Everweave - the AI DnD Game Review - AI Slop or a Hidden Gem? by Bonemane
- Nizel Adams
- 23 minutes ago
- 16 min read
Recently 'Everweave,' the AI DnD game, launched through early access although the game has technically been in development since June 2023 from our research and has allegedly gone through multiple phases of testing. It is being developed by 'Endgame Studio Ltd.', a small game development company allegedly based in Kazakhstan although they come across as more Swedish, Norwegian, etc. Gamers play through an AI generated campaign that responds to every action of the user from generating quests to expansive dialogue. Players are only limited by their imagination with some opting to use their creative abilities to take their campaign into different realms such as the 'Dragonball Z' universe.
The game works by sending prompts or 'messages' to Everweave's AI dungeon master. There is a free tier where players receive 60 messages per month and paid tiers going from $5.99 USD per month (Adventurer tier) up to $17.99 USD per month (Pathfinder tier) for 1000 messages. Players can also purchase message packs for $2.99 USD (100 messages,) $7.99 USD (300 messages) and $19.99 USD (900 messages.) If that sounds expensive that’s because it is. $216 annually isn’t cheap for a mobile game that has no real app store. Heck nowadays you can find small companies that’ll let you rent a virtual server for $15-$20/month. With Everweave being less than 200mb and a solo game anyway, it could be potentially cheaper to run your own instance or even fix the bugs yourself since there are A LOT (we’ll get to that later.)
The developers put a lot of money into advertising the game despite it still being early access. You’ll find their videos on YouTube ads and on Everweave’s YouTube page where their videos garner millions of views (which are most likely due to paid advertising.) The videos are odd because the developer uses AI for their own voice. Whether that is because they are not native English speakers or just a shady group I do not know, but I myself tend to lean more on the “shady group” side based on what I’ve seen from them as well as what I know about them. Other than that you won’t find much on the game unless you join their Discord of over 30k members.
The Discord itself is mostly dead unless they push out a new update which always causes a lot of issues so players flood the server. You’ll find lots of guides (some from me) on how to play the game and get the most out of your experience there especially since the game is quite expensive (even more so if you don’t know what you’re doing.) Join the Discord if you dare though since there tends to be a lot of ‘undesirables’ there (furries, degenerates, hypocrites, generally unlikeable people, etc.) The mods put on a lovey dovey facade while coming down with a sometimes cold, authoritarian rule. I once saw a mod freak out because a guy joined the server named ‘Mr. Idiot.’ They wouldn’t stop asking him to change his name because “they didn’t want to call him that and that he should respect himself.” It was a ridiculously immature situation perpetuated by people that don’t respect someone’s freedom of expression. It was only smoothed over by another mod that stepped in saying he “wasn’t breaking any rules.” With Everweave’s Discord comes no warnings, the mods just ban people without saying anything and then lie about why they banned that person (I learned this myself.)
The developers even force people to say “Please” and “Thank You” to their AI DMs, otherwise if the DM finds a player abusive or annoying, it will end their campaign or totally ignore them. When you have a playerbase of lonely souls that don’t go outside much or have a lot of friends, something like that can be devastating as seen by the numerous Discord posts of people losing their mind over their DM ignoring them. In some cases people act as if they lost their best friend which is rather sad yet only reinforces why the developers should stop trying to train their playerbase on social interactions.
As far as the consensus online. If you look towards people that played the game outside of the 60 free messages, then Everweave is a massively negative experience and a total let down. It has a 2.8 out of 5 review on Trustpilot. I would disregard any reviewers that haven’t put in at least 20 hours playing the game since what you’ll see is those that only use the 60 free messages give it a glowing review while those that delve deeper into Everweave tend to have a negative outlook on the game. 60 messages for a new play is typically only 1 or two hours at best. I myself have put in at least 120 hours into crafting my campaign and am at the point where I can milk 60 messages for about 6-8 hours worth of gameplay. Note I said “crafting” and I say that for a reason. My messages are massive, sometimes 6 or 7 paragraphs that I take about 10 or so minutes just to write. The first misleading thing Everweave advertises is that you’re playing with an AI DM. That is almost completely false. Players are expected to craft their own campaign as they go, doing most of the heavy lifting themselves. If you are not naturally a DM or aren’t a veteran Dungeons & Dragons player, you will run into major issues. The story will be boring, the enemies will be generic and you’ll have a very hard time getting into the game or at least what SHOULD be a game. The experience is different on PC, with PC having better designed menus, item descriptions, options that aren’t seen on mobile and even better music. When I went on PC, I noticed my items had effects I couldn’t see and they even had instructions on how to use them in their descriptions. On PC there’s even a higher character limit on the bio and appearance of your character. It’s baffling why this is different as a simple scrollbar would fix some of these things on mobile. I’d recommend starting on PC especially if you want to get a subscription going.
