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The medieval setting is very in fashion right now, and along with the success of Manor Lords and the upcoming Norland, another survival crafting RPG is continuing to build success after a rocky launch. The Bellwright release was marred with negative Steam reviews, but regular updates from developer Donkey Crew is seeing its player count and user score slowly continue to climb as it fixes bugs and adds additional features.
On launch day, Bellwright arrived to ‘mixed’ Steam user reviews, landing a 52% rating. However, daily updates have continued to roll out since it arrived in early access, and within a few days that score had risen to a ‘mostly positive’ 72%. Now, 11 days after the game’s launch, it sits at 77%, and its concurrent player count has climbed to a peak of 13,709, with the survival RPG consistently topping 11,000 concurrent players a day.
Our own Bellwright early access impressions find potential to be had, but remarks on the slightly shallow systems at launch and notes, “the developer needs to use early access as a chance to think hard about what it wants Bellwright to do particularly well – the thing that’s going to make it stand out from the pack.” The good news is that Donkey Crew looks to be eager to continue iterating and polishing on that solid base with updates arriving on a daily basis throughout the week.
The last five days have seen upgrades including improvements to the raid mechanics, increased warehouse storage, the ability to add rules and filters to your food cellar, reworked recipes and research options, improved logic to help production chains run smoothly, map optimizations, autosaves, and a save backup system. There have also been plenty of smaller quality-of-life tweaks, bug fixes, and solutions for common crashes.
While there’s a long journey ahead in early access, it seems like Bellwright is moving steadily in the right direction, and the player response has been equally positive. Donkey Crew says it is “currently working on a feature roadmap to share with all of you,” where we can expect to get a clearer idea of what the upcoming weeks and months look like. “We strongly believe in keeping you in the loop of our development and progress,” the team concludes.
If you’re not quite ready to jump in for yourself yet, there are lots of the best survival games to sate all your scavenging, crafting, and building desires. Or you can immerse yourself in the best medieval games on PC if you’re a particular fan of the period.
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