RuneScape: Dragonwilds

Every time I play RS Dragonwilds I'm reminded somewhere there is an office of developers who hate my entire existence and are doing their best to make a game as QOL-void and disrespectful of my time as possible. I played on EA launch, and now a year later and I'm quickly reminded of all the issues that I looked forward to being fixed but never were. If you must play because your friends for whatever reason think this game is "fun" just do yourself a favor and play a ranged character, because melee is terrible and you won't be able to farm enough food to keep yourself alive because of all the damage that's impossible to avoid. Speaking of food I've farmed in every open world survival game that I've played with my friend group. So much so I've just accepted that will always be my job when we pick up a new game, but this game has made every terrible farming system look amazing. You can never really feel like you've crested a power curve and have a resource engine built to have fun, but rather always putting out the nearest fire of lacking resources or having to farm something just to repair so you can get back to actually playing the game. This game has potential, but seeing the lack of difference in the little stuff over a year I'm not holding out hope. I'll see you in a year when this game resurfaces with my open world survival rotation.

It's not great. Other than the title, a handful of characters, "skilling" system, and some gear and quest names, it has nothing in common with RuneScape. Outside of that, it’s just a very generic open-world game with building and crafting, which also not very polished. World is big and beautiful but very empty. Even animals or resources you'd need in bulk are scattered around in quite inconvenient way, making collecting resources quite a chore. Chests with random items are also everywhere, sometimes they have craft recipes inside, even ones you unlocked already. Interestingly they refill from to time, but there's not much use of it. Crafting items is fine thanks to linked chests, but processing is not so good as you have to take out items from chests all the time, currently it's not possible to group or filter items by being processed or not, it gets a little frustrating if not having separate chests for everything. Another things that you can't build things you don't know recipes for as recipes re unlocked by picking up ingredients, but it's a bit inconsistent. For example, picking up thread created by spinning flax unlocks bow, picking up feathers unlocks arrows, but picking up tar doesn't tell you can process it in kiln to get adhesive. Base building is fine, it's quite customizable and relatively cheap. Probably one bad thing about it that you can't move items, only remove and place them again. Removing gives resources back so it's technically free. One annoying part about base that it gets constantly raided by goblins. If you try to hide they'll start destroying it. After dying they leave you alove for the next couple of days. Main tip here is never stash all your gear when you at the base. Questing is bad, it's very hard to follow what characters say, they also never repeat anything beside last sentence. There's lo quest log and only way to track progress is map, which also only shows spot of interest or NPC and short not very informative summary. Dungeons aka Dragonkin vaults are quite the same, each has some upgrade to unlock and some "final" boss which is just buffed version of common vault monster. There's specific quirk related to vaults that there's numerous items requiring vault cores for craft (most notably lodestones for teleportation) which can be found only in vaults. Most have 2, sometimes 3. Having teleports next to them is useful as they "restock", allowing you to collect some every couple of in-game days or so. Bosses are surprisingly generic. Even the Act 1 final boss only has two attacks, both of which you can easily avoid just by jumping. All that build-up completely wasted, just like that. Skilling while having multiple flavors is quite tied to magic. Hate chopping trees? You will unlock chop tree spell later. Hate chopping fallen trees? Unlock spell for chopping it in logs with one cast. Hate mining or watering plants? You got the idea, there will be always some utility spell. There's not much unlocks by level, mostly increasing chance of success a little, aside of that it's spell or access to a new tier. RuneScape is quite great IP with huge potential, but in the current state it just wasting it by being RuneScape-flavored open-world game.

Great game, but fast travel needs some work I've played around 31 hours of RuneScape: Dragonwilds so far and I'm really enjoying it. The combination of survival, exploration, RuneScape skills and progression works surprisingly well, and there's a lot to do. The world also feels genuinely huge, which makes exploration exciting. However, the size of the map becomes a bit of a problem because fast travel is so dependent on Law Runes. For new characters, Law Runes are locked behind level 50 Runecrafting, while teleportation becomes useful much earlier in the game. I'm currently around level 36 after 26 hours, so level 50 still feels quite far away. You can find Law Runes from vents and other sources, but they are still difficult to keep stocked when you're constantly travelling around such a massive map. I understand that the developers don't want teleportation to completely remove the importance of exploration, but I think there should be a better middle ground. Either make Law Runes more accessible earlier, reduce the teleport cost even further, or introduce some additional fast-travel options. The map is huge, and that's one of the game's strengths, but at the same time it can turn travelling between areas into a lot of running back and forth. Especially when you have to return to your base, get resources, go back to where you were, and repeat the process. I'd also like to see more ways of making long-distance travel convenient without completely removing the survival/exploration aspect. Overall though, I'm having a great time with the game. The world, progression and gameplay loop are really good, and I'm definitely going to keep playing. I just think the fast-travel system could be improved significantly, especially for players who haven't reached 50 Runecrafting yet. 8/10 so far. Great game with a few progression/travel decisions that I think could be improved.

I'm beginning to believe that UE5 is the problem, not cheap labor that doesn't know how to work the engine. The game is unplayable without frame generation in high population areas. Even then there are horrendous frame drops occasionally. Gameplay itself is alright.

like this comment please, this game is worth it trust

What do you expect from a good survival RPG? Well, I expect to have solid progression, engaging quests, varied combat, plenty of crafting recipes, a well-designed building system, balanced difficulty, and enemies that aren’t just damage sponges. This game has none of those. Instead, it offers generic content, excessive grind, and clunky progression.

Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm only 7 hours into the game, but SO much grinding! So far I've done a couple dungeons, with were fine, but now, after all the grinding I'm getting wrecked by lvl 3 mobs, with no way to get additional gear. The entire experience just makes me want to turn off the computer until Valheim releases in a couple days.

what a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slog seriously. it doesn't justify itself. Why would I be motivated to do any of this stuff? It's a survival game with the runescape packaging. there's some njoyment to be had here. doing anything in this game is a drag. saturation adjustment slider