Dragon’s Prophet: Hands-On Preview

Four character classes. Three hundred dragons to catch. Where do you begin?

Dragon’s Prophet is the new MMO from Runewaker Entertainment, creators of the popular free-to-play Runes of Magic MMO and it’s in closed beta right now.

Dragons

Auratia, the world of Dragon’s Prophet was created by dragons and dragon genes have infected all the creatures, resulting in crocodile-like land dragons, whale-like fish dragons and so on. You can tell they’re dragons and not fish because they have scaly, lumpy skin. Uh-huh. Right.

Regardless of this odd redefinition of “dragon”, the creatures are everywhere, a little like the world of Monster Hunter. Using the weapons and skills of your base class, you can manage up to six dragons. Train them properly and you can play any style you like. That’s the claim anyway.

Unlike Monster Hunter, capturing dragons doesn’t feel like a skill you need to learn. Instead, it’s just a simple mini-game, more akin to breaking horses in Red Dead Redemption in that you hop onto a dragon, hammer on directional keys and try not to fall off. It’s less subtle than RDR though, as a big overlay pops up with an indicator that wibbles around as you try to push it into the centre. It’s disappointing but with 300 unique dragons, I can see why they’re going with such a simple implementation.

You’ll have four basic types of dragon: water, land, flying and gliding. Each has its own playstyle – flying dragons will allow you to shake pursuit by flying through clouds, for example. Dragons can also be used to shortcut farming requirements. While you’re offline you can send your pets out to gather resources on your behalf, or even to train against each other. There’s a chance that dragons can learn skills from one another, so you may need to hunt down a variety of training buddies in order to build the perfect fighting companion.

Classes

Thanks to the customisation of the dragons, there are only four basic character classes:

• The Guardian: Your classic heavy fighter who wields melee weapons – one or two-handed weapons, dual-wielding or one-handed and shield
• The Ranger: A ranged DPS class who fights with bows and gunblades
• The Oracle: A scythe-wielding hybrid of close combat and magic
• The Sorcerer: The elemental magic purist

Your active skills will depend on your class and weapons, as in every other MMORPG ever. I was slightly disappointed to learn that dragons are more like mountable pets than additional PCs.

While wielding dragons sounds amazing, actually fighting with them is underwhelming. You don’t actually control your dragons directly, or even give them orders. Rather, your dragon spawns for combat and automatically attacks your target according to the character traits you’ve given it through training. You carry on attacking with your skills as normal and your dragon lumbers along beside you doing its thing. It’s basically a glorified NPC party member, and this made me a little sad.

Even worse, as long as your dragon is in combat mode, it drains your dragon energy bar. Once that’s gone, it despawns, leaving you surrounded by a bunch of angry, half-eaten mobs. Dragon energy is gained primarily through successful attacks, so it may be possible to sustain your companion with some skilled fighting. In practice however, mine lasted barely a minute and given my propensity for aggroing nearby mobs with poorly-aimed range attacks, I spent an awful lot of time dead. For a game purportedly about dragons, there’s a notable lack of dragony action. Perhaps I just need more time to get used to the way my dragon fights?

Right now you can take up to six dragons into the fray and leave another six back in your lair but you can only wield one at a time. This allows you to travel with PvE set of tank, AoE specialist and whatever other playstyles you like while, for example, keeping a PvP set at home, or bunch of experimental builds.

Surprisingly, there isn’t a pokedex-type log of dragon types that you’ve caught. At least, not just yet. The team at Infernum are considering it, as well as considering a way of storing non-current dragons in your home base but right now, it’s just the six dragons on-hand with .

Islands and Homes

There’s also a space known as The Frontier. This zone is shared across servers and its made up of a series of large islands. Players with money will be able to rent plots of land on an island and set up their own house, eventually building up custom player-owned villages. Inside the house, you can buy and place furniture wherever you want (gravity and space permitting), even down to positioning of cushions on your bed.

Guilds could potentially take over an entire island, running the main resource node and defending the local castle from attack. The majority of PvP will take place here, so it’s worth looking carefully before you commit to a patch of land.

Dungeons

As we played an unfinished build, it was too buggy for us to complete a dungeon but what I saw was a pretty standard mix of killing bugs and giant tree monsters. There were some environmental touches, like floating islands that swing back and forth across a chasm, so you need team coordination to make sure no one gets left behind.

Dungeons themselves have seven levels of difficulty. You can solo the whole game if you like, fighting through each one on a low level just to get through the story, but you’ll never pick up the good loot drops that way.

Dragon’s Prophet promises plenty of great features. The group quests look fine, using the dragons as mounts is brilliant and the classes themselves are fun to play. It’s just that with the dragons, the fun lies in manipulating stats and passive training. I wish the dragon capturing had been a little more ambitious and the dragon combat more active but there may yet be plenty of tactical combat to be found in dragon tag-team battles. We’ll see.

You can sign up for the Dragon’s Prophet closed beta now: European site, American site.

Screenshots

Got any questions about Dragon’s Prophet that I haven’t covered? Leave them in the comments and I’ll answer for you.