DragonSword: Awakening Guide
Continent of Orbis Field Guide
DragonSword: Awakening is an anime-style open-world action RPG from Hound13, built in Unreal Engine 5. You play Lute, travelling toward Orbis and swept into mercenary life. This guide covers the systems that decide fights: Status Ailments, Signal Skills and team building.
- Playable Heroes 19
- Engine Unreal Engine 5
- Release Jul 22, 2026
- Install size 25 GB
- Languages 11
- Latest Patch 1.0.10
If this is your first hour
Three pages that cover the systems new players misread in their first few hours — plus the live record of what each patch changes.
Beginner guide
Who Lute is, what a mercenary run looks like, and the one system you must understand before the first real fight.
Status Ailments & Signals
Tag-team combat is the whole game. Here is how stacking ailments feeds into Signal Skill combos.
Cooking
Combining ingredients found across Orbis is a real progression system, not a side activity.
Patch tracker
1.0.10 is live, 1.0.11 is dated for 3 September, and the Workshop policy lasted zero days. Every update, recorded.
Everything we have written
Every section below is a hub — open it to see each individual guide.
What is DragonSword: Awakening?
DragonSword: Awakening follows Lute, a boy travelling toward Orbis, the first kingdom built by humankind. He falls in with Johnny, a mercenary, and Castella, an Elf, and is pulled into mercenary life as a shadow spreads over the continent. It is an open-world action RPG, not a roguelite — one persistent map, eight story chapters, nothing resets. Combat is the part most guides get wrong. You field three Heroes and control one at a time, and each carries two Active Skills and two Signal Skills. Signal Skills have no cooldown; they arm when a specific **Status Ailment** lands on the target. That single rule is what makes team building a question of overlapping ailment coverage rather than raw damage — three Heroes who each apply an ailment nobody else responds to will never chain, no matter how good their individual numbers look. Two systems surprise people in the first hour. There is **no natural HP regeneration**: out of combat you heal at a Goddess Statue of Organa, in combat only Lute has an on-demand heal, and you can carry just two equipped consumables. That is why Cooking is a progression system here and not a side activity. And some enemies take no damage at all until struck with the right element — if your damage feels ignored, read the environment before you rebuild your gear. The Steam release is buy-to-play with **no gacha and no paid characters**. Eight Heroes join through the story; the other eleven are bought in the Exchange with Fate's Invitation tickets the game hands out as you play. Four more — Ryza, Jerome, Veronica and Logan — are on the roadmap, and Hound13 has stated they are part of the full version rather than paid DLC. This guide is written from the Steam store listing, Hound13's own patch notes and announcements, player-written Steam guides and Steam's public achievement statistics. Every page ends with the sources it was checked against, and where something is not documented the page says so rather than filling the gap. That matters for this game in particular: it shipped on 22 July 2026, and most of what currently circulates about it is auto-generated from the store page.
- Developer / Publisher
- Hound13 Inc.
- Release date
- 22 July 2026
- Platform
- Windows (SSD strictly required)
- Price at launch
- $29.99 USD
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Modes
- Single-player, online co-op
- Interface languages
- 11 interface/subtitle languages; Korean is the only full-audio language
Questions people ask before buying
How many characters does DragonSword: Awakening have?
There are 19 playable Heroes. Each has distinct Status Ailment abilities, which is what decides who they combine well with rather than raw damage numbers.
How does DragonSword: Awakening combat work?
You stack Status Ailments with Active Skills, then chain Signal Skills for combos. Heroes switch in and out of battle through Switching Signals, so a fight is a relay rather than one character.
Is DragonSword: Awakening on PS5?
Not yet, and no platform has been named officially. Hound13's official FAQ (Steam, 28 July 2026) says, verbatim: "Currently, the game is only available on Steam. Console platform service is in preparation. Platforms and release timing have not yet been finalized, and we will announce details as soon as they are confirmed." Reports naming PlayStation or Switch specifically are running ahead of that statement — the FAQ names no platforms.
Does DragonSword: Awakening need an SSD?
Yes — the store page states an SSD is strictly required. Installing on an HDD may cause extended loading, texture pop-in and framerate drops. Install size is 25 GB.
Does DragonSword: Awakening have co-op?
Yes. The Steam categories list Multi-player, Co-op and Online Co-op alongside single-player.
How many bosses does DragonSword: Awakening have?
Sixteen named bosses are confirmed by name across Steam's achievement list and Hound13's patch notes — nine tied to Subduer achievements and seven to Conqueror achievements. No source publishes HP, damage or resistance values for any of them, so our [boss page](/guides/bosses/) lists names, difficulty gates and global clear rates rather than a stat table.
How many achievements are in DragonSword: Awakening?
Sixty Steam achievements, seventeen of them hidden — patch 1.0.9 added the sixtieth, a Nightmare clear of Barduk the Corrupted. Steam withholds the hidden conditions and Hound13 has never described them, so the [achievements page](/guides/achievements/) prints names and global unlock rates for those rather than guessed unlock steps. Rates were re-read on 1 September 2026 and move over time.
How long is DragonSword: Awakening?
The producer's own estimate is roughly 10 to 15 hours for the main story, or about 20 hours to complete all eight chapters. That figure comes from Hound13 rather than from aggregated player data, and it does not account for the Tower of Trials, familiar collection or achievement hunting.
Can you play DragonSword: Awakening with friends?
Yes, with different caps depending on the content: two players for subjugation content and three for raids. Joining is by invite code. See [co-op and multiplayer](/guides/co-op-and-multiplayer/) for what the patches have and have not fixed — several commonly repeated claims about offline play and cross-platform support are not confirmed by any Hound13 statement we could verify.