Our Verdict
RuneScape Dragonwilds takes everything I love about Jagex’s world and progression and turns it into a wonderfully rewarding experience. Its exploration, crafting, combat, and base-building make even the smallest tasks feel meaningful. Dragonwilds is an easy game to lose yourself in.
I’m going to age myself up a bit here, but I’m from the days of playing RuneScape on Miniclip. Whether it was on the busted family computer or sneaking in a quick woodcutting session on unblocked links at school, Jagex gave me a formative introduction to the fantasy RPG landscape. However, I didn’t play RuneScape Dragonwilds at launch last year. It kind of passed me by, but that’s all changed. This game has me fully in its grasp. So, if you’re a newcomer or RS veteran wondering if you should pick it up, then I’ll say it from the top of this review: yes.
RuneScape Dragonwilds veers away from the point-and-click nature of Old School RuneScape and its current-day iteration. It goes down the route of something more akin to Valheim or, more recently, Dune: Awakening. Using 25 years of lore as its backdrop, Dragonwilds is a survival-crafting adventure interspersed with RuneScape’s brand of RPG shenanigans. That means whimsical characters, dashes of British humor, and fantastic world design.
It begins with a group of adventurers who set sail for the newly discovered continent of Ashenfall in search of riches and adventure. Their expedition quickly turns disastrous when dragons attack their fleet, leaving only a handful of survivors stranded on the mysterious land. After discovering traces of an ancient civilization and repairing a magical lodestone, the Wise Old Man sends a message back to the mainland for help. You answer the call, arriving in Ashenfall with nothing to your name and everything to prove as you uncover the secrets of the continent and the dragons that rule it.
The story itself takes a back seat to exploration, but I think that works in Dragonwilds’ favor. The looming threat of each major boss gives me a reason to push deeper into Ashenfall, while each region gradually reveals more about the world and the dangers lurking within it. Dragonwilds understands that its real story comes from the adventures I create for myself: getting hopelessly lost, barely escaping a dangerous area, and admiring Ashenfall.
In OSRS, locations like Lumbridge, Varrock, and Kandarin are all dripping with charm, wonder, and the right amount of mystery. They’re also brimming with other players, each of them going about their day. Dragonwilds supports a total of four players, jumping up to six if you’re on a dedicated server. The lack of active players in your world might seem like a detriment, but Dragonwilds isn’t just a watered-down MMORPG.
I think it’s important to make that distinction, as it really is a very different vision of what RuneScape is. However, it does scratch that MMO itch thanks to its robust base-building and sheer variety of quests. In your early hours with Dragonwilds, it’s going to be tough. There’s no way around it. I died plenty of times, most of them in amusing ways due to my own blunders. A rogue bite from a giant rat chasing me, falling off a cliff, or aggravating a chicken. It’s all possible, but Jagex doesn’t let it get you down – it’s all part of the learning curve.
I spent the first six to ten hours of my experience learning how Dragonwild’s systems interact. It seems a little obtuse at first, especially as someone who’s been away from RuneScape in general for a long time. Jagex puts the focus on discovery and trusts you to piece things together. What I love is how it encourages me to interact with RuneScape’s community. When I’m not using the in-game recipe book – a growing encyclopedia of everything from weapons to farming materials – I’m seeking out fan-made content.
You see, RuneScape as a whole is a heavily community-curated experience. Jagex may not always get it right with its changes, but there’s no denying it listens to players. With that in mind, staying up late to research what I need to craft specific tools or armor giddily fills me with joy. It feels so refreshing to seek out knowledge from fellow players, while Jagex trusts you to figure things out on your own terms. This comes through massively in its world design.
Dressing the world is a score full of earworms from Peter Michael Davison and Ashton Mills. Comforting acoustic guitar arpeggios drizzle over the hills, while doomed piano keys echo through fields of zombies. RuneScape has always had a penchant for superb tunes, but Dragonwilds really knocked me for six with how impeccable its soundtrack is.
Jagex molds RuneScape’s low-poly aesthetic with the embellishments of Unreal Engine 5, and it’s a winning combination. There have been several occasions when Dragonwild’s landscape has stunned me, causing me to stop and drink it in for a minute. Watching thunderstorms rip through the air in the Stormtouched Highlands or the souls of the dead fly through the air outside the Grim Reaper’s church are highlights. But there’s more that I’ve yet to see, as Dragonwilds still has its entire first year of content to explore.
Bramblemead Valley, the Bloodblight Swamp, and the Fractured Plains are Dragonwild’s main opening areas, with voyages to the Stormtouched Highlands thrown in along the way. They may seem like random biomes, but as the first main quest to defeat a massive dragon called Velgar unfolds, Jagex’s grand intentions become apparent. Bloodblight Swamp is full of poisonous gas and ores that I can’t extract without a Bronze Pickaxe. I also need an Iron Axe. Across the map, in the Fractured Plains and Whispering Swamp, are the materials I need to get on track.
To that end, there’s a Metroidvania feel to Dragonwilds. You’ll revisit areas often, learning something new almost every time. Previously unobtainable materials become yours, in turn unlocking recipes for better gear. Honestly, the journey of acquiring Iron Ore shouldn’t be as thrilling as it has been for me. Yet, my battles with goblins and beasts are already some of my favorite recent gaming memories. That’s all down to Dragonwild’s absolutely incredible sense of reward.