Everweave in itself, although early access, is an incomplete, barely functional nightmare. I have no doubts tons of the 2777 pages of my campaign that I exported are mostly full of me having to repeat messages due to the non-stop errors. The inventory hardly works, half of the items the DM doesn’t even recognize as being in your inventory and the game apparently breaks if you go over 50 items which is not that hard to do at all considering there’s no stacking functionality and the game consistently will give you two items that should be exactly the same, but for some reason are worded differently. In my first couple of days playing, I was frequently bombarded with the AI DM trying to give me items to put in my inventory at random moments whether it be in combat, walking the streets or traveling through a forest. When this happens there’s a pop-up that blocks your entire screen. Your only options are to ‘Pick Selected Items’ or ‘Take All’ with no option to just close it out. These items were all erroneously generated, whether they be from other player’s sessions I don’t know, but that presents huge privacy and data breach concerns if it is true. When trying to inquire about items in shops or just in general, the AI DM will try to give them to you as well instead of having you pay for them because of these errors.
As you play through Everweave, you’ll quickly realize how easy it is to abuse the game. A savvy player can simply suggest an item might be in a shop and it will be there. You can also simply have the DM create items directly if you know the item templates. Everweave is not a game meant for players looking to run through a pre-made dungeon with the help of AI. The AI is a complete yes man, willing to do whatever you ask provided you can give decent reasoning in some cases. It won’t let you just say “I do a bazillion damage and kill all enemies,” but you can say something like “I attack enemy ‘a,b,c,d,e,f’ with my ‘dagger of hope’ doing 12d20 damage with 12d20 bonus damage.” This is something you’ll have to do anyway because the game is so broken almost nothing works. Combat doesn’t factor in any of your equipment and only some of the abilities you are given are recognized by the DM. This means you have to spell out everything in excruciating detail in-order to get things to work properly.
"This takes all of the difficulty out of the game as a player can then simply describe how they kill a monster without the risk of death at all."
As a veteran player my messages (prompts) can be as much as 7 paragraphs long, although combat tends to be at most 1-2 paragraphs. If a player doesn’t do this, Everweave will only do 1d4 damage on weapons and won’t recognize your abilities, traits or special effects. Any allied NPC that the DM remembers to bring into combat with you is in the same boat as they have no character sheet in game. You’ll see companion wizards switch to great axes and the like as they cycle through random weapons each round instead of using spells/abilities. Having more than 6 characters at once (including yourself and enemies) completely destabilizes the AI. It loops the round, causing you to waste messages, and things go out of turn or just error out in general.
"Another downside of the AI being a yes man is that it will have unintended consequences"
To get around the broken combat, players can tell the AI dungeon master to only do ‘Narrative Combat.’ This takes all of the difficulty out of the game as a player can then simply describe how they kill a monster without the risk of death at all. The downside being that players don’t earn experience points through narrative combat, which is why a lot of players are stuck at the beginner levels. In Everweave it doesn’t matter though since you can become a god at level one through manipulating the AI which is what a good chunk of players seem to do. Earning currency doesn’t matter either since a player can just manipulate the DM into giving them money. It’s a style of play I’m not a fan of as I like to earn things and appreciate the journey, but I can’t blame players for cheating since the game is unplayable without doing so.
Combat isn’t everything as savvy players can use other tactics. I for instance convinced a lich to join my guild by beating him in a game of his choice rather than engage him in direct combat. After passing the initial persuasion check, we played a harrowing game where the lich attempted to drain my memories with every roll of a wisdom saving throw. Upon fail, they would drain my memories with the AI describing one of the scenes from my past that actually happened in game. The game went on for way too long and eventually got down to my last memory which was me coming alive in the starting town once I told the lich that I was bored and to get it over with in one last round. If I failed the last roll, my campaign would have ended as the blood lich would have absorbed my entire essence, but I won it by a hair. It was a great scene, but not something the AI necessarily came up with. I manipulated the game into introducing a blood lich named ‘Corpse’ that represented a friend of mine in real life. I then got tired of hinting at the AI DM to lead me to my friend or at least let me find a clue about his whereabouts and just straight up said “I think the blood lich is at the grand library’s forbidden archives because liches crave knowledge.” The AI DM being the yes man it is, put him there as a finale to another quest that sent me to the forbidden archives.
