40 Hours I'll Never Get Back: A Dragonwilds Reality Check
This summer, my brother convinced me to try a game genre I'd always considered a hard pass—survival games. The gateway drug? Nostalgia. RuneScape Dragonwilds stirred up old memories of grinding for that upgraded Dragon Pickaxe, of earning two level 99 skill capes before Jagex wiped the slate clean. I caught myself reminiscing about the good old days—then promptly slapped myself for it. The original game wasn't even that good.
I'm not a survival game person. I want that stated for the record.
Still, curiosity won out. I bought into the early access of RuneScape: Dragonwilds, thinking: Jagex has tried to make new entries in the series before and failed. Maybe this time would be different.
Forty hours later, my opinion had hit rock bottom, and my distaste for survival games remained entirely unchanged. My negativity was apparently bothering my brother enough that we argued into buying Palworld, which had just left early access.
Four hours in Palworld outshone forty hours in Dragonwilds. It struck me that Dragonwilds felt less like a RuneScape spin-off and more like a cheap copy of the survival genre—whereas Palworld wore its Pokémon inspiration proudly and still managed to be its own thing.
Lazy Design
"Volume over quality" sums up my impression of Dragonwilds after reaching the Umbral Sands and looking at the roadmap ahead.
The excitement died the moment I noticed that enemies like zombies, rats, and wolves were being recycled across different regions. New areas never actually felt new. I can forgive painting a green dragon blue—dragons are cool no matter the palette. But fighting near-identical echidna-looking monsters with slight variations gets old fast. Picking up yet another crystal variant in a supposedly fresh region, just to pay for gear schematics, is boring. My base getting raided by the same recycled monsters isn't tense—it's tedious.
Fighting the same giant zombie boss in both Dowdun Reach and Umbral Sands is the textbook definition of lazy design.
I tried to remember whether the original RuneScape was lazy by design too. If it was, then Dragonwilds is indeed a worthy successor.
Early Access
I know, I know. The game is in active development. Yada yada.
But I do think early access games have a responsibility to uphold a standard. Adding items that serve no purpose yet—just sitting there taking up inventory space—is a choice I don't understand. Slapping a "COMING SOON" label on the Ascension Core while dangling Masterclass weapons I can't actually upgrade feels like an unnecessary provocation. How dare you make my Abyssal Whip worse than a Mythril Sword? Unforgivable.
Melee and Ranged feeling woefully uncool compared to Magic speaks to unbalanced combat mechanics. That's forgivable—for now.
Early access should be about showing a confident direction for where the developers want the game to go, using players to grind down the rough edges along the way. Instead, Dragonwilds leans on a very linear system to sell nostalgia without substance, and it shows.
Quests
Each region follows a primary quest chain that gates progression—you gear up, solve puzzles to unlock a vault, then defeat the final boss. The main quests do their job and feature some nice cinematics that briefly explain the lore.
My problem is with the side quests, which are bland to the core. I would have loved going on actual adventures with characters like the Wise Old Man or Vannaka. Instead, they just stand there. Stationary. Doing nothing. Lazy, again.
Verdict
Dragonwilds isn't without charm—the dragon fights are fun, the cinematics are a nice touch, and the nostalgia hook is real. But charm alone can't carry a game that recycles its content, pads its systems, and mistakes a linear progression for depth. Four hours of Palworld gave me more genuine enjoyment than forty hours of this.
If Jagex wanted to prove they could build something new from the RuneScape legacy, they're not there yet. Not by a long shot. They should refine the combat and make me feel like a Slayer. Make me feel like I'm Percy Jackson—a demigod—at the end of each region, on a mission led by the Wise Old Man. That's the game I'd sink another forty hours into.