RuneScape: Dragonwilds Steam Charts & Stats

For early access this has a terrible update cycle. wouldn't buy until it comes out fully, if it does.

Regret buying with everything going on, would refund it but I'll just drop this review and not touch it again, as well as cancel my membership and junk.

I know this is Early Access, so I'll be gentle. I refunded this game close to the 2 hour mark. Why? Let me explain: The game is more of a taste of what is to come...and I'm not impressed. It feels like Ark, but not as good. I feel as if this game is more for the nostalgia for Runescape players. It's got survival aspects to it (Hunger, Water, Sleep), but none of those really feel impactful. It is extremely easy to manage all of those stats, so in the end it was more of, "Oh, I'm starving and need water. Let me down 30 berries and some boiled water that I got from walking 2 feet. Or maybe I'll eat rat meat that is extremely plentiful as well as the random chickens everywhere." You have a lot of skills to level just like in Runescape and it's the typical grind, but easier....a lot easier. Not a gripe by any means. There is building and crafting, but this all feels exactly like any other survival game. Fighting is easy and you only have access to a sword and shield/knife at the moment with more promised to come. In short, I feel like this game doesn't know what it wants to be and has different styles mixed in with the Runescape design and feel. The UI feels clunky and has extremely small text along with weird inventory screens and utility bar. The graphics aren't bad, pretty typical for this genre. I just really wasn't wow'd by anything and I was bored within the refund window time...thankfully. I think I'll let this game cook for awhile before I decide to try it again, if I ever want to. I honestly ran to this game because it's Runescape, but was utterly disappointed with what I saw (Again, I know it's EA). If you're looking for a survival/crafting game, look elsewhere...there's plenty around that play and feel a lot better than this one. Imo; Cash grab targeting RS players and lovers.

Aside the fact, that except for maybe on a very surface level, this game has nothing to do with the actual universe of RuneScape, at it's current stage (May 2025) there is no way I can recommend this game. People complain that there is no healing during combat, that is not correct. If you push a bit into the game, you will find recipe for Healing Potions within an hour or quicker. But god damn this game is FRUSTRATING on so many levels. The balance of damage dealt was stagger damage taken is ridiculous, especially when considering that for the most part you will be fighting vs multiple opponents at once. The game also makes the severe mistake, that in what ever region you are in, all you will be able to acquire is the resources that match that regions supposed difficulty level (and yet, with the respective armour and weapons from that difficulty level, you will still feel outmatched a lot of times, as far too many opponents have weirdly long detection ranges). So whenever you push into the next region, you are ridiculously underpowered and have to spend ages on farming/grinding, dying, respawning, eating, drinking, travelling, rinse and repeating. And then for way too long you don't get new blueprints for new stuff, and when you do, the game shits 5 or 10 on you at once, that you will struggle to acquire the necessary resources, for the required crafting stations, so that you can prepare FOR THE ZONE YOU HAVE JUST CURRENTLY DISCOVERED. Just to have to rinse and repeat the underpowered process again for the next zone. Combat is incredibly janky and at times feels really non-responsive. The game requires you to dodge and block, which is fine in theory, except your stamina drain rate on dodge is just... 3 dodge rolls and you are out of stamina, and when facing multiple opponents who attack within splitseeconds, you have to perform all dodgerolls to not get staggered. Blocking is only semi useful and the part that I am talking about with unresponsive. Happened way too often to me, that I pressed block, and just nothing happened. Attacks are janky and near impossible to adequately correct their direction when some opponents move or dodge. But god beware you dodge during their attack chain, they will very accurately tether and rubberband you and "dash" to your new location while performing their swings. And movement in this game, oh god don't even get me started.... Jumping is like kneehigh. You will rather early discover a spell, that has a brief cast time and then allow you to ONCE jump like 4 times your height. useful in some areas to explore, but not usable in combat whatsoever. Additionally, when running or walking up ramps or non level surface terrain, jumping my actually do absolutely nothing. This weird and unintuitive behaviour/mechanic cost me way too many respawns, because I succumbed solely to how unnatural and unintuitive movement in this game feels. Also, opening your map the first time after every launch, the game will legitimately freeze for 3 seconds, And I am running on a very good rig, 64GB DDR5 CL24, AM5 7900X3D, RTX 5080TI... The ingame tooltips are incredibly lack luster still in a lot of areas, so you will rarely know which item does what exactly, or rather which crafting station does what exactly, until you've built them. The game is a chore, politely put. It has tons of potential, and yes it is still in Early Access, but as of right now I can not under any circumstance recommend it at all. Mechanically and balance wise, the game is... not in a good state. If I remember, I will respectively update this review in a couple of months or weeks, when the new updates hit. But as of right now, I just feel utterly done with this experience. It feels almost like initially someone had the idea of making this a mobile game, that features micro transactions to raise your powerlevel, but when they slapped the RuneScape IP on it, they were not allowed to do that any more. Edit (still in May 2025!): After progressing into yet another area, grinding all the required materials for that areas appropriate gear level, I am once more flabbergasted at how unexceptionally terrible the balance in this game is. The best weapons for that gear level, and the best armor, hardly make any difference to the gear from the previos levels. Sure the numbers look a little bit higher, but you feel zero difference. The fact that I unlocked consumables to improve my stats is not helping at all, as 80% of these consumables require ingredients that are not even custom to the current unlocked areas, but require more progresison, some of which severly more progression. Pulling individual enemies is near impossible in most populated areas, as triggering aggro on one, will trigger aggro on ALL that are within aggro range of that one you triggered. So you will yet again quickly get overwhelmed. Retrieving your items post death likely leads to another death (if under such aforementioned circumstances) as you will just reinitiate that entire aggro chain again while trying to retrieve your items. You are REQUIRED to obtain and maintain all possible buffs through consumables and magic, to NOT BE OVERWHELMED by more than one not default enemy. Add hunts and raids to that mix, as well as how quickly food/water/energy/stamina drain, and the game is a 9/10 on a frustration scale. A mere 2 or 3/10 on a fun scale.

