RuneScape: Dragonwilds

This is going to be a list of scattered thoughts on different topics of the game from paragraph to paragraph, for final more succinct thoughts, see the tl;dr at the bottom of the review. **PROGRESSION** I'm a long time Runescape player, including Classic, 2, 3, & old school so I'm not unfamiliar with the grind but the grind here grows larger with each successive region & not in a satisfying way. Nothing expands mechanically past the first 2 major zones but everything does take longer for less reward as you go. You're pushed to increase your power level to match the region since if there's a difference of even 1 point enemies will be hitting harder & you'll be hitting softer so it becomes a struggle to catch up to the region power level yet by the time you do, you'll be about ready to move on to the next region and start the struggle over again. As an example of the grind, in the first regions you'll be easily gathering enough items with just a couple outings over an hour or so to get your tools, armour, and weapons, however in a later region some of the drops you need are exclusively from loot bags dropped by specific enemies to acquire fibres, which needs 4 fibres to make 1 thread, and then 3 thread is needed for 1 cloth. An armour set requires between 7-24 cloth depending on your combat style choice. Meaning you need up to 288 fibre from loot bag drops on enemies that you will have to wait on respawns for as each bag drops 1-2 fibre & a full cull of the region will net you maybe 40~ lootbags. You can reduce the grind by making a custom world but are punished for doing so as you are not allowed achievements if you do so, I initially went to custom after a short try at normal mode as I felt the death penalty of dropping everything except your clothes too harsh - I thought to myself naively "drop resources only would be a good compromise" but the options were either "drop everything" or "drop nothing" turning deaths into a teleport rather than any kind of punishment. **GAMEPLAY** Skills do feel interesting in the early game with some interesting abilities and takes on gathering but it quickly tapers off as the active unlocks get further apart & the passive gains are nearly meaningless fractions of a percent boosts, some of which do not help at all & others still can't even be noticed Examples: Runecrafting's passive buff for levelling is to increase the time allowance for picking a difficulty on the minigame to make runes, it doesn't make you any better at runecrafting. Agility's passive buff for levelling is the tiniest reduction in sprint stamina cost at -0.085% per level, you'll struggle to tell the difference even comparing a level 1 to 99. Quests likewise feel unrewarding and obtuse for the most part, There are no indicators on the map for where quests start and when you do start one whether or not you get any kind of guidance or quest markers seems random. You won't know any rewards until you finish, the quest log on the map screen offers little in way of help or organising anything, you're stuck with each quest until you finish it & quite often the rewards are just cosmetic capes rather than anything that'll help you progress, you won't actually know what you're questing for until you're done, or if you look it up on a wiki ahead of time to see if it's even worth the effort. When there are quest markers on the map it interferes with map scrolling and marker placement since if a quest area is highlighted with the mouse you cannot do anything else with the map, as such you can't set any accurate markers for quest zones. I'm hoping this gets patched. Combat is split between 3 major styles, melee, ranged, and magic. Melee is very mash until the enemy falls down, occasionally blocking, dodging, or parrying, it can be satisfying but lacks meaningful depth. Ranged is point and shoot while backpedalling, it has even less depth than melee & feels undercooked compared to both other styles. Magic is flashy, offering many elements of attacks and even providing healing, most skills also come with magical utility spells that mostly serve as a "skip actually doing this skill" such as "explode that tree into resources" "auto water my farm" "explode that ore vein into resources" etc. & while novel at first, I feel if your reward for levelling a skill is to be able to do less of that skill then something has gone wrong. **CO-OP PLAY** There's no shared co-op progress despite being marketed as a cooperative play game. Recipes, quests, map progress, & markers are unique per player & cannot be shared. As a result it doesn't feel like a team game at all even in combat as there's no aggro management. Crafting also becomes a chore as xp is awarded to whoever picks up the finished product rather than the person who initiated the task so your xp can be unintentionally sniped as all items magnetise to any nearby players inventory if they step too close. **GRAPHICS/AUDIO** The game has an incredibly saturated lighting system, put a torch down and now everything is bright orange, there is no neutral lighting available so everything is either incredibly bright godrays and coloured light painting everything it touches or pitch darkness with very little in between, it's a bit exhausting on my eyes. The day/night cycle often introduces very sudden lighting changes, in some parts of the world becoming too dark to see a thing for a few moments before levelling out to a middle ground of brightness, torches are available but a magical light isn't available until you've done a ton of runecrafting and even then