RuneScape: Dragonwilds Reviews

This is by FAR the most rage inducing game I have ever played. The input lag is abysmal - swing your weapon and land a hit 3-5 business days later if you're lucky. Every single enemy is OP. The stamina system needs to go completely, 3 swings of your weapon and your character is gassed. I can't walk two feet out of my front door without being attacked by something. Dodge and enemy? Lol, they swing at you from across the map and land a hit. Any enemy that uses a ranged weapon has laser aim, only way to avoid getting hit is to doge right at the last millisecond. In my last session, I was being chased by wolves who were already killing me, then a dragon swoops down and spits acid on me, gg. The fucking spell animations - dude, for the love of god, shorten these, its almost impossible to enchant a weapon in battle because there is a 6 minute animation before the enchantment is applied, I wanted to pull my hair out with this. No game has ever made me as angry as this steaming, stinking, pile of excrement has. I have just under 8 hours in the game, that's enough for me, sadly I cannot refund but at least I got it on sale I guess. I could go on but I will stop there. Do not buy this game if you care about your mental health.

basic survival game with a runescape skin and less engaging mechanics than RS clunky combat, braindead AI, vaults are boring. "It's early access" I hear you cry. Yes, that's the common strategy for underwhelming games. Start with expectations low, so they slightest common sense changes or effort looks genius. Just wait for the game to be a finished product so you don't have to slog through 70% of the game and get 30% new content when it's done. Just a shame the 70% was wasted on an unfinished product. Stop putting games in early access and just have open/closed betas. By the time the game is actually finished most players will have almost nothing to do aside the "endgame" which will likely turn out to be even more tedious and droll than the meat and potatoes of the game.

Overall, this game has a ton of potential! It took me about 24 hours to complete the current content through the final boss and I was thoroughly emerged the whole time. The graphics and settings are beautiful, the pacing between exploration, fighting, farming and home building felt natural, and the mechanics were engaging and fun. With all that being said, the game is obviously still in early access (obviously...) so there is a ton of room for improvement. To me that is a object of opportunity rather than disappointment, this game has a ton of potential to develop into something that is worth of the Runescape name. It's also worth noting that I played completely solo. Here is what I liked: -Beautiful and smooth graphics. -Size of the world, explorable but not overwhelming. -Dungeons were a fun challenge (especially in early game.) -Fighting mechanics were fun and engaging. When I died it was usually (usually...) because I did no manage my resources or positioning, with lots of opportunity to make adjustments to strategy and tactics. I loved (and would love to see more emphasis on this) that there were certain situations where each combat style was more useful. -Gathering and crafting was a nice break from the combat and most of the upgrades felt rewarding. -I like guided questline approach to the survival game. Here is some room for opportunity: -The rewards in the chests were underwhelming, I stopped opening them at a certain point. -The quantity of goblin packs were annoying, I would rather receive less and have them be more rewarding. -The damage of fire magic seemed underwhelming unless you got the full combo (maybe that's the point?) -Introduction of the Abyssal Whip seemed premature and underwhelming. Maybe add upgrade options in the future to continue to enhance its abilities and damage so that it doesn't become obselete? -The tower to the final boss seemed like a missed oppurtunity. All that build up and you think you are going to get to battle your way to the top of the tower and nope, it just teleports you to the top. -The ending of the final boss fight seemed to wrap up to quick, the body instantly disapears before it hits the ground and the head appears in your quest inventory, you don't even get to loot him. -Near the end the dungeons were underwhelming, they did not seem to scale well in difficulty. -The perks on the gear remained the same for each tier, i'm hoping this is just early access and will be update to have some diversity. -The left click ability on the longbow was lackluster to say the least, it didn't really seem to work. Here are a few issues: -In the highlands I got knocked off the rafters that go up to the castle because the lightening struck me. I couldn't see the initial animation and by the time I heard it I was mid cast of windstep and was ANIMATION LOCKED. By the time the lightening hit me I had windstep active and was knocked off the rafters. I landed safely on a small ledge about halfway down and halfway up. I had no choice but to jump off and kill myself, which meant my gravestone was (and is to this day) stuck on the side of the cliff forcing me to rebuild. -The shortbow seemed janky, if you tried to aim it with right click and then quickly fire sometimes it would just do the left click fire ability, sometimes it would fire twice. -When building using ghost mode, if you try to remove some ghost piece sometimes it would miss the one you are aiming at and delete the wrong thing. -aiming at certain chests might open the wrong chests (might be a hitbox thing) I'm looking forward to see what this game brings, excited to see the Runescape world come to life in a survival game! Post Edit Other Ideas: -ability to leave 1 item in storage, and ability to dump all items into one storage box and have it go to where the item belongs (leveraging the F deposit functionality) -There is a cow spawning in my house. I have a strict "No Cows in the House" rule, so this is a problem... -Ability to blacklist items you pick up, and ability to automatically delete certain items.

