Tag Archives: RuneScape: Dragonwilds

The Steam Winter Sale 2025 Wraps Up with Awards and Stats

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We have arrived at that grim first Monday of the new year.  Here it is cold and wet and gray out and it is time to get back to work and for some reason the state likes to schedule a whole bunch of things to happen on the first Monday of the month so I have a mound of problems on my plate today.

And on top of that, Steam’s Winter Sale is wrapping up… will have wrapped up by the time this post goes live.  So it goes.

Steam Winter Sale 2025

But what is a winter sale but a slight turning of the dial from the norm?  Well, most Steam sales are like that, but winter has a few bonuses to go along with it.  For example, the Steam Awards.

Nothing I voted for in the Steam Awards won.  I have no investment in most of the categories, so those are mostly just a guess as to which title I think will win… but I am usually able to guess correctly on something.  Not this year.  Here are the winners.

The 2025 Steam Awards Winners

Game of the Year went to Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I guess shouldn’t have been a surprise.

The only category I had some mild investment in was the Labor of Love category, where I voted, once again, for No Man’s Sky.  Hello Games has really kept things going for over nine years now.  But, as happened last year, Baldur’s Gate III won.  It shouldn’t even have qualified one year in, in my opinion at least, and two years since launch isn’t all that convincing.

It turns out this popularity contest is just a popularity contest or something!  Imagine that.

And my pick for outstanding visual style, My Little Puppy, was also snubbed.

My Little Puppy

Being nominated was the real prize for this title I suppose… though I am just now noticing that the puppy appears to have a halo over its head.  This may have been a darker pick than I realized.

Anyway, the link to all of that is at the end of the post.

Then there is the Best of Steam 2025.  These show the top 100 titles over seven categories, including sections for VR and Steam Deck.  But really only the top sellers and most played are interesting to me.  They are broken out into Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze sections, with Platinum being the top 12, though they are not ordered within each category.

This year the Platinum tier top sellers were as follows:

Steam 2025 – Top Sellers

Certainly some of the usual suspects on there.  How DOTA 2 and Counter Strike 2 continue on forever I do not know.

I suppose the surprise on there is Schedule I, an early access indie title, though the bigger surprise for me is that Civilization VII didn’t make the cut, landing down in the silver tier.

As for games I play, No Man’s Sky did sneak into the Bronze tier, which isn’t bad for a nine year old title that is buy to play with no DLC available.

On the most played side of things, the Platinum tier had the following:

Steam 2025 – Most Played

Again, some of the usual suspects in there, including the aforementioned DOTA 2 and Counter Strike 2., along with GTA V and Stardew Valley.  Also, the surprise again was Civilization VII being down in the silver bracket.  When has a new Civ title been that low in either, especially with almost a full year since launch?  It did make it to Platinum for new releases, but not in the larger groups.

Then, down in Bronze were No Man’s Sky and Valheim.  People keep on playing.

No Man’s Sky did make it to Platinum in the VR category… something added after launch… so it has that going for it.

Then there was the Steam Hardware Survey, again linked at the end of the post.

Steam Hardware Survey – December 2025

I am always most interested in the primary display resolution, where 1920×1080 has remained dominate by a huge margin for years.  But that dominance is shrinking.  It was 53.68% at the end of 2025, but 55.98% in 2024, 60% in 2023, and 65% back in 2022.

That still isn’t enough movement to get some companies to acknowledge that larger resolutions exist, but smart ones, like ArenaNet, have acted.  Guild Wars now looks great on my my 3440×1440 screen (which represents just 3.65% in the Steam survey) unlike some Middle-earth titles I could mention.  Maybe they’ll get with the program in 2026, though I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Finally, the big question:  Did I buy anything during the sale?

I did!

I purchased Icarus, Blue Prince, and RuneScape: Dragonwilds.

Potshot had mentioned Icarus as a possible next title, and it was $3.50, so why not?

Blue Prince has been getting a lot of talk, so I grabbed that on sale.

And RuneScape: Dragonwilds is another survival co-op title that has been getting some traction… and it was on sale, so it is there in my backlog waiting for me to find the time to try it out.

So that is it, the end of 2025 and the Steam Winter Sale.  Now we’re on to 2026.

Related:

Friday Bullet Points about Coming Attractions in the Midst of the Holidays

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It is Friday and I once again have a few items I want to cover but which I couldn’t quite bring myself to go all in on for a whole post.

