RuneScape: Dragonwilds sees players gathering, building, and crafting in the continent of Ashenfall! Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the game’s Early Access, and more.
Everything We Know About RuneScape: Dragonwilds
RuneScape: Dragonwilds Plot
RuneScape: Dragonwilds is set on the continent of Ashenfall, a land that has been isolated and largely forgotten by the rest of Gielinor. Here, dragons have awakened, throwing the land into chaos and threatening the player’s survival. Players must then uncover the reason for the dragons' return and the Dragon Queen’s role in it, and find a way to overcome the threat they pose.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds Gameplay
RuneScape: Dragonwilds is a cooperative survival crafting game. Players, solo or in groups of up to four, are tasked with surviving in a land ravaged by wild magic and the awakening of dragons. Gameplay here revolves around gathering resources such as wood and ore, crafting tools, weapons, and shelter, and developing skills familiar to the RuneScape franchise. A key element differentiating Dragonwilds from other survival games is the integration of RuneScape’s skill-based progression system and the use of rune abilities to aid in gathering and combat.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds Release Date
Launched in Early Access on April 15, 2025
Jagex caught fans off guard by the Early Access release of Dragonwilds on April 15, 2025. While a spring 2025 launch had been anticipated, they released the game without prior announcement. The estimated window for the full release is early 2026, pending further updates.
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| Price | $29.99 | ||||
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RuneScape: Dragonwilds Review (Early Access)
There’s Rune for Improvement
Aside from it being shadow-dropped by developer Jagex, silence hangs over RuneScape: Dragonwilds. Not the literal absence of sound, however—gods no, there’s plenty of clashing steel, howling dragons, and chopping wood echoing through its open world—but rather the kind that follows after something monumental has shifted. A new continent has risen, and in RuneScape, that rarely happens without someone, somewhere, losing their mind.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds is an open world survival game that is ambitious in scope. But it is still very much RuneScape. That sense of high fantasy and hometown epic destinies undercut by players trading raw chickens in the Grand Exchange is still present here. However, this isn’t exactly Gielinor as we know it as well. The quaint villages and NPCs have been replaced with crumbling ruins and half-sane hermits. Every choice—what to carry, who to trust, whether to shelter or to sprint—has weight. And every moment you survive feels like a question you’ve answered correctly, even if you’re never quite sure what the question was.
As an Early Access title, RuneScape: Dragonwilds has a long road ahead if it hopes to stand shoulder to shoulder with genre titans like Valheim or—even bolder—Minecraft. There are gaps to fill, edges to sand down, and systems that need a serious second pass. But even in its rougher state, there’s plenty to admire. The foundation is sturdy, the ideas are ambitious, and the potential is unmistakable. If Jagex nurtures this project with care, Dragonwilds might just be one of those rare games that ages like fine wine.
Teaching Old Runes New Tricks
Ashenfall, once lost to the annals of history, has reemerged. It is a realm teeming with untamed wilderness and the remnants of a bygone era. The continent’s resurgence, however, is marked by the awakening of dragons, beings whose presence threatens to shape the balance of power. At the heart of it all is the Dragon Queen, a sovereign whose dominion over Ashenfall poses a challenge to all who dare to confront her.
But before charging through with reckless abandon, you’ll have to learn the ropes, and immediately, you’ll find that Dragonwilds does what nearly every survival crafting game does: it sits you down and teaches you how to gather, how to craft, how to fight off low-level vermin, and how not to die of thirst or hunger while trying to remember how many planks it takes to build a halfway decent shack. It’s familiar territory—comforting, even, in how well-worn the gameplay loop is. Pick up wood. Smash some stones. Whack a rat. Repeat. But then, in the middle of this grind, the game does something that makes you stop and say, "Ah, now this is RuneScape." It introduces magic!
Not just the "throw fireball" kind of magic, though there’s plenty of that. No, what sets Dragonwilds apart is how it weaves its runecasting into the very fabric of the survival loop. Spectral Axes cleave down entire forest of trees in one swoop, followed by a spell that turns the timber into ash logs without you so much as unsheathing your axe.
Progress by the Axe-load
What’s even better is that this system doesn’t overwrite the need for actual skill progression. You’re still incentivized to manually chop, mine, and harvest in the early hours, as spells have cooldowns, and they consume a lot of runes. Plus, in true RuneScape tradition, you’ll need to grind your relevant skills to unlock and empower them. For instance, you can only manually cleave trees using your axe until you unlock the Axtral Projection spell, which becomes available at Woodcutting level 11. To quickly harvest logs from timber, you’ll need the Splinter spell, acquired upon reaching Woodcutting level 27.
