Jagex, the developer of the long-lived massively multiplayer game RuneScape, has announced a new spinoff: RuneScape: Dragonwilds, an open-world survival and crafting game in the style of Valheim, Ark, and Minecraft.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds will launch into early access on Steam in spring 2025. It’s set in the trad-fantasy world of the cult 2001 MMO, but developed in Unreal Engine 5, so it looks like a modern video game. Jagex describes it as an “adventure that blends high fantasy with light RPG elements and iconic RuneScape lore.”
Dragonwilds is playable solo or with up to three friends, and involves all the survival gameplay you would expect: chopping down trees, building houses, unlocking new skills and crafting recipes, fighting goblins. There’s a focus on magic as players harness a power called Anima to facilitate their survival.
All the action takes place on Ashenfall, a forgotten continent on the world of Gielinor that’s never been explored before. Dragons have awoken there, and the ultimate goal of the game is to slay their queen.
RuneScape is one of the most unlikely success stories in gaming. Coded in the basic programming language Java by brothers Andrew Gower and Paul Gower, it started life as a browser game and didn’t get its own client until 2016. But it has persisted for nearly a quarter-century, powered by a nostalgic fanbase, the majority of whom choose to play an older version of the game called Old School RuneScape over its latest iteration. Andrew Gower recently launched his own spiritual successor, a retro cozy MMO called Brighter Shores.
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