A few years ago when I tried Old School RuneScape for the first time, I spent hours puttering around the starting area taking on basic quests, chopping down trees, and slaying goblins in the surrounding wilds. After each lengthy session, I would exit the game, lean back in my chair with a contented smile, and realise that I had accomplished essentially nothing of note.
This is the quintessential RuneScape experience: an MMO so expansive and storied that you could easily drop hundreds of hours into it without seeing or doing half of what’s available. The goal isn’t so much to progress as it is to simply exist in the game’s fantasy world, engaging in activities both exciting and mundane that slowly but surely add up and strengthen your character’s abilities. Put otherwise, the grind is kind of the point.
So perhaps it’s a mark of authenticity more than anything that despite its more focused scope and shift to survival game mechanics, RuneScape: Dragonwilds inspires these same feelings within me. With the spin-off title’s launch on Switch 2, I spent just south of 55 hours working my way through the main questline, yet it feels like I have barely scratched the surface.
In keeping with genre contemporaries like Minecraft and Valheim, Dragonwilds plunks you down with virtually nothing to your name in a world full of things that are trying their absolute darndest to put you in an early grave. As you traverse the dragon-ravaged continent of Ashenfall, you’ll need to constantly manage your health, stamina, hunger, thirst, and rest meters while accumulating resources to craft armour, weapons, material processing stations, and other items that improve your odds of survival and give you a chance at fighting back.
This core loop of gather-craft-fight-gather is what defines Dragonwilds. While it technically has a linear narrative, it serves as little more than a backdrop to your character’s personal ascension to an ultra-powerful dragon slayer.
The main campaign is broken into five major sections, each centred on a specific portion of the map. To progress through each section, you’ll need to push into its corresponding zone, gather new materials to raise your armor level and weapon power, and complete several sub-objectives before taking on the area’s final boss.
Don’t expect to breeze through it, though, as Dragonwilds can feel brutally punishing at times. The world is dense (perhaps a tad too dense) with enemies that can and will hunt you down the moment they are alerted to your presence. You’ll often have to face off against foes that exceed your current armour level, meaning that a single hit or two can spell death for your character. This makes even relatively basic tasks like gathering clay from the local swamp biome quite the perilous endeavour.
Your chances mostly revolve around how well you’re able to get to grips with the game’s combat, a system which feels somewhat at odds with itself. There’s no room for button mashing here, as you’re encouraged to learn each mob’s attack patterns and make good use of your blocking and dodging abilities to avoid incoming hits and respond in kind.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/nintendo-switch-2/runescape-dragonwilds