That said, I am pretty sure I could have made a full post out of four of the six points, but I am also in that situation where I have more posts in progress than there are days left in the year.  So I am noting down the essence of a few topics so I have a foundation for later posts.

The EverQuest team put up an announcement about their plans for Time Locked Progression servers (TLPs) for 2026.  Business as usual in some ways, as we get some sort of special rules server out of them every year.

Fangbreaker – the 2025 server that was a bit of a snooze

Except 2026 is going to be a bit different.  They have two servers planned, Frostreaver and Lethar.  The former will launch in May and the latter later in the year.

For Frostreaver they have polls setup in the forums to allow players to decide what the rules of the server will be when it launches.  The questions include things like:

  • What expansions should be unlocked at launch
  • Should beastlords and berserkers be available at launch
  • When should the server end
  • What should the xp rate be like
  • Should it allow multi-boxing

Along with other things like should there be special bonuses, what should they be, when should they unlock.  All sorts of things.

The whole thing is illuminating as it highlights both the mindset of the team (they fall into some old patterns, like assuming that after Planes of Power it is all downhill) and giving a sense of what parameters they can adjust easily.

This seems to me to be very much a reaction to the whole debacle around The Heroes Journey, which Daybreak has alleged was hurting their business by siphoning off players, at least until they got an injunction to shut it down.

My sense is that unless they can roll a version where you can solo any class through all the content… except maybe raids… but why not raids as well… that they are not going to scratch the itch that THJ was covering.

So we shall see how that comes together.  Bhagpuss has more about it in the post I linked above.

Meanwhile, not much was said about Lethar except that it will arrive later in the year, will start at The Serpent’s Spine, and will include a “personal loot” feature.

TSS was the 2006 expansion that tried to make a new, more coherent, and quest driven path for new players in the wake of WoW shaking up the MMO meta.  It is better than the usual “there’s the world, have fun” attitude of the early game, but it is also almost 20 years old and shows its age.

I don’t know if either of these plans will work, but at least the team seems to recognize that they have to shake up the special server meta a bit if they want to keep players engaged.  As I noted i that post about nostalgia, you can’t keep serving up the same plan and expect adulation every time.

We already knew that WoW Midnight was going to land on March 2, 2026, that announcement having landed a couple weeks back.

World of Warcraft Midnight

The remaining questions were “When would the pre-patch drop?” and “How much will that shit all over the 20th anniversary classic server unlock of The Burning Crusade?”

I submit once again the meme I made last time to sum up how it looks from where I sit.

Toy Story Meme of Woody being dropped with the phrase "I don't want to play with you anymore" and TBC printed over Woody

TBC players feeling this right now

TBC Classic pre-patch lands on January 13th, then a week later all focus will be on WoW Midnight and the lands of classic will be shoved into the background as the two pre-patch events run in parallel.

Maybe I am over-reading this, but I once again regret assuming that Blizz wouldn’t crowd out one launch with another, as has been their policy in the past.  Redbeard explores this more in a post of his own.

Blizz has a whole post about what is coming, linked above, but here are the bullet points they chose to throw out:

  • New Demon Hunter Specialization—Devourer
  • New Race and Class Combination: Void Elf Demon Hunters
  • Class Combat Design Updates
  • Stat and Item Squish
  • User Interface Updates
  • Transmogrification Updates
  • Player vs. Player (PvP) Training Grounds
  • Housing Early Access
  • Pre-expansion event
  • The Winds of Mysterious Fortune Returns

That final item appears to be a catch-up event so you can get your alts… or lapsed mains if you’ve come back to retail for housing… up to the level cap in anticipation of the new expansion.

Anyway, this is all part of what Blizz chief Johanna Faries says will be their biggest year yet.

It is the holiday season in New Eden as everywhere else, and CCP has been running its usual Winter Nexus event, with a few updates, while having PLEX sales and what not to try and cash in on the consumerism that Christmas has come to mean here in late stage capitalism.

Winter Nexus 2025

One of the posts they put out, meant to remind you that you had best start collecting the daily login rewards if you want to get the big prizes, also included an interesting line.

On 5 January, the seasonal track will extend, giving you more reasons to keep active in the ice storms.

Left otherwise unexplained, it appears that CCP has plans for an… ongoing Winter Nexus?  Are we going to have space snow until Groundhog Day?  Until the equinox?  I don’t know and CCP hasn’t told us yet.

