Melvor Idle: Into the Abyss

I've played a lot of Melvor. I've completed the base game and Throne of the Herald 100% and played long before the 1.0 release. Loved the idea of an idle RuneScape, which I have also played for many, many years. I can say with full confidence that this DLC is absolutely not worth your time, regardless of its price. Throne of Herald was not without flaws. It did its best to add to the base game and ramp up the difficulty. I would say I enjoyed it. Atlas of Discovery was an odd departure from made the game great, adding an incredible amount of bloat with very little value. That's when the game honestly just started feeling like a chore. And now Into the Abyss is the cherry on top of this messy cake, going full throttle on If I had to sum up the content that comprises this expansion, I would say the entire game was copy and pasted with a color change. They basically jammed the same reskinned game inside the already existing game and if that makes no sense to you, you will find that it doesn't make much more sense when you actually play it. Every skill (with the exception of the 2 Atlas of Discovery skills now have a second, Abyssal level and separate, abyssal ressources, monsters and items. That's right, it's the exact same thing as the base game except everything now has "abyssal" in front of its name. Remember how you started off fighting cows and chickens? Well now you get to fight abyssal cows and abyssal chickens. But you won't be able to use everything you've been working on in the past few expansions, you will need to deal abyssal damage and abyssal heal your own abyssal damage with abyssal food from abyssal fishes you will abyssally cook with the abyssal fishing and abyssal cooking skills. There are just about no interactions between the base game and the abyss... You're welcome to try and guess what items from the base game actually work in the abyss, but the game absolutely won't make it obvious in any way. And with the hundreds of new items the past expansions added, you now have over a thousand items to go through to try and see if the description mentions "normal" damage or something along those lines. But even if it doesn't, chances are it just won't do anything. So at this point, you might be wondering: Why is all of this abyssal stuff mixed in with the rest of the game if there are little to no interactions with the rest of the game? Well, I would like to know as well. All it does is double everything, make every incredibly bloated and hard to navigate. The worst part is they actually had a big update to address this, were they made an effort to actually split the content with a "Enter / Leave Abyssal Realm" toggle which will basically hide the base game stuff from skills. It's a start, but still leaves me wondering why ANYTHING about this expansion is part of the base game to begin with. This entire DLC is nothing short of beating a dead horse. A big addition is the Skill trees and it's honestly very, very difficult not to feel completely indifferent about them. Before I explain why exactly that is, I need to just talk about the game's development a bit. I think that the developers had something great at the start because they repurposed a great concept to begin with. RuneScape was fun and satisfying and turning it into an idle game worked brilliantly. However, every single addition that were brought to Melvor proved that the creators never had any idea why it worked to begin with. Agility was the first skill that was added to the game and the first step into making the game worse. The amount of passive bonuses is absolutely ridiculous and makes all of them completely meaningless. When I look at my "Current Global Active Passives from Agility", I see a modal that is so long it barely fits on my screen. Astrology is somehow 2 to 3 times WORSE. Countless 3% this and 8% that. You don't see those buffs, you don't feel those buffs. They are nothing but a hindrance and an artificial grind that will make you feel inefficient if you don't have them while doing anything else. Nearly everything they've added after the base game has been this. Numbers, more numbers, more modifiers, more double-edged swords. Everything has made this game feel more and more tedious and just make you want to go on the wiki and lookup what the best combination of bonuses is out of hundreds upon hundreds of items. It's just not fun for the vast majority of people. Now back to skill trees. What would you expect the skill trees to have? Special abilities? Things that combo into each other? Synergies? Things that work well together? How about 5% XP? How about 5% MASTERY XP? Yeah? You like that? How about 5% XP but like, four separate times? Yeah? How about 5% XP four different times and four other times for mastery and it's that for every single skill in the game? This is not a joke. The rest is material cost reduction, additional resources etc. All the same stuff that was already in the game. There are branches but you can unlock everything, they are hardly choices and the choices are meaningless because they don't actually affect the game in any substantial ways. This is nothing but another orgy of passive bonuses like every other useless crap they have added to the game. Oh cool now I have 67% XP bonus instead of 60%. In an idle game. Where you can simply leave it running while closed and never ever notice the minutes or even hours you would save by having those bonuses. I have not seen a single thing about this expansion that was new, different or exciting in any way. After spending time to complete everything 100% all I see is a moved goal post. A carrot on a longer stick. Why am I playing this? What is the point of starting everything over, but now it's abyssal? What will be the next expansion? The void? Another copy paste but now skills take x100 times longer to level instead of 10? Fighting void cows and void chickens with void weapons that deal void damage and void food that void heal your void health? There is absolutely no reason for you to buy or play this. If you've completed the base game, please do yourself a favor and do not play Into the Abyss; it is nothing but a monumental waste of time, which would be better invested staring at wall. The lesson here is that sometimes, games can be allowed to end. And it's okay for them to end. They don't need more content forever. You can make another game.

Way worse than the base game and past expansion. Way more grind-y, just spent 5 days chopping wood to be able to craft for 24 hours to gain 3 crafting levels. Deleted the game after that. Disappointed since I enjoyed everything before now.

The base game had a lot of moments of tedium, and Into the Abyss makes it much worse. I've just completed into the Abyss and can honestly say I was FAR more annoyed than satisfied by the end. There's very little balancing between skills, getting 60/60 Woodcutting only provides you a small fraction of what you need to level your crafting and fletching for example The combat was fairly nice until the end, in which it's just utterly tedious. Maxed combat, best gear I can equip, and getting one shot by enemies in slayer tasks unless you IMMEDIATELY swap to the correct combat type. It's just punishing instead of fun

This is rough. It needs some major quality of life updates in order to make it a bit more enjoyable. It's playable in its current state but the further I get in to the dlc the less and less I am enjoying it. I really hope it turns around soon or there's an update.