Dungeonborne Debuts A New Thrill In Steam Early Access: Extraction Dungeon-Crawling

A new studio is set to launch a new game idea onto Steam Early Access.

Mithril Interactive describes their game Dungeonborne as an “immersive first-person player-versus-player-versus-environment dungeon crawler.” Or, as Gematsu puts it in their report, an extraction dungeon crawler.

The aesthetic certainly screams FromSoftware, but it looks like this will be a more conventional RPG experience. You can take on the role of a Fighter, Priest, Rogue, Swordmaster, Pyromancer, Cryomancer, or Death Knight.

Perhaps more tellingly, the game will be in first person perspective, so the FromSoftware influence may be completely aesthetic, and we’re actually getting a fantasy version of Escape from Tarkov.

Mithril also promise a limited set of features for now. There are two dungeons; single player in Closeau Castle, and multiplayer in Sinner’s End.

The combat system features ten unique weapon pairings, and you can build weapons using affixes, corruptions, and gem sockets. There will be 40 unique and legendary items, and an auction house.

Finally, there’s a 3v3 arena where you can win or lose without worrying about losing your equipment.

The system requirements listed on Steam are somewhat modest, so Mithril may be looking to pitch this as an esports level game. You will neither between an i5 5600K to an i7 9700, 8 to 16 GB RAM, a GTX 1060 3 GB to a GTX 3060 Ti, and 15 GB of storage. Mithril hasn’t listed what AMD parts are compatible, and it may not quite be ready to run on Intel Arc GPUs, much less the new ARM based Snapdragon X Elite SOC.

Some curators who seem to have played the game in testing have compared it to Dark and Darker, which is very similar in concept, and was released by Korean studio Ironmace just last month, also on Early Access. It’s likely that these are only two of the first such extraction action RPGs that got released first, and we may soon be getting swamped with them in the near future.

It’s certainly not hard to see why multiple studios would come with the same idea at around the same time. Extraction shooters are a hot genre. Fantasy and medieval themed games, including RPGs, are also popular. There’s a newly discovered appetite for PvPvE live service games. So why not combine all three?

If successful, this genre may be just what the industry needs to grab at some of the audience of extraction shooters, but aren’t eager to play more new games in that genre. But we’ll see how it all plays out in the coming months.