This is quintessential Runescape in the form of a survival craft game like Valheim, progress feels very slow compared to other similar games in the genre, but that's not a bad thing.
I'll be honest, I liked Valheim but I didn't play it as much as I maybe would've because of the world system being similar to Terraria, once a resource has been drained it's gone for good, so unless you plan on exploring endlessly further or starting a new world to drain of it's resources it becomes a walking sim and I've always hated that. Dragonwilds fixes this by having a static map with respawning resources on timers just like OSRS and you can setup your own teleport system next to resources you need or want later.
You're required to manage all of your combat skills relatively evenly or at least have some skill in the melee and your choice of either Archery or Magic Casting just for a bit of DPS before you get in range. The different combat styles all have their own unique flavor of which I've elected to use Magic as I think it's the strongest.
Melee is a bit too floaty and unreactive in my opinion, adding delays to blocks and having it's own flow you need to get used to, it feels a bit better than something like Lords of the Fallen. (not the remake) Just like Runescape you're required to swap between Slashing, Piercing, or Blunt attacks depending on the enemy which means you do need to keep a few weapons on hand, this is probably the biggest downside to melee imo, other than that I think it can feel amazing hitting parries at low stamina and having it boost your stamina up rewarding skilled gameplay.
Archery has a flavor of Short Bows with faster draw speed and less damage or the absolute ballistic canons that are the Longbows if you're able to get some fully charged arrows off in the enemies heads, you can also opt out of the ADS style aiming and go for quick shots with nice spins and backwards jumps thrown in for flavor by just clicking the shoot button.
Finally my favorite is Magic, opting for a bit slower attacking overall for devastating multi-hit spells, between Wind which does the highest damage on enemies in narrow corridors and it's piercing attacks, my least favorite Water which is almost entirely AoE spells with rather low damage, or Fire spells and raining little meteor storms that pepper the enemy with good damage while applying a DoT effect. These all will have varied use just like melee weapons so you can't just stick with one spell unless you plan on doing half damage to some enemies. The real biggest downside is that you'll need to level up your Runecrafting if you plan on making this your primary damage source as every spell cast will cost a rune of the damage type you're using.
Skilling will be something you'll want to do to make the game easier for you as you progress, early levels are easily attained and you don't really have to work hard to make decent progress at the start. Personally I think fishing or agility will be the hardest to attain 99s with as respawn times on fishing points feel like they last longer than an entire day/night cycle so you WILL need to move around to consistently get exp unlike most other skills.
If you're looking for a game that rewards effort put in and don't want a subscription based game like OSRS I think this will be the game for you. If they truly do intend to listen to player feedback and shape the game around it just like OSRS I hope to see much more content coming from this game.