There’s no complex skill tree in Dragonwilds where you spend points to unlock buffs or special abilities. You earn it all organically through doing things over and over again. It’s been that way since OSRS. You fight a lot; you increase your attack. Cut down trees; your woodcutting skill goes up. It’s that simple. With the baggage of skill trees removed, Dragonwilds wants you to go out and just try your best.
Jagex knows you’re going to struggle, so much so that there’s an emergency option to return to the game’s first spawn point. I’ve been utilizing it a lot in a pinch, realizing that I’m not powerful enough for areas beyond the opening region. Yeah, it can be annoying when you die and have to travel back for your belongings. Dragonwilds never feels like it’s truly punishing you, though. Those journeys to collect my belongings train me up for the dangers ahead. Death respawns you at your bed in your base, so you’re ready to craft up some essentials and get back to it.
I love how the experience emboldens its rewarding nature, too. I can see it tangibly when I wear better armor sets. Lovely audio touches like chainmail clattering when I don Iron Platebody and matching leg armor are smile-inducing moments that color Dragonwild’s world. On a bigger scale, your base is an extension of this. It’s less of a place to engage with crafting tools and more of a canvas to call your home. During countless redesigns, I’m envisioning where my squad and I can sit down around a fire and eat Rat Roast together.
Base-building is effortless to pull off. Sure, you need resources, but the actual act of building is ridiculously easy and intuitive. Just select the part you want and drop it. Need a slightly different perspective? There’s a magic spell designed with building in mind, as it shifts the camera to a new plane. Better yet, you can build wherever you desire. You might be inclined to choose Bramblemead Valley as your home, but you don’t need to build it where NPCs like the Old Wise Man indicate.
Anywhere in Ashenfall can be a place to lay your head. However, I’d probably advise against doing it where the undead reside in Fellhollow. Bases can be attacked from time to time by enemies, so placing your home in a lower-level region might be the smarter play. Combat itself should be a breeze for anyone to pick up, especially for fans of Soulslike games. It uses the same format, even mapping parries and dodge rolls to the same buttons you’d expect. Like Soulslike games, you feel that growing sense of power as your skill level increases and a stronger arsenal becomes available. Those pesky archers will never bother me again; heed my words.
What will strike you as pleasingly satisfying is the simple art of cutting down trees and mining ores. It may seem a little boring to keep hacking away with your axe, but somehow, Jagex makes even the most mundane of tasks soothing for my brain. But what about choosing exactly how you play Dragonwilds?
You can either choose to play Jagex’s new Switch game in its vanilla form, with no tweaks to the world, or you can get more granular with customized servers. Say you want to increase XP gains or make things a little tougher, just in case you’re a sucker for pain; you can do that. If you know someone with a dedicated server on PC, up to six players can join the fun. However, their PC or the server, whichever it’s configured to use, needs to always be online.
By default, you play with up to four players, with full crossplay functionality. I haven’t had much time to experience the latter, sadly, as crossplay was recently removed from the Nintendo Switch 2 version while Jagex fixes some bugs. When it did work, I seamlessly joined random players in open servers or my girlfriend playing on PlayStation 5. On the Nintendo Switch 2 version, it runs at a mostly stable 30fps in Handheld and Docked Mode. Its resolution is quite disappointing, though. Compared to the sharpness of its counterparts, the Nintendo Switch 2 outputs a notably softer image that takes away from Dragonwild’s otherwise wonderful art direction.
Where I’d say Dragonwilds let me down the most is with its lack of cross-progression. I can’t pick up the same character from my PlayStation 5 on Nintendo Switch 2, and vice versa. Considering the number of hours I’m putting into this, it’d be nice to know I don’t need to do two separate grinds. Whether Jagex addresses this in future patches is unclear, but it’s something to be aware of if you are considering picking it up on multiple platforms.
As someone who grew up playing RuneScape and spent countless hours with OSRS, returning to Jagex’s world through Dragonwilds has been a strange but genuinely rewarding experience. I haven’t played RuneScape properly in a long time, so I expected to feel a little lost coming back to it. Instead, the familiar faces, locations, humor, and progression systems came flooding back, while Dragonwilds gives them a completely new purpose. It feels like returning to a place I remember, only to discover there’s still plenty left for me to learn.
There are frustrations. The lack of cross-progression is a genuine disappointment, while the softer image quality on Switch 2 stops it from being the definitive way to experience Dragonwilds. The temporary loss of crossplay is another blemish, although Jagex is already working to fix it. Even so, none of those issues have stopped me from wanting to jump back into Ashenfall. Every new piece of armor, every newly accessible area, and every resource I’ve spent hours hunting down gives me that little dopamine hit that RuneScape has always excelled at. It’s a game that makes even chopping down a tree feel worthwhile.
For $29.99/£24.99, RuneScape Dragonwilds is an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a rewarding survival RPG, especially if you have even a passing affection for Jagex’s long-running MMO. I might have missed the boat at launch, but I’m glad I finally climbed aboard. Dragonwilds has reminded me exactly why I fell for RuneScape in the first place.