A clash of existing survival genre classics with a spin on magic. For an early access game, it has an intuitive build system, a steady progression line and breathtaking graphics. It's quite polished, but like all survival genres has the problem of a lack of content. Not to say it will take you a long time to beat the game, eventually you will want more shit to do and more bosses. No survival game can truly fix this issue because eventually you will progress to the end in any game. So i'm not really going to knock the game for that. I haven't found anything that has bothered me so far. In my honest opinion though, Valheim really hit the nail on the head with bosses and progression, but dragonwilds is a fresh set of content and a new world to explore, so it is honestly better than valheim in ways, and worse in others. I'd say that Valheim has a beautiful aesthetic to it, and it's peaceful and has European homestead vibes, whereas Dragonwilds is more of a medieval magical archer vibe. Instead of Vikings, you're a like a lil Zelda exploring your world. The progression and leveling is quite fast, but of course this will probably change as more content is added including bosses and areas on the map. Some people have said they could beat the game in 20 hours, i'm only two and a half hours in so far and I have to say that i'm really enjoying it.

What everyone needs to understand is this game is very early access! The devs see all the reviews saying they are just trying to make a quick buck and they have addressed this comment numerous times. Most comments that are negative are from people with 100-200 hrs In the game(which is a lot) I cleared the game in maybe 12 hrs 100% complete and spent another 20 hours just building and having fun. So someone that has that kind of time into the game(100+hrs) obviously liked the game enough to play it for an additional 80+ hrs after beating it. Just give it time this game will be amazing after they get their full dev team!

Dev's are unable to keep there commitments, would ask for refund if I could. if you say first week of June we will get a update on the first week of June we should expect a word or what was promised instead we got RADIO SILENCE.

I'm writing this while it's still in early access, so this might be outdated by the time someone gets to this review. I'll do my best to update it once it's fully out. Let's start with the positives. This game is very addicting, the grind is just as fun as the original MMORPG. It's stable, which is always a positive for early access, despite many of it's over-tuned or half-baked systems. The building mechanic is one of my favorite systems in this game and it provides much more flexibility than you'd imagine. The progression system, while in it's infancy, is fun and doesn't feel too lacking. They provide a decent amount of leveling up in the beginning which can be a nice hit of dopamine, like when you set up new game account in the RS MMO and level up from 1. I like the idea of the melee combat system, it's very fun being able to parry and dodge during combat. Now for the negatives/constructive criticism. The hunger and thirst mechanics for survival are a chore. I like being able to cook different things and make different infusions, but at the end, you have to eat and drink every minute to prevent the fatigue and slower recovery that comes with hunger and thirst. The constant dragon attacks are annoying, especially since it's a poison dragon, so just getting hit means you'll die in about 10 seconds unless you have the anti-poison status from a potion, which are hard to come by already due to the scarcity of marrentil, especially considering that there's an entire area COVERED IN POISON. The biggest problem this game has is that gathering and refining resources are complete chores. Sure, water is super easy to come by and purify, making infusions isn't hard, farming sheep isn't difficult by any means, but when your meter goes down as fast as it does, it starts to get pretty expensive towards your time. For example, making string is pretty easy. Flax is plenty in two areas and 3 coarse fur can also produce 1 thread, it starts to add up when a ton of recipes require 3-20 coarse threads. The storm touched highlands is my favorite yet most loathed area. I like the plentiful raw materials! I can't stand the constant attacks from rams, the blue goblin guys, and plants. It's really easy to just trigger 3 enemies to start attacking you both close range and long range. The frequent thunder strikes are kinda awful too, especially since they tend to strike you at the worst times (mid air or in combat.) While I like the idea of the combat system, it's either way to easy or way too hard to fight enemies. If you're two tiers ahead of the enemies of the area, it doesn't matter how much you get hit, you can annihilate the enemies pretty fast. But if you're even just one tier removed, the combat gets unnecessarily hard. Fighting one enemy is fun, parrying and swinging back are my favorite things to do. But if even one more character fights you, now you have to roll and shield a ton more while your energy depletes FAST. And if you though that your energy depletes fast, imagine how annoying it is when you're really thirsty or hungry for not consuming food and water every minute. I'll have to dodge 3 times away from berserkers so that they don't do a third of my health each hit, and can't even fight back because I'm already out of energy. If you have some extra cash and really like RuneScape, you won't regret buying it, even in it's infancy. If you're not a fan of survival games, then this game will make you rip your hair out. I'm excited to see how Jagex continues to improve this game. Edit: I fixed some misspellings and bad phrasing. After the newest update (0.8), they made it so that your hunger and thirst deplete significantly slower near a claimed bed. This is exactly the type of QOL update we needed. Same with the stacks being increased to specific numbers, and the weights are a bit better balanced. I really appreciate this update.

I expected something a little different than Runescape. Instead I got something a little different than Valheim, but less good.

At this point game devs have been hiding behind early access for an easy buck. You had an Alpha and a Beta, yet you couldnt deliver a finished product when it came to something as simple as cooking or combat. we have been waiting for any additional update for months now. Any community I have found from this game is gone. The roadmap has zero updates to it. Literally the only thing they did was fix the dragon attacking, which modders did in 24 hours of the game coming out. zero transparency as to why the constant delays.