I didn’t come to RuneScape: Dragonwilds as a complete RuneScape virgin, despite missing the boat on RuneScape back in the ’00s. I’ve played a little bit of Old School RuneScape, and was incredibly absorbed in the Jagex-published Melvor Idle. I’m not exactly unfamiliar with how the game’s sense of progression works, and it makes sense that a survival spin-off could have worked. Could.

Fundamentally, there’s nothing egregiously wrong with RuneScape: Dragonwilds. It is paced much like other survival games, with clear influence taken from Valheim, which hit 1.0 earlier this month. There are many different skills for you to master, a range of biomes to explore, and enemies to hunt – but it all feels a bit joylessly functional.

After scrounging up the rocks and wood that you need to make an axe, you go to a tree and swing. And then you miss. Turns out, you need to be almost square to the tree to chop properly. Okay, no problem. Let’s go mine some rock. Not that rock; that’s a decorative rock. You need to go and mine those specific rocks over there. It’s extremely rigid in the way that it wants you to do things, a point the game makes clear immediately by having you follow a pre-ordained set of tasks rather than just exploring and discovering things for yourself.

That rigidity extends all the way through the game, too. Take the spinning wheel that I needed to make, for example. To track down a character who’d gone missing, I needed antlers, but deer are hard to hunt with a dagger or a club. So, you need to make a bow. To make a bow, you need a coarse thread. To make coarse thread, you need a spinning wheel. The game doesn’t tell you how to unlock this. It turns out that you need to pick up some flax to get the spinning wheel blueprint. If you aren’t compulsively wandering around and picking up everything that you see, you’re buggered, it seems. This is a game that you need to play with the wiki open, because some kind fan will likely have explained the game better than it explains itself.

Keep yourself alive

Let’s get down to the basics of gameplay – survival. You need food and water to keep going, so you’ll have to channel your great (x200) grandparent and become a hunter gatherer. That’s fine, we all know what to expect when you need sustenance in a game. What we don’t normally have to deal with is your character being such a terrible cook at low Cooking levels that your food can come out burned, and far less nutritious. This has knock-on effects, with burned food not efficiently helping you recover health, which, in turn, can make early combat encounters against goblins a real slog.

Why not let me take the food off the fire when it’s ready? Why do all my efforts go to waste so that a number can tell me that I’m better at Cooking, rather than my character and I becoming better at in-game cooking? Water is a better system. You can collect dirty water anywhere, but to make it drinkable, you need to boil it. Simple, intuitive, and the game doesn’t make you arbitrarily mess it up.

Most individual skill levels feel fairly fatuous. Leveling them gives you tiny stat increases most of the time, with meaningful upgrades arriving less frequently. There’s none of the sense of achievement or progression that you are treated to in Melvor Idle, despite its deliberately streamlined and stripped-back nature.

The wild, grey yonder

More than anything, Dragonwilds feels like a game that struggles to express its reason for being, and one that’s still underdone at 1.0. The sense of place is perhaps the biggest contributor. While hand-crafted, the world itself doesn’t feel interesting to explore. There’s no real sense of mystery, with one goblin-infested area looking much like another, and it’s very easy to get turned around without realizing it because areas look broadly samey.

While I was playing Dragonwilds, I wondered why you’d choose to play it rather than any of the best survival games already on the market. This is particularly true when you compare it, once again, to Valheim, which feels like its clearest competitor. RuneScape gives you a huge world full of discoveries, while Melvor Idle offers its sense of progression in a highly-distilled form. What role does Dragonwilds play? After several hours, I still don’t know.

10 years later, Old School RuneScape is still the best MMO I’ve ever played