both these light sources are bright orange, ruining the visuals of many biomes. A lot of the music involves remixes from Runescape's own classic tracks, I enjoyed a lot of these & the nostalgia burned strong, no complaints there at all. Occasionally there were unexplained sounds that only occurred in co-op, I believe some sound sources don't have a range limit so a player casting a spell on the other side of the map plays as if they cast it while stood next to you, this most commonly happened with the windstep spell and will hopefully be fixed in a patch. **STORY** Lore-wise the game takes place after the Elder God Wars saga of Runescape 3 and contains many notes & dialogue regarding this which could serve as spoilers for those who care about that. You can play the game with no knowledge of Runescape's world though & it mostly serves as a "yeah that happened" nod to events more than anything else. The writing is reminiscent of Runescape's brand of dry humour & hits well for the most part if you don't mind a lot of reading as the only voiced segments are between region introductions. Key characters that are along with you for the journey don't offer much outside of being static quest dispensers. The wise old man, Vannaka the slayer master, Doric the smith, & Zanik the cave goblin stand around at pre-determined spots ready to ask you for favours or give tutorials. They never move, they never fight, they never do...anything. There are multiple copies of them pasted across the map in each region ready to exposit at you & their redesigns are rather questionable with Zanik in particular that I want to draw attention to. Zanik is from a race of short, hunchback cave goblins who lived in the dark for hundreds of years that grew very large eyes to adapt to the darkness yet here Zanik looks like she dropped straight out of a harem anime, where are her cave goblin eyes? Why does she have the stature and shape of a lonely isekai writer's fantasy love interest? She's not a cave goblin anymore, she's a dang anime girl & I'm ranting way too long about this. **tl;dr** - Co-op lacks team mechanics & doesn't feel cooperative - Progression doesn't feel rewarding after the early game & gets progressively worse - Lighting is an aggressively saturated attack on the eyes - They turned Zanik into an anime girl goblin??? - Music's nice oh damn I hit the character limi

First of all, this is not a complete release. They still have major features planned in roadmap, but slapping 1.0 helps the sales apparently. Even if that is ignored, game also features: - corrupting your save file if you change name of character; - corrupting your save file, just because it feels like it; - UI and UX issues like not being able to use burrows if it is overlapping with a quest objective; - questionable UX decisions. I get using players instead of professional QA during early access, but expecting your players to playtest 1.0 release is a bit much. Second of all, this is not a coop game. You are not playing with your friends, you are playing next to them. - recipes can't be shared; - experience for craft is awarded to however picks up the product; - waypoints can't be shared; - quest progress can't be shared; But my personal favorite is that there is abolutely no mechanics to manage aggro. Which leads to this jolly scenario: Melee fighter initiates the mob. Mob ignores the fighter and rushes towards the archer. Archer wants their personal space respected and repositions. Mob chases archer. Fighter chases mob. Queue the Benny Hill music. This is kinda manageable during regular exploration and clearing, but becomes very annoying during boss fights cuz as soon as boss decides to switch from fighter to ranged DPS, damage dealt takes a severe dip as damage dealer is now also doing acrobatics, while fighter can't really do any reliable damage to a moving target.

[h1]A Good Game, But Not Ready for 1.0[/h1] I'll update this review as development progresses because I genuinely think there's a good game underneath all of this, and I want to see it improve. [h2]Coming From a Long-Time RuneScape Player[/h2] For some context, I've been playing RuneScape for a very long time. I started back with RuneScape Classic and have played pretty much every major version of RuneScape since. When Dragonwilds came along, I was excited by the idea of experiencing RuneScape's world, skills, creatures, lore and progression in a proper modern 3D game. Dragonwilds isn't really that. It's much more of a survival/crafting game set within the RuneScape universe than a modern 3D version of RuneScape itself. [b]And that's actually fine.[/b] Once I stopped expecting "3D RuneScape" and treated Dragonwilds as its own game, I found a lot here that I genuinely enjoy. The RuneScape influence is everywhere, the world is fun to explore, and I've had plenty of good times playing it with friends. My problem isn't that Dragonwilds is a bad game, or that it isn't the RuneScape game I originally imagined. [b]My problem is that I don't think it's ready to be called 1.0.[/b] [h2]Bugs & Stability[/h2] During my time playing 1.0 I've personally experienced: [list] [*] Rubber-banding enemies [*] Delayed or completely missing hit registration [*] Inconsistent parries [*] Animations and sounds getting stuck [*] Equipment failing to render [*] Enemies failing to respawn [*] Falling through terrain [*] Inventory and spell wheel becoming completely unusable [/list] That last one has happened repeatedly while playing on our dedicated server. I'll suddenly lose the ability to open my inventory or spell wheel entirely. The only way I've found to fix it is to leave the server and reconnect. Sometimes even that isn't enough and I have to [b]completely restart the game.