With RuneScape: Dragonwilds, the Old School MMORPG takes a detour into the survival genre. It’s not only fluffy, as MeinMMO editor Alex finds, but also offers its own unique magic. However, it could shine much more if it weren’t for the namesake runes.
How my heart rejoiced as I plunged into RuneScape: Dragonwilds. A concentrated load of magic, powerful dragons, a touch of old school flair in the graphics, and the latent fear of tipping over at the next corner because you overestimated yourself again, as it is typical for survival games. All of this combined with the feeling of a classic RPG and some really nice gimmicks.
But what fascinated me the most was the magic you can perform there.
Because you can not only craft cool staffs and wands with which you can shoot powerful magical projectiles, but there are also greater spells that you have to perform with a bit more effort. In return, you gain some cool advantages like temporarily floating through the air or chopping down multiple trees at once with a thrown spectral axe.
These spells not only look pretty cool, but they also set the survival game apart from competitors that also incorporate magic. They give Dragonwilds a unique flair that makes you feel like a gifted magician early on who just has it and uses the elements to your advantage.
I would be truly happy and would spend my magical life joyfully cheering in the world of Ashenfall, if it weren’t for a related problem that makes Dragonwilds’ magic system both the best and yet the most annoying that I have experienced in survival games so far.
Runes, Runes … Rune Essence!
Don’t get me wrong, grinding is part of survival games like teeth are to dragons – that’s completely clear. Harvesting resources, hunting, gathering, surviving. And that you also need a resource to use magic is also completely normal and should be so. After all, magic also has its price and has to come from somewhere.
This is where the namesake runes come into play. You can find and shape them in all elemental forms so you can shoot them as projectiles or use them for your larger, staff-independent spells. To do this, you either have to mine Rune Essence like ores and craft them into runes or tap the respective elemental rune energy from hotspots.
So far, so good.
However, for the large spells, you often need not only one rune and definitely not just one type, but several. What was initially fun to piece together – for spectral axes, for example, you need air and arcane runes – turned out to be rather annoying the longer I played. Because many of the spells you needed much more often than initially thought.
At some point, I found myself carelessly crafting and collecting all kinds of rune types just to have the right ones on hand and not have to search for them because I wanted to cast the spell.
I was grinding mindlessly around, and the magic somehow lost its charm. That feeling of forging the spells yourself and performing a kind of ritual faded, and soon everything didn’t feel so powerful anymore. That’s a shame because this initial feeling of powerful, ritualistic magic forged from elemental runes had really captivated me.
But in the end, it became a resource like all the others, just nicely packaged and with special effects.
Have you played RuneScape: Dragonwilds? What do you think of the system with the magic and the runes? Feel free to write it to us in the comments!
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