I was initially excited when I heard that Toplitz Productions would be publishing another Dynasty game. Toplitz publishedMedieval Dynastyback in September 2021, which started out pretty empty but developed over the next couple of years into one of my favourite simulator games. Wild West Dynasty promises the same, except with a fresh setting and a different developer. But the problems are already pretty apparent: this game isn’t ready for early access. It needs a lot, lot longer in the stove pot.
Medieval Dynasty might have been empty when it entered early access, but at least it ran fairly well and had plenty of content to tuck into. Sure, characters might have sometimes clipped through walls, and deer would occasionally spawn on the roof of the town’s tavern, but the frame rate was okay, and you could chop down trees, so I was happy. Wild West Dynasty is a shambles in comparison - it’s stuttery, the graphics are rudimentary, and the texture pop-in is atrocious on my very reasonable PC. Before we continue, it’s important to remember that these two games are not from the same developer.
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But before I get carried away with the negatives of Wild West Dynasty (I will, later on, don’t worry), I should address some of the aspects I enjoyed during my couple of hours with the game. The crafting and inventory management is surprisingly solid and simple to understand. This can so easily go wrong in these types of games, and in a genre that really relies on the functionality of the bazillion menus you’ll be navigating, it’s nice to see a bit of effort going into this aspect of the game.
Even with the poor performance, the atmosphere of the Wild West has been captured. Maybe it’s something to do with the colour scheme and sweeping vistas, but if the devs can hold on to this fleeting butterfly of richness in the world then there might be hope for the game later on down the line. The cloned NPCs and dodgy graphics don’t help here though, and maybe I’m just blindsided by desire for a game like this to actually work and look brilliant - a sort of Red Dead Redemption but with ranch building and cattle hustling. The dream continues.
That’s about it in terms of positives. Yes, it’s an early access game, but it also costs £19. The boom of early access games has been ongoing for the past couple of years, and I’d say that it works out around 50 percent of the time, maybe even less. It worked out in Medieval Dynasty’s case, and a handful of others, like Valheim for example (even if progress on the game was pretty slow.) But I can also think of dozens of games that completely fell apart in early access, like the pirate MMO Atlas, or the survival MMO Last Oasis, and a bunch of others.
There’s a theme here. Big games from small development teams that make enormous promises often fail. Typically, some type of MMO or survival game, a categorization which Wild West Dynasty falls into. Prolonged early access is followed by basic updates that take eons to arrive. Eventually, the updates stop and the game dies, never to be heard of again. If you didn’t refund immediately, the money’s lost in some sunken Steam treasure chest.
Wild West Dynasty is in a terrible state. The game barely functions. NPCs don’t interact with you except for on a very rudimentary basis. Stuttering, frame lag, texture pop-in, poor graphics, really dodgy animations, UI bugs, weird mechanics like weight just not working as you’d expect, very basic skill tree, an annoying tutorial… the list of problems is long and tedious.
The worst part of the game is probably the lack of things to do. Yes, I know the game is in early access. Most of the NPCs are mindless clones. Two of the quests, from Karen, just didn’t work. Battling through the stuttering to get started in the game, Wild West Dynasty promptly crashed. I reloaded the game and started to try out some other parts, like picking up items and interacting with NPCs. Coming from Medieval Dynasty, these things feel pretty straightforward and fundamental, but both of these are missing. Wild West Dynasty is not a finished product, it’s not even early access - it feels like an in-house test.
I’m all for supporting a developer’s work on a game - I don’t have anything against early access or Kickstarter or whatever other platform a dev decides to use to promote and fund their title, but it’s also my job to guide you away from purchases like this. This game is not worth your £19, your 20 bucks, or any other equivalent. I don’t think it will be worth that kind of money for many months to come. I have faith in Toplitz after the success of Medieval Dynasty, and my hope is that they can steer this game in a positive direction. It may be that you feel that way too and want to support the team. But for now, as an average consumer, save your cash, wait for some other games to pop up over the next few weeks, and check back in on Wild West Dynasty in a few months time.
