I love a game that knows exactly who it’s being made for. Earlier this year, I wrote in my Star Wars: Zero Company review that the game felt made for folks who “adore tactical games or love Star Wars.” A great game knows it can’t please everyone, and in RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Jagex knows its audience. There’s a healthy nostalgia for RuneScape and its early MMO fervor. While many MMOs have come and gone, this IP stays vibrant thanks to fans new and old. With a new co-operative survival-adventure experience launching, can its lore and world carry it through a crowded genre? Here’s our RuneScape: Dragonwilds review.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds Has a Multi-Year Plan for the Future – Will It Last?
RuneScape: Dragonwilds takes place on the forgotten continent of Ashenfall. Here, dragons have awoken, and a menacing Dragon Queen seeks to control every inch of this mysterious world. As your character and allies craft and survive the lands, you’ll uncover magic and ancient powers to see a path forward to overcoming evil. It’s a fairly straightforward setup, and one that does a great job at throwing you into the story via early-game tutorials and intro quests. Like any good surival crafting game, you slowly gain access to more resources, more things to build, and more powers to aid you in your journey.
Visually, there’s a RuneScape asthetic to its art style that feels familiar. Still, this game is much more stylistic than the experience many of us know from the early 2000s. Creatures from the mainline game are here, as are quests and music we all know well if we spent time in the OG MMORPG. Additionally, grinding is a major part of this game loop as well. As you work your way up to fight dragons, I found myself having to spend time doing tedious hunts for lower-level enemies to get my skills up. It’s expected in an experience like this, but other survival crafting games do feel like they make the grind a bit more enjoyable. It’s sort of the looming question at the heart of RuneScape: Dragonwilds. Can the IP of RuneScape be enough to overcome other major players in the survival crafting genre?
Where Does Nostalgia Factor Into the Crowded Survival Crafting Genre?
This game blends co-operative survival-adventure elements with familiar RuneScape flair throughout. If you have little to no experience playing RuneScape back in the day, it might not register. We see many third-person survival crafting games now, and some even in this top-down perspective. The elements of RuneScape’s core gameplay that I relate to most are no longer unique. Entire franchises have launched in a similar vein, many of which are now among the most-played games in the world. So, how far can nostalgia carry RuneScape: Dragonwilds?
This game has plenty of the addictive quest gameplay I love about RuneScape. Nothing tickles my brain more than a list to complete that mirrors my character’s skills and inventory growing stronger. The framework works and definitely harkens back to OG RuneScape, but the in-between parts don’t work for me as well. I find a game like this, where you’re managing inventory screens for building, crafting, and character items, to increasingly be a point of frustration for me. RuneScape: Dragonwilds does little to make this massive library of items and resources navigable.
While the world itself feels expansive and inviting, managing the minutiae of my character’s inventory feels cumbersome. There also feels to be some early-game grind and enemy scaling that very much makes the single-player experience too tall to summit. Co-op is obviously the vision, but for players like me who fit game time into small pockets, I want the flexibility to play solo and not feel like I’m struggling through anything tied to my one-person party status.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds Works for Longtime Fans, But Newcomers Will Make or Break Its Success
There’s a lot to like about RuneScape: Dragonwilds, especially for someone who isn’t entrenched in every survival-crafting game that hits digital storefronts. It’s an easy yet accurate criticism to say many other games in the genre innovate or push gameplay more than this experience. It’s also fair to say fears over the game achieving its multi-year roadmaps seem slim in the age of live-service game cancellations. Still, the fandom for RuneScape ignites a flame for this franchise over and over again in ways that even surprise me. Whether it can support a game entirely separate from its mainline MMO experiences remains to be seen.
There’s a good chance the game’s long-term success hinders not only RuneScape fanatics but newcomers. Can players who seek out these experiences find enough to keep them playing RuneScape: Dragonwilds instead of the countless similar titles? My hunch is no, but that’s not the game’s fault. This is a hot genre right now, and like the Metroidvania boom of the late 2010s, we are likely to see good games eclipsed by great ones. Still, for anyone with fond memories of RuneScape, this will likely be an experience worth sinking at least a little time into. I just didn’t feel the hook to stay with it long-term, and I worry if others feel similarly, we might not see Jagex’s multi-year plan play out.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds Review Score
3/5
RuneScape: Dragonwilds is available now for PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X|S.