There are nine skills in total, and their progression is quite direct. To level up Woodcutting, you simply chop down trees. Similarly, Mining requires smashing stones, Artisan involves crafting items, and so on. These skills are not particularly complex, and they unlock in a linear fashion, like in classic RuneScape. However, I wouldn’t mind if Dragonwilds took notes from other RPGs and moved away from this linearity by introducing a more complex system, such as a skill tree with branching options depending on your playstyle.
But that’s just me; perhaps the age old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies here. Regardless, what's present is still a nice way to keep the bones of RuneScape intact while injecting something refreshing into the survival genre’s somewhat tired formula.
Grinding To Survive
This system can be a bit of a grind, however. As you progress through the game, leveling up and unlocking stronger spells, a creeping problem begins to emerge—one that’s all too familiar to veterans of the genre: resource starvation. Magic, for all its convenience, comes at a steep and sometimes frustrating cost. Nearly every high-tier spell requires Rune Essence to cast, and that seemingly generous supply you started with dries up fast.
Sure, you can gather more Essence from Rune Geysers scattered across the land, or purchase runes from vendors, or hope you’re lucky and get some from a mob drop, but none of that is convenient. None of it feels sustainable. So, sooner or later, you begin hoarding. You stop casting spells to chop down trees or mine rocks—not because you don’t want to, but because it’s simply more efficient to do things the old-fashioned way. I mean, why burn precious resources when your axe still works?
That gnawing impulse to conserve—to hold back just in case—-permeates the entire experience. It’s the kind of paranoia that sits at the back of your mind the moment you first lose all of your items to a hostile mob you didn’t see coming—something you were unprepared for, as you’re just minding your own business.
After a set amount of in-game time, you and your newly built fort will be besieged by waves of goblins. They don’t knock. They don’t wait for you to exit your chambers. They just arrive, en masse, battering down your walls and smashing through your defenses. These waves come with little warning. You might be barely patched from the last goblin raid, rebuilding a corner of your base, only for another wave to hit. To make matters worse, the game occasionally throws in dragons that rain poison from above, which forces you to drop everything and sprint for safety.
The problem here isn’t the concept; in fact, I actually like the idea of mobs invading your home. The problem, though, is the lack of scaling. Early on, when you’re barely cobbling together basic gear and still figuring out the game’s basics, being annihilated by mobs that feel tuned for much higher levels is more frustrating than fun. It feels punitive, especially when these events interrupt one of Dragonwilds’ greatest strengths: its base building feature.
Home, Sweet Home
Dragonwilds actually nails this aspect of the game. Building is snappy, intuitive, and deep enough that you’ll be spending hours making your dream home. Pieces snap together, rotate on a vertical axis, and can be raised or lowered to suit your needs. There’s even a structural integrity system, à la Valheim, where parts collapse if they’re not well-supported. It’s tactile. It’s grounded. It’s good.
Then there’s Ghost Mode, a tool that lets you blueprint your future home without needing the materials up front. It’s a godsend for organization junkies and long-term planners like me, and when paired with the Eye of Oculus spell—essentially letting you enter a god-mode perspective—it makes you excited to see how the game will evolve once it fully releases.
CAUTION: Still Under Construction
Unfortunately, that silence, that nagging feeling of imbalance—that sense of something good just barely restrained by an uneven execution—is woven throughout RuneScape: Dragonwilds’ Early Access release. There’s a great game here, a genuine ambition to mix the classic RuneScape formula with another genre. And in flashes, it succeeds. But as it stands now, Dragonwilds often feels like a blueprint taped over a foundation still being poured.
The bones are solid. The vision is compelling. But the game still stumbles over itself more than it should. Systems feel layered, but not always interconnected. For $30, there’s just not enough content yet to support the long haul, and what is here sometimes lacks the polish and tuning to justify the grind. These aren’t unsolvable problems, though; they’re the growing pains of a game trying to do a lot in its current state.
Thankfully, Jagex has made their intentions clear early on. Their Early Access roadmap outlines a generous helping of upcoming content: a brand-new region, new skills and quests to sink your teeth into, new gear to chase, new enemy types to fight, and—perhaps best of all—a full-fledged creative mode! The studio understands that the foundation needs support, and RuneScape has always been a game that evolved in real time, often awkwardly, often messily, but almost always with the help of its community. And that, perhaps, is the most RuneScape thing of all.
Game8 Reviews
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RuneScape: Dragonwilds Product Information
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| Title | RUNESCAPE: DRAGONWILDS |
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| Release Date | April 15, 2025 (Early Access) Early 2026 (Full Release) |
| Developer | Jagex Ltd. |
| Publisher | Jagex Ltd. |
| Supported Platforms | PC (via Steam) |
| Genre | Open-World, Survival, Adventure, RPG |
| Number of Players | 1-4 Players |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB RP |
| Official Website | RuneScape: Dragonwilds Official Website |