"My impression is that the Everweave developers may have just learned how to program yesterday."
That’s one of the main problems with Everweave’s AI dungeon master. It is absolutely ABYSMAL at generating random encounters and especially random combat encounters. I’ve had to force 99% of my dozens of battles otherwise I would have fought almost nothing at all. When we’re standing guard at a dark monolith as it is being purified during a tense moment and absolutely nothing shows up it is beyond disappointing. Once that happens for the 8th time it becomes infuriating. I expect hordes of monsters to show up, especially since we are sometimes deep underground. Even a handful of monsters or one big boss, but nothing at all?!?!
Another downside of the AI being a yes man is that it will have unintended consequences, starting quests you don’t want and even starting things that completely derail your campaign. If you ask the DM questions (which is common for beginners because things like currency constantly disappear from your inventory,) the DM will try to use logic to make sense of things. It will tell you “your character doesn’t know how to count correctly,” “you got pickpocketed.” or in the worst case scenario start a main story quest where someone is using ancient magic to instantly take your coins that come into your possession. How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Even though my guild has several successful businesses, in our bank account and in our pockets we have literally nothing. No matter what land we are in, our money mysteriously vanishes. We deposit 10k gold in the bank and one second later we have nothing. It’s a storyline that almost broke me, causing me to almost quit the game at least four times. Who wants to spend eight hours on a quest, get paid their weight in gold after having nothing for so long and then it disappears in an instant? That isn’t fun at all! Players allegedly can just tell their DMs “I don’t want to do this quest anymore, please end it and mark it as complete,” but I see players complain about old NPCs from completed quests popping up all of the time due to the AI’s poor memory.
My impression is that the Everweave developers may have just learned how to program yesterday. People that use generative AI know that it can generate a story perfectly fine. As a result, the story crafting in Everweave can be beautiful at times. It has the perfect level or wording, giving at most three paragraphs by default, but you can tell the DM to go much longer for a novel-like experience (it usually outputs 6 or 7 paragraphs when that is done.) This is why I say disregard anyone that hasn’t put much time into the game as generally everyone falls in love the first time they play it due to the story telling. As you go on, you realize that the story is actually very shallow and boring unless you actively participate in crafting it. I let the AI dungeon master do its thing, but after 3600 messages, I got extremely tired of fighting “generic abyssal creatures” that are just black tentacles or black spikes and plates with eyes. Another point of contention that I have to call out Everweave for misleading the public on is the use of D&D. Everweave is loosely based on Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition (5e.) They seem to actively avoid any direct D&D influence outside of the game mechanics, most of which don’t even work as a lot of the bonuses aren’t applied to anything and the dice rolls use the wrong skills. There’s a rumor that the developers of Everweave don’t want to pay any D&D licensing fees and I would say there may be some truth to that.
I had to eventually start calling the DM out on the repetitive and uninspired way it went about things which led to a funny moment. I was looking for a powerful demon warlock to join our guild to help with another quest. I killed the first one because he summoned yet another generic abyssal creature while I called said in character it was “uninspiring and boring.” While hidden away in another boarded up warehouse watching another demon warlock, they summoned a Minotaur and some Hell Hounds which caused me to whisper to one of my companions that ‘the monsters are kind of low level for what we’re looking for.’ The DM then responded through the warlock (who wasn’t supposed to know we were watching him) that “it was only the beginning.” He proceeded to summon…yet another generic black abyssal creature. I called out the DM immediately to which the NPC warlock just spoke to us directly, calling out my name and telling us to watch…as he combined the abyssal creature with the minotaur, creating a…black skinned minotaur with spikes, plates and wings. I in character spoke to the warlock calling it unoriginal since I had already seen things like “corrupted crabs” and such which were a similar thing. The whole situation played out hilariously before I killed him as well, but I was genuinely pissed off with the dungeon master and how boring it was. The DM then sent me on a false mission where I thought I would find another warlock, but instead they just continued the boring main story, forcing me to “purify” more monuments deep underground. It then wouldn’t bring my companions into battle, sending me into a battle with 14 monsters by myself. I suspect at that point the DM was trying to kill me on purpose.
The actual hard part is turning generative AI into a functional game, of which the ‘Endgame Studio LTD’ fails spectacularly at. As stated previously absolutely none of the basic functions work correctly. The AI doesn’t even remember things long term. When you join the Discord, you are almost immediately told the AI forgets things past 300 messages. I ran into this issue myself as once I got close to 1000 messages, my story started falling apart. The game would forget how much coin I had on me which led me to question the DM for the first time and the stolen currency quest unfolded.