[/b] These aren't obscure bugs I've encountered by deliberately trying to break something. They're affecting things you're doing constantly: fighting, moving around, using your inventory and simply playing the game. A few bugs in a newly released game are understandable. But when problems are regularly interfering with core gameplay, it's difficult to understand why the game was considered ready to leave Early Access. [h2]Crafting & Inventory Need Work[/h2] This is probably one of my biggest frustrations outside of the bugs. The crafting system becomes increasingly clunky as you progress. Workbenches [b]throwing crafted items onto the floor[/b] instead of providing sensible storage or output feels particularly strange. Then there's the sheer number of materials you're expected to manage. Different threads, cloths, hides, leathers, ores, ingots and other increasingly specialised resources start piling up across different chests and crafting stations. I'm completely fine with a survival game having lots of resources. Complexity can make crafting and progression more interesting. But: [b]Having lots of materials isn't the same thing as having crafting depth.[/b] There needs to be a better system for organising and accessing everything. When I'm spending more time trying to remember which chest contains which particular type of thread than actually crafting something, the system has crossed from being complex into being tedious. [h2]There Are Lots of Smaller Problems Too[/h2] This is where Dragonwilds really starts to feel unfinished. Some mechanics and unlock requirements are poorly explained. Combat can feel clunky. Progression can sometimes feel shallow. There are numerous quality-of-life features that feel strangely absent. None of these things individually ruin the game. The problem is that they keep piling on top of each other. A clunky system here, a missing QoL feature there, an unexplained mechanic, an enemy rubber-banding during combat, something not responding properly, another trip through your storage because you need a particular crafting material... Eventually you stop thinking: [i]"This game has a few rough edges."[/i] and start thinking: [b]"Why isn't this still in Early Access?"[/b] [h2]And That's the Frustrating Part...[/h2] [b]I actually like Dragonwilds.[/b] I've put time into it because I'm enjoying it, not because I'm forcing myself through a game I hate. There's a genuinely good game here and I think Dragonwilds has a lot of potential. That's exactly why its current state is frustrating. It feels like a game that needed more time in Early Access to polish its existing systems before putting the 1.0 label on it. [hr][/hr] [h2]Conclusion[/h2] Calling something 1.0 obviously doesn't mean development has to stop. I fully expect Dragonwilds to receive more content, fixes and improvements over time, and I hope it does. But leaving Early Access should mean something. To me, it should mean that the core game is sufficiently polished, stable and complete that the developers are comfortable saying: [b]"This is the finished foundation of our game."[/b] Right now, Dragonwilds doesn't feel like it's reached that point. [b]It feels like I'm still playing an Early Access game that happens to have 1.0 written next to the version number.[/b] That's why my review is negative for now. But this isn't a review I'm writing and abandoning. As Jagex continues developing Dragonwilds, I'll come back and update it accordingly. I genuinely hope that eventually I'm changing that thumbs-down to a thumbs-up.

Negative review for one simple reason: my [b]solo game crashed because Steam servers went down[/b]. A single-player session should not depend on Steam servers, internet connectivity, authentication services, or any other online infrastructure once I'm already playing. If I'm playing solo, a server outage somewhere else should be completely irrelevant to my game. Losing progress or getting kicked out of a single-player session because an external service goes down is simply unacceptable. Please make solo play truly independent from online services. [b]EDIT:[/b] I honestly didn't expect this review to blow up, so I want to clarify a couple of things because I keep seeing the same responses in the comments. Yes, the game [b]does support offline play[/b]. When Steam was still having issues, I was able to launch the game again and continue playing offline without a problem. That's exactly why I consider this an issue. I explicitly chose [b]Solo Play[/b], yet when the online connection was lost, I was kicked out of my solo session. The game already has everything it needs to handle this gracefully: offline play works, local solo worlds work, and the game can run without those services being available. If an online connection disappears during Solo Play, it should simply drop the connection and keep the local session running. I shouldn't even notice that Steam, EOS, Jagex services, or anything else went down. And yes, I am still playing the game. I paid for it, I enjoy parts of it, and I want to keep playing it. Leaving a negative review because of one issue I consider serious does not mean I suddenly have to uninstall the game or stop using the product I bought. A Steam review is feedback and a recommendation, not a declaration that the game has absolutely no value whatsoever. If this issue gets fixed, I'll be perfectly happy to update the review accordingly.