Review

Runescape: Dragonwilds review

A cosy co-op survival game set in a well-known franchise

I don’t think I’d be stretching the truth too much if I said I’ve played most of the popular sandbox survival games. Pixel ones included. My friends and I usually spin up a dedicated server and run around until we’ve seen all the content or get bored😁

My reigning champion is Enshrouded. I loved absolutely everything about it and ended up putting in 120+ hours😅 (they’re promising a full release this year, by the way, so there’ll be a reason to return!). Maybe one day I’ll get around to writing a glowing review. But today, I want to share my impressions of another game in the genre — Runescape Dragonwilds.

I first heard the name Runescape back in the early 2000s. There was an MMORPG called that, I know that much! Heard of it, sure, but never played it. Back then, I was more into Ultima Online and Lineage 2, with a few tentative steps into WoW. No time for some weird Runescape thing. So it completely passed me by.

About a year ago, I stumbled across Runescape: Dragonwilds on Steam. Went to check why that name sounded so familiar and threw it on my wishlist “for later.” Well, later finally arrived! I spent a couple of months waiting for a discount because the reviews had me a bit wary. Plus, Early Access. Plus, a good friend of mine described it as “yeah, it’s alright,” and his opinion and experience aren’t something you can just dismiss. Eventually, the stars aligned, and we jumped in with the start of the Steam Summer Sale and a big content update that added a new region and a bunch of balance and QoL changes.

Before we begin

Being mature, experienced folks, we went straight to renting a dedicated server. And that’s where the trouble started. The provider advertised by the game itself costs twice as much as our usual g-portal https://www.g-portal.com/en (not sponsored, sadly). While one of us was renting the server, I went off to figure out character creation.

Character creation

Things aren’t quite as obvious here as you’d hope. There are a couple of “character” types:

• Standard
• Custom

This is about the server settings. Tweak anything in the settings, and your server proudly becomes “Custom.” Play with the defaults, and it’s “Standard.” “Standard” characters can’t join “Custom” servers, and vice versa. We didn’t mess around with the settings, so we went with “Standard” and left everything at default.

Then comes the actual character creator. And there’s barely any room to play around. Pick from 3–4 preset faces, eyebrows, eyes, beards/moustaches. Pick a hairstyle from a slightly longer list. Pick “type A” or “type B” for your body. That’s it. Enough for me, honestly — I’m no good at these fancy character creators of yours😁

First steps

Character created, server joined, intro cinematic watched. Half the job done! The voice-over in that cinematic is magnificent, by the way! Purely on the visual side, I liked the starting area. Everything’s so green and pretty, and the music is lovely! Birds singing, deer running around, some weird rocks floating in the air, a graveyard nearby… There’s a little lake, there’s a windmill, there’s a ruined village full of goblins. Lovely stuff!

You immediately get a fairly standard tutorial quest that walks you through the core mechanics: “hit trees with an axe, hit rocks with a pickaxe, hit rats with a club, hit runes with a pickaxe too, don’t hit skills — here’s how you level those!” Then you’re sent off to talk to some Old Wise Man, who gives you your main quest. At this point, it’s safe to say the game has begun!

Progression

You always have a Main Quest that leads you step by step towards the area’s boss. Kill it, and you move on to the next biome. To beat the boss, you’ll need to farm enough resources and gear up for the area’s level (yep, zones have levels, but you don’t😋). The amount of grinding increases with every new zone, which really disappointed me. In Dowdun Reach, currently the second-to-last zone, you have to practically commit genocide against the poor knights and mages, because they’re the ones dropping the resources you need.

Crafting

Those all-important resources for new gear always come from your current zone and are split into tiers. Each zone usually has:

• ore — to make ingots for armour and weapons
• hides — to make leather for armour and weapons
• thread — to make what? That’s right! Fabric! What for? Armour and weapons!
• ingredients — to make food and alchemy stuff

Recipes for everything you can make from a particular resource unlock the moment that resource enters your inventory (there’s a Journal where you can look up crafting mechanics and recipes — what comes from where and what goes into what). It’s a pretty straightforward system: discover a new ore, smelt it into ingots, unlock armour, gathering tools, weapons, and jewellery. Off you go to gather the resources for your gear and craft it.

Building

To have somewhere to craft, you need to put down some kind of basic “base” and scatter crafting stations around it. The stations are mostly self-explanatory too: furnaces for smelting ore and other stuff, a station for armour, one for weapons, one for jewellery, one for magic staves, one for bows/crossbows and arrows/bolts (yes, those are all separate crafting stations). There’s also a sawmill, a millstone, several cooking stations… And, of course, a vegetable garden! That’s a whole science of its own😅

Despite all that stuff, our master architect managed to squeeze everything into a pretty modest space, so it actually turned out cosy! Mobs from the surrounding area will periodically attack your base. In our case, that meant the starting area and two waves of level 1–2 goblins, who were more of an annoyance than a serious threat.

As for how convenient building is and the variety of textures, I’ll quote our master architect: “Well, it’s no Enshrouded…”😁 No voxels, just the usual blocks. I can’t say building is particularly awkward or ugly. But I never really felt the urge to make the place nice, either.

