RuneScape: Dragonwilds

I'll be honest with you: the moment I heard that familiar level-up chime while hacking at an ore vein on the continent of Ashenfall, something in my lizard brain lit up. Dragonwilds is Jagex's boldest creative pivot in years, transplanting RuneScape's iconic skill progression into a co-op survival-crafting framework that sits comfortably alongside Valheim in the genre pecking order. It is not a sequel to the MMO, not a remake, and not quite the reinvention Jagex's marketing might imply. What it is, at least in Early Access, is a surprisingly coherent blending of two genres that have no business working together this well. The skill system is the core of everything here. Eleven skills, including Attack, Mining, Woodcutting, Runecrafting, Artisan, Construction, Cooking, Farming, Ranged, Magic, and Fishing, each level up through direct use and each gate meaningful unlocks rather than just raw stat bumps. Level your Attack to 11 and you unlock Tempest Shield, a parry-based spell that bursts outward with energy. Level Woodcutting high enough and you get Axtral Projection, which fells trees in an instant. Runecrafting lets you mass-craft runes at an Altar and fast-travel via Lodestones. The loop is familiar to any veteran of the MMO, but it has been re-tuned so progress feels fair rather than punishing, at least for the first dozen or so hours. The three combat styles, Melee, Ranged, and Magic, each carry their own armour bonuses and playstyle logic, and mixing armour sets for partial set bonuses adds a layer of build planning that the genre rarely bothers with. Where it stumbles is in the places you might predict. Combat lacks weight. Blocking and dodging are the correct actions mechanically, but the feedback on connecting a hit or landing a perfect parry is thin enough that big encounters can feel like stamina management exercises rather than satisfying brawls. Solo players have it rough: difficulty scales with player count globally, meaning friends joining your world can push enemy health and damage up even when they are on the other side of the map. The dragon ambush system, which sends a dragon swooping into your area on a semi-regular schedule, is initially thrilling but becomes genuinely frustrating when dragon fire clips through roofing geometry and kills you inside a building you spent an hour constructing. Inventory management is another friction point, with weight limits that bite hard during mid-game resource runs, and no smart-storage system to pull crafting materials directly from nearby chests. The worldbuilding, though, earns its keep. Ashenfall is a hand-crafted continent, not procedurally generated, which gives it a sense of deliberate geography: scorched dragon territories bleed into forests shimmering with Anima energy, ruins hint at a backstory that the quest structure, built around a riff on the MMO's classic Dragon Slayer quest, actually starts to pay off. For veterans of Gielinor, the Wise Old Man showing up in full 3D voice acting is an unexpectedly warm moment. For newcomers, none of that nostalgia is required; the setting holds up on its own terms. Jagex has continued adding content through the Early Access period, including the Ranged skill in version 0.9 and the Dowdun Reach area update, and the roadmap signals more skills like Defence and Thieving are in development, with a full 1.0 target that has been pointed at early 2026. The pace of updates has been uneven, which is the real risk any buyer is taking right now. Bottom line for the current build: this is comfortably above average for Early Access survival games, polished enough to play through its roughly 20-hour content window with a friend or three, and mechanically interesting enough that the eventual full release could be genuinely special. Solo players who hate stamina-gating should wait. Everyone else who has ever whispered the words "99 woodcutting" ironically and meant it sincerely, you know who you are.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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