RuneScape: Dragonwilds attempts to blend fantasy role-playing with survival crafting elements, presenting players with a vast continent named Ashenfall. The game introduces players to the history of early settlers and the tale of Dragon Queen Kuldra through lore scattered in blue books and side quests. While these narratives add a layer of depth, they primarily serve as a backdrop for common in-game activities like exploring temples and fighting creatures.
Crafting at the Core
The majority of gameplay loops in Dragonwilds are centered around its robust crafting system. Players can forage for resources, smith weapons and armor, craft jewelry, build furniture and structures, and more. The game allows for extensive material gathering, with certain resources like ores being more crucial for progression. While magic spells can alleviate some of the monotony, learning them requires sufficient skill progression.
However, the crafting system is criticized for being bloated, featuring an excessive number of workstations and items that feel more laborious than enjoyable to collect. The escalating material requirements for higher-tier gear, coupled with the proliferation of specialized crafting stations, contribute to this tedium. For example, crafting advanced gear necessitates components like Fine Cloth, which in turn requires threads and gold bars. By the game's midpoint, players might find themselves managing separate stations for tools, weapons, armor, jewelry, ranged weaponry, and magical implements.
Flexible Roles, Limited Impact
Dragonwilds eschews traditional RPG class systems. Instead, players can switch between combat roles by changing their equipped gear. Swapping from armor to robes, for instance, transitions a character from melee to magic capabilities. Despite this flexibility, the system's impact is called into question, as players can often brute-force challenges with a melee focus. Ranged and magic combat are noted as less effective due to the nature of many encounters, which frequently involve flanking maneuvers. While magic has its uses, few creatures exhibit significant magical weaknesses, and melee combat often provides higher damage output through attack speed and buffs.
A Massive, Grindy World
The world of Dragonwilds is substantial, with the initial story arc alone taking 20 to 30 hours to complete. Subsequent arcs, like Fellhollow, require a similar time investment for their story quests. A common expectation at the beginning of each new region is a significant grind for materials, often lasting three to five hours, before players can safely venture into expeditions or tackle quests with vague instructions. While an in-game setting can ease the experience grind, the default progression encourages this repetitive loop. The game does attempt to spice up exploration with gimmicks such as "soulrifting" in Fellhollow, which opens alternate planes and reveals invisible bridges.
Risk and Reward
Player death in Dragonwilds carries a penalty akin to Soulslike games. Upon depletion of health, players drop their entire inventory and are teleported back to their last camped location. To recover lost items, players must return to their gravestone, a process that can be inconvenient, especially if the gravestone is located within a dangerous area. While the game thankfully allows players to retrieve their dropped inventory and spawns gravestones outside dungeons, the necessity of re-entering perilous territory to avoid extensive crafting can be frustrating. This mechanic can be disabled in the settings, but playing as intended often leads to cumbersome situations.
Unconventional Guidance
Dragonwilds embraces an "old school" approach to player guidance, opting for minimal handholding. NPCs may offer general directions, but rarely provide specific instructions, such as requiring an Iron Pickaxe to mine a dragon's teeth for a quest. This can lead to players spending considerable time deciphering hints and finding the necessary items for progression.
Ultimately, Dragonwilds prioritizes the journey of quest completion over its ease. This approach means more time spent in the crafting system and discovering environmental details or hidden lore. However, it can also result in hours of repetitive material gathering, potentially without significant progress towards objectives. The game offers a unique perspective on survival-crafting with its base-building and farming mechanics, but the lack of clear direction and the prevalence of tedium make it difficult to recommend over more streamlined alternatives in the genre.