Quests

Quest areas are usually marked on the map, and the journal gives you a brief description of your objective. Often a bit too brief. It feels like some kind of attempt at old-school questing, but a very strange one. For example, some quests mark an area on the map where you need to do something. Others just say “help the ghosts 0/3,” and that’s it. What, how, where, and why? Nooo idea.

Apart from the main quest, there are a few NPCs who hand out side quests. The rewards, though, are a complete disaster. Usually, you get capes. Seriously. Just capes. Pretty ugly ones, too. More on rewards below. Maybe there are some interesting puzzles and quests I never found. I’m only talking about what I saw — and I wasn’t impressed😔

Okay, fine — one of the quests gives you a mount. It’s cool, and it has skins!

Skills and levelling

Every character has a set of skills loosely divided into combat (Attack, Magic, Ranged), gathering (Mining, Woodcutting, Fishing, Farming), and artisan (Artisan, Construction, Cooking, Runecrafting).

All skills level up through use: chop trees, level Woodcutting; chop goblins, level Attack. The maximum skill level is 99. Runecrafting and Fishing involve a simple mini-game you have to complete to get your “loot.”

As you level each skill, you unlock passives and spells at various milestones, most of them along the lines of “0.5% bonus damage to wood.” There are no classes or restrictions, which is cool! You can absolutely be a fisherman in heavy armour who shoots magic at distant enemies and bonks them with a big two-handed hammer up close.

Buffs and food

The game has a massive pile of recipes for different dishes. There are about 3 separate cooking stations — one for “frying,” one for “cooking,” and one for “boiling”😁. There are also drinks and potions, so no need to go hungry or sober.

Why cook at all? First, your character has hunger and thirst bars that need topping up, or you’ll be rather dead. Second — buffs. Almost every proper dish gives you some temporary buff on top of filling your belly: health regen, faster stamina recovery, extra melee damage, poison resistance (handy, that one! There’s this swamp…). You’re constantly stuffing your face, and life without food buffs is pretty miserable.

A special shout-out to the burning system: ingredients have levels, and if your Cooking skill isn’t high enough, you’ll consistently get charcoal instead of dinner. Like everything else, Cooking levels up just by doing it, so for a while our base looked like an industrial kitchen: fry everything that isn’t nailed down, rat meat included. Bon appétit!

One nice touch — there’s a spell that refreshes the duration of all your food buffs. Cast it, and you don’t have to chew through your entire packed lunch again. The game does little things like this really well. By the way, casting this particular spell makes you burp loudly😇

One less nice touch — as with everything else in this game, by the halfway point you find 2–3 recipes that “work” and only cook those. The enormous pile of other dishes remains a bunch of pretty pictures in your journal. The game doesn’t give you much reason to experiment: belly full, buff active — good enough, back to grinding🤷

Runes

As far as I understand, this is the game’s main selling point. There are 7 types of runes in total. You use them to cast spells, and the game has plenty of those. So where do you get these runes?

• Rune essence “deposits” are scattered around the world, and you need to gather them (read: mine them). Essence also drops from certain monsters and can be found in chests. But those “deposits” will still be your main source.
• You turn the rune essence you’ve gathered into runes at a special crafting station. You can also play a mini-game there to get twice as many runes and some bonus XP. Since I did most of the runecrafting in our party, I got spectacularly sick of this procedure. My inner cheapskate just won’t let me take 250 runes instead of 500. So I had to keep playing this bloody “game.”
• Converting essence levels up “Runecrafting,” which lets you craft new types of runes as your level increases.
• Alongside rune essence deposits, you’ll also find different types of Anima Vents, where you can spend rune essence to get runes directly at a 1:10 ratio.

Spells

Besides the obvious combat use for runes — holding a staff and magicking magic at enemies — there’s a decent selection of non-combat and utility spells. Some can help in a fight too: for example, you can enchant your melee weapon or bow with an element. You can replace your dodge roll with a short forward blink, or make a goblin go beat up its mates. Probably the most useful spell is repair. You and your buddies all strip down together and dump everything that needs fixing on the floor in front of you. Cast the spell, and the repaired items automatically fly back to their owners! It’s quite a spectacle and actually feels like real magic😊

Most spells, though, are for “household chores.” Chop down several trees at once with a magical axe, then chop them up into logs. “Blow up” an ore vein instead of mining it one piece at a time. Summon rain to water your whole garden at once, or summon a personal chest to stash your heaviest junk. Or catch fish that’s already cooked😂

The spells are fun and get used constantly. For example, you very quickly stop feeling like mining ore manually and just blow up every deposit instead!

But there’s a catch here too. For some reason, all (or almost all) utility spells have brutal cooldowns. Why can I only blow up ore once a minute? So I don’t abuse this incredible mechanic? No answer. And the game had a very “fun” bug hanging around for ages. There’s a spell that lets you chop up a felled tree. Except it doesn’t, because the moment you use it, the server crashes. And that bug survived 3 patches (it was fixed about a week ago).