There's Early Access and there's Runescape: Dragonwilds. This game is about two years away from being eligible for Early Access. It is so bare bones and devoid of content that it belongs in the same category with literal scam games like The Day Before. For anyone familiar with Runescape, Dragonwilds released without Magic or Range Skills, and its end game weaponry being Iron. That should give you an idea of how unfinished this embarrassment is. The Devs produced a roadmap after three months of radio silence saying that they'll get to Steel in December 2025, and the rest will run up to 2027. Not to mention the mass layoffs at Jagex DAYS after Dragonwilds release, and all of the interactions the Devs have had with the community seems to be focused around 'We are still here!' and 'This game is definitely not dead we promise!'. There are barely 500 people playing this on the busiest days, content updates are minuscule and deliberately drip-fed to give the illusion of progression. Most importantly, don't forget that Jagex is owned by a Private Equity Firm, if Dragonwilds doesn't print money the the team will get fired and the game will be taken off the life support mode its currently on. I've seen claims of over a million copies sold, but peak player count was around 50,000, so that seems extremely unlikely. Current player count is now one hundredth of that, meaning they have literally lost 99% of their player base. I accidently left the game running over the weekend after leaving the house, so I can't get a refund, but I can at the very least try to prevent any one else from making the same mistake. Save your money, or buy Valheim or Enshrouded. Or get a pizza, it'll last longer than this game.

Steam lists this game as unsupported on the steam deck but in reality it works about 95%. The thing that stands out is the storage (chests). withdrawal is very easy. putting things in is another. That is easily solved by plugging in a keyboard. I am using a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo. it works fine, no issues what so ever. That being said, it is annoying to have to put down the controller and pick up the keyboard. This will need to be resolved before the game leaves Beta. Yes, it is still in Beta. The game reminds me a lot of a western. with the wooden forts you build to protect your stuff. And yes, the lil heathens will pound on the walls until they break through. build multiple entrances to work around this. Also build multiple layers of walls. that will keep you from being surprised too quickly. wood is a very abundant resource, use it. Goblins will attack in hoards. Build up your fighting levels quickly or be prepared to die. If you think you are about to die, I suggest running to a spot when you will have easy access to pick up your stuff after you die. You will respawn at your bed. If you haven't built a bed, then you will have a fairly long run back to your tombstone. BTW - the goblins may roam in onesie, twosies, but when they gather into a warband, they will be from 6 to 12. The higher you level, the more there will be and the better outfitted they will be. I would really like to see a western themed DLC. it would make the mayhem comical indeed :) One thing more that is no so obvious. They state you can save anytime. You can but you have to quit to do so. I have not seen an auto save, but that does not mean its not there. Please add a save option to the pause menu.

I was excited for a new RuneScape game, especially since I didn't care for Brighter Shores. The game has a really neat premise with seeing a land you've never seen before. PROS: - The house building is actually pretty well done! There's a few issues where the item won't place where you want it to, but I loved making my own house. - I've secretly wished for an over the shoulder style free-roam update, and this is what it would look like, which is neat! - Progression is well-paced. It's not something you can do in an hour, which I appreciate. CONS: -I couldn't type this one because I KEPT DYING. -No major updates yet? I upgraded everything, and my skills are all at 50+, leaving me no reason to continue playing. -Lack of NPC's. There was a handful of people that went on the journey and I've seen... Three? It's a game I want to enjoy as updates come out, but when will they come out? It's been four months and we've had a couple of hotfixes. At this point I can not recommned this game to a RS fan, but hopefully I can in time.

The game is beautiful, and it's tons of fun! But that fun is very short lived, as it's also incredibly early access. There's essentially 0 content. The game plays like Valheim. It looks a lot better than Valheim. It has some nice QoL features that Valheim is lacking. But that's about it for what it does better at this point. You will run out of things to do and enemies to fight very early on unfortunately. Updates are few and far between, with quarterly updates bringing us things like...basic skill trees. Not even fully fleshed out skill trees, mind you. The recent example at the time of this review was the mage skill tree. Prior to this, you could use magic/ranged/melee, but only got skill points and new skills for the melee tree. They've now added the ranged tree. But it's underwhelming for the amount of time we'll go before seeing literally anything else added to the game. Next up is ranged I guess, so at least all 3 combat styles should have a skill tree soon? It's not a bad game, but at this price you can find competitors that are much more fleshed out with plenty more content available. I'd recommend playing one of those until Jagex gets closer to a complete game for this one.

The fact that an Epic Games account is required not only to play multiplayer, but to even start the game is really dumb. Growing up playing RS, I'm well aware of how scummy Jagex is and I feel like this is just a cheap money grab.

dragonwilds should be labeled as preprepreprepreprealpha..... theres nowhere near enough content to justify the pricetag especially with how slow contents rolling out according to the roadmap. unless you want a short lived hit of runescape nostalgia id wait another 10 years to purchase this game

I’ve played through DragonWilds up to the current endgame a couple of times now. Honestly there isn’t a whole lot to do once you hit that point. But it’s still pretty fun. If you’re hunting for your next 1,000-hour time sink, this probably isn’t it. However, I do recommend keeping an eye on its development. The future looks exciting, if the devs stick to their promises.