This follows on from CCP tossing in new objectives in the back half of the Crimson Harvest event earlier this year, so apparently the crew has come to believe they can’t just do business as usual on their two remaining seasonal events and expect users to remain engaged.  Good for them.

Look, there is part of me that wants to remain angry about this, an issue with the game that they have acknowledged since at least 2016.  They have mentioned it and pushed it off for a long time.

I feel you man, I am tired of this too

But when somebody actually does something you want you shouldn’t reward them with complaints about the tardiness of their delivery.  You should encourage their efforts to achieve that objective.

So I applaud this effort.  Looking through it, it does seem like they are taking pretty small steps towards the goal of a game playable on a monitor that is larger than 1920×1080, but you have to start somewhere.  Any progress is better than no progress.  I hope that next time I feel the urge to play… I already did a run to Mordor this year, so it may be a bit… that the team will have a more workable solution that involves less of me squinting and getting my face close to my 3440×1440 monitor too see what a tool tip says.

Meanwhile, I have to find a new prediction as I can’t just run with “SSG will ignore large screen monitors” for another year.  And no, I am not going to go back and give them credit for 2025 as they did not make the Dec. 15 deadline.

On the rare occasion where I write about RuneScape and/or Jagex, I am prone to bringing up the fact that RuneScape is the only successful title they have ever shipped.

This is actually not uncommon.  There are a lot of tech companies that ride on one product.  It isn’t even a matter of founders having just one good idea.  Often success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time with just the right feature, and just being lucky.

There is an alternate timeline where Orkut, Google’s first run at social media, which came out just ahead of Facebook, dominates while the Wikipedia entry for Facebook starts off with telling people it WAS a social media network.

This matter of luck and timing is part of the reason Zuck keeps pouring money into new ventures like the metaverse, because he has billionaire imposter syndrome and feels the need to prove he is smart, that this wasn’t all a fluke.  And he will never succeed in that venture.

Anyway, Jagex seems to have recognized this as well as any of us and now they have two versions of their main product, RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.

But what if there were… three versions of their main product?

Enter RuneScape: Dragonwilds, which takes the RuneScape branding, their most recognizable asset, and brings it into the co-op survival genre.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds

Part of me is totally on board for this, as the co-op small world survival genre has worked pretty well for our group since Valheim… and with Minecraft before that.  The game is described as follows:

On RuneScape’s forgotten continent of Ashenfall, dragons have awoken. Gather, build, skill and craft to survive in this co-operative (1-4) survival crafting game. Only by mastering survival and uncovering ancient secrets can they hope to slay the Dragon Queen—alone or with allies.

The 1-4 player thing fits in with our needs.  So this could be a thing for us.  But will it be a thing for Jagex in the long term?

Valheim set off a rush to mimic its indie title success and now the market it crowded with options, with more coming along.  We’ve seen a lot of minor variation, but promising titles like Nightingale have already run out of money and have been left incomplete due to lack of ongoing success.

So the question is, will Jagex be able to tap into the RuneScape installed base, or is this going to be another step outside their success zone and end up like so many “me too” titles?

Finally, an interview that popped up in my feed last night featuring Greg Street of Blizzard fame, Scott Hartsman who started with EverQuest and EverQuest II before challenging WoW with Rift, and Rich Vogel who started back on Meridian 59 and went on to Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, exploring the state of MMOs in the west and whether that is a dead genre at this point.

Unsurprisingly, three people who have spent their careers working in the genre say it isn’t dead.

I could write a long post over-analyzing each quote and putting up real world examples that support or refute their arguments, but really their answers are not going to satisfy you if you are heavily invested in the genre.

That is not to say they do not bring up good points.  Things like there not being enough content at launch… content is a pretty loose term and can mean whatever people want it to mean… to people valuing their time differently here in the third decade of the 21st century are certainly legitimate arguments.

But funding seems to play heavy on their minds, the feeling being if only the right financing package was there, then they could deliver a success, something all the more difficult to achieve in this time of downturn in the industry.

And, of course, what is an MMO anyway?  There is some nebulous set of lines drawn where if you change too much from the WoW model then you’re not an MMO and it doesn’t count.

As one of those players heavily invested in the genre, I do not spare myself of blame.  The problem with people like me is that we want another MMO that will make us feel like we did with EverQuest in 1999 or WoW in 2004 or whatever… and that is an impossible task.  If you clone the original, then it feels tired and if stray too far… well, nobody really does that because they are afraid of losing people like me.

So maybe that is the problem? A problem?

I don’t know.  I thought kids these days did everything on their phones.