.

On weapons, the most used per tier were the Magnum HG at tier 2, the Bullet Drill AR at tier 3, the Amber Horn SMG at tier 4 and the Judgment Ray AR at tier 5. On lethality, two enemies account for most deaths: the Goblin Elite Shaman's spell represents roughly 35 percent of recorded deaths, and the Ogre Chief's club slam around 30 percent.

That last figure is the most telling, and it reads both ways. Either these two opponents are the intended difficulty spikes, and the game is well calibrated. Or two enemies totalling 65 percent of deaths signals a fairly clear balance problem, where one specific attack punishes too hard or reads too poorly. That is exactly the kind of data a studio gathers in order to fix things, and we will see at the next test.

One last notable point: difficulty level 50 was reached and cleared during the playtest. In a roguelite, knowing a ceiling was already broken through in ten days says something about the community's appetite, and about the balancing work awaiting the studio at the higher tiers.

The number worth reading carefully

And now the critical reading, because a press release remains a press release.

More than 100,000 sign-ups and more than 46,000 hours played works out, if you divide crudely, at under twenty-eight minutes per sign-up. Which would be catastrophic, except that is not what the text says: it speaks of people signing up for access, and of hours logged by those who actually played. Those are two different populations, and the release never claims otherwise.

The honest conclusion is therefore simply that we do not know how many people actually played. If it was twenty thousand, that is over two hours each, a very good result for a playtest. If it was eighty thousand, the average becomes far less flattering. Signing up for a playtest costs a click, playing it costs an evening, and the gap between the two is always considerable.

There is nothing dishonest here, this is normal communication. But a sign-up is a metric of curiosity, not of commitment. The solid figure in all this is rather the 80,000 wishlists: that one commits the player at launch.

What we want to see

No release date has been announced, the game is still in active development on PC, and further playtests are planned in the coming months with additional characters, weapons and locations. So we are not scoring it, and there are no user reviews yet.

Two things will decide its fate. The first is the feel of the shooting: in a roguelite FPS that is what you do a hundred times a run, and no quantity of runes rescues a limp weapon. The second is the balance of the difficulty tiers, precisely where the playtest statistics already point at rough edges.

One practical caveat worth flagging now: the game is announced in English, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Japanese. No French for the moment.