Getting around the map

The map is big and there are lots of regions, so the game lets you place teleport points and jump between them. They cost next to nothing. The basic shopping list: some rocks from a roadside ditch, rune essence, and an item you find lying around in “dungeons.” I never found a limit on these teleporters, so you can carry the materials around and plop those little pancakes down wherever you need them. Or don’t need them.

And I think now is the right time to talk about the game’s problems. Because there are quite a few, actually.

Problems:

Crap rewards

This annoyed me more than anything else. Seriously. Throughout the entire game, chests will give you piles of junk resources and a blueprint for some stool or banner (for the hundredth time!). Dungeons are the same story — a recipe for a gear skin or a knife that’s slightly different from the default one. That’s it. After the first dungeon or two, you can just stop going into them altogether! Side quest rewards are an actual joke. Here’s an example (quest spoilers ahead!):

Early in the game, you can find a statue. Examine it, and you’re told there are 3 recesses in the pedestal that look like you could put something in them. While running around the different areas, I found 3 more statues you could stick something into. I approached one with a gemstone in my inventory and got a little “key.” Delighted, I went off to find the other 2 statues. Found them, figured out which gemstones I needed, collected the “keys,” and happily ran back for my reward. I mean, this wasn’t even a quest — it was a semi-secret puzzle that I, being so damn clever, had solved. I was expecting something cool: a weapon, a spell, some kind of ring or amulet. Instead, I got a cape. No stats. Just a cape, fittingly enough in Dynamo colours — white and blue.

Combat

Boring. Really, really boring. Every fight boils down to clicking monsters to death. With one button. That’s it. Switching weapons changes absolutely nothing. The only time you need to dodge or parry/block is when you’ve just entered a new biome and haven’t crafted that zone’s armour yet. As soon as you have it — soul-crushing boredom is back!

Combat magic is really weird too. You have basic staff attacks. That’s it. You can choose an element by selecting a rune. What does that change? Well, neither water nor fire does enough damage compared to the default — wind. The visual effects change too, sure. But the damage is still lacking, the animations take forever, and kiting monsters is horribly awkward.

Bows and crossbows — I can’t really comment. Barely used them, so I won’t bash them. But judging by feedback from my “colleagues,” there’s nothing good to say either.

Gear

It’s all the same. Three types of “sets” — heavy, medium, light. The only differences are small defence increases, the zone level they’re tied to, and their appearance. That’s it. No armour variety, no different builds, no mechanics. No-thing. It feels roughly like this:

Enter a new biome, everything hits hard and kills you in 3 hits. Grind, farm, craft new armour. Congratulations! You’re now a goddamn Terminator, and good luck killing you. At least 10–15 hits. You can completely forget about blocking and dodging and just click mobs to death. Haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.

By the way, there’s no transmog. So if you don’t like how your armour looks — well, maybe you can hide your helmet in the settings, I dunno 😂

Jumping puzzles

I have nothing against them. Not a huge fan, admittedly. But for some reason, most of them in this game follow the principle of “one mistake and you’ve made a mistake (you’re dead, I mean).” And then you’ve got a 10-minute run back. Maybe longer. With a chance of dying on the way, too. It’s especially painful in the level 5 and 6 zones (Fellhollow and Dowdun Reach). In Fellhollow, it’s transparent chests with the loot I described above; in Dowdun Reach, it’s several sections of the main quest.

Grinding for the sake of grinding

The game doesn’t reward exploration or give you a reason to be curious. It wants you to go to the same place and keep chipping away at the same resource/mob over and over.

You enter a new biome and quickly find a “convenient” farming spot. And that’s basically it. No need to go anywhere else. You just keep returning to that spot and collecting the resources you need.

Skill levelling

Each skill caps at level 99. But levelling most skills beyond 50 gives you absolutely nothing useful. Just some passive effect like “-0.5% durability loss” per level. A reminder: repairs are practically free.

Or take this example: at Mining level 74, you get a passive that reduces ingot weight by 50%. This will come in handy approximately NEVER. Because you’ve never carried ingots more than 2 steps in your inventory (from the furnace to the chest), and you never will. And there are truckloads of passives like this.

Verdict

Honestly — the tedium got to me, and I dropped it in the final region after 45 hours. I think the last straw was the utterly dull final boss of Dowdun Reach. Seriously, fighting him is more boring than killing Frank Horrigan (if you know, you know🤗).

So after that boring boss, we entered a new region, and I realised exactly the same thing was waiting for me again — find metal, smelt ingots, grind-grind-grind, then craft armour, and so on. And I had absolutely zero desire to explore the desert.

Is it a bad game? Definitely not. The first two or three regions are fun. Then you notice you’re constantly doing the same thing, and you just can’t shake that thought.

Would I recommend buying it? Strictly on sale, and only if you have a couple of friends to play with.

Do I believe it’ll get better over time? No. It’s been in EA for a couple of years now, and all the key features are already established. And they’re boring. They can add more areas (and they are), but I don’t feel like exploring them. They can tweak the balance, but the problem is the mechanics, not the balance.

Will I return? Maybe, once it leaves EA. We’ll see what gets fixed and what gets added. For comparison, I can’t wait to get back to Enshrouded, despite having put far more hours into it.

Hugs to you all! <3

Action RPGSurvivalCoop