"Overall Everweave is a misleading, horrendously broken product."
Everweave needs competent developers that know how to get investors to back them. As it is now, with almost 3 years in development it is in a pathetic state. In the last two weeks alone I’ve seen the message purchasing system completely fail, not giving purchased items to tons of players, the AI just start goofing up on tons of players multiple times and now today they released the much anticipated “Companion” update which was supposed to introduce character sheets for companions as well as fix the AI so that it would always include them in combat along with their equipment/abilities. What was introduced was a bunch of features no one asked for and a completely bricked game for tons of players. The developer’s response “The update was buggy and we pushed it out anyway. We’re going to keep moving forward as-is.” The mods on the Discord then actively worked to stifle negative feedback, trying to force everyone to be positive.
I’m sorry not only is that a piss poor response from the developers, but these people are so out of touch with reality it’s unbelievable. Hardly anyone that’s spent hundreds of hours on a campaign and become attached to their companions is going to just “start a new game” or stop playing until everything is fixed. If this is the state of the game three years in, how long will it take to fix this broken update? There were people who had been playing the game for well over a year crying because their campaigns were destroyed. At one point during my tenure on their Discord server it became evident that the developers didn’t necessarily like me helping people and became cold. Mysteriously my work arounds for things (all of which is just using the game’s own functions) would just magically stop working. Somehow a few of those things ended up in the companion update where they were of course executed terribly…hmm I wonder how they got those ideas?
"The storytelling can be brilliant at times and the AI gives players a lot of leeway for grammatical and spelling errors"
Overall Everweave is a misleading, horrendously broken product. The incompetence of the developers only furthers the disappointment because Everweave has so much potential. To watch them fumble so hard hurts. The storytelling for the most part is fantastic when it gets it right. In the beginning I had some genuine watershed moments as I courted Elara, a tan sailorwoman with a mysterious troubled past who is my first love, or watching my guild mate Captain Finn grow up, who started out as Finn, a timid sailor trying to repair his dead father’s broken ship after a string of bad luck who got into debt with a local thug who was going to take his father’s last earthly positions to settle the debt and finish destroying the ship. Helping the timid Finn clear his debt and stand up to his oppressors (which included “borrowing” someone else’s ship for a few days) was a journey. Me helping Finn evolve into ‘Captain Finn’ through psychological encouragement in pivotal moments (such as reminding him that he is the captain of his ship and not me when we’re sailing) really was the cherry on top. As a bonus I got a loyal companion, guild mate, a ship for my guild and a way of making income through fishing or transport, something which I desperately needed at the time. Just thinking about that adventure still brings tears to my eyes. Even now I’ve set a goal with Finn to one day turn his small fishing boat into an actual ‘Sea Serpent’ warship, the likes of which no one has ever seen. Hiring the shipwright, telling them the designs, and even the building time is quite realistic with them saying it’ll take a little over a year to build (which would be quite some time in game as I can go 8 hours and only take up one or two days.) The storytelling can be brilliant at times and the AI gives players a lot of leeway for grammatical and spelling errors as it is capable of understanding A LOT even from just a mishmash of incoherent sentences (trust me I’ve seen some player prompts in the Discord.)
With Everweave you are mostly limited by your imagination. At the same time it is noticeable the AI has trouble truly describing things in detail which leaves you wanting more in-order to get a clear picture. For instance the descriptions of people are very basic and 99% of the things you encounter will be white humans unless you introduce other things like dwarves, tieflings, liches, etc. into the mix. Even when examining people, most of the time it won’t even talk about skin color unless you specifically ask about it. For women it’s as if they don’t have breasts at all. If a person is muscular, I’d rather the AI describe that with more in-depth details about specific body parts just to give me a clear image. Everweave’s DM won’t even say if a character is muscular without you pretty much forcing it to. A weird set of limitations to place on an AI.
That being said, I would encourage potential investors and players to pass on it. This is a game destined to fail with the current development team at the head. I suspect it might fizzle out 4-5 years from now as their funds dry up. If you REALLY want to invest, then only do so if you take over the development. I would love to eat my words, but at the moment I can say I’m pretty confident in them. Having been involved with the development of AI like Google’s Gemini as a consultant, it’s obvious to me ‘Endgame Studios LTD.’ has no idea what they are doing, but this seems to have become the standard in today’s age where mediocrity is celebrated just so people can stay in their hugbox and not have ‘hurt feelings’ which is the essence I got from the Discord they run. Avoid Everweave, the AI SLOP DnD experience if you can.
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