RuneScape Dragonwilds interview: Why Jagex is making the jump from MMO to Survival

RuneScape Dragonwilds is a survival co-op adventure sprinting into early access in Spring 2025 with every chance of becoming a beloved sibling to RuneScape 3 and Old School RuneScape.

Make no mistake, Dragonwilds is a survival co-op adventure and not an MMO like Jagex’s two flagship titles, but there’s obvious overlap. So much so that the Cambridge-based developer’s decision to choose this genre in particular, makes perfect sense.

Jagex began prototyping and toying with ideas that would eventually coalesce to become Dragonwilds in 2021. As the project’s aims and goals became more concrete, production went full steam ahead.

Ahead of its launch, Dexerto sat down with Dragonwilds Executive Producer Jesse America to learn more about the project’s origins, how it retains the very British DNA of its forebears, and the importance of the number 99.

Jagex is no stranger to iterating upon and continually updating a game over years and even decades. RuneScape 3 (formerly RuneScape 2) has received frequent updates since 2004.

“At the time I was thinking, ‘What is a project that would suit Jagex, the way it thinks about games, and game development?’” America told me, adding that he ultimately “settled on something that would not lead us down the path of trying to be a AAA developer because that’s not necessarily Jagex’s style. A game concept that we could iterate upon together with the community.”

Community input has been of huge importance to Jagex over those two decades, and, while they’ve strived to maintain a balance between fan feedback and implementing its vision, America recognized the correlation between fostering a strong community with the longevity of a survival game.

“You’ve seen that in our games like Old School and others, where what we’ve done is listened to players and acted upon their feedback. From that starting point, I arrived at survival games.”

Old School RuneScape, a snapshot of an older RuneScape 3 build that ultimately became its own game in 2013, only adds content to the live game if it passes an approval threshold voted on exclusively by players. The democratic approach is unlike any other MMO and certainly has its flaws – not all good ideas are given a pass. But as a concept, it would be an invaluable tool to gauge sentiment, especially for a game in Early Access.

Whether Jagex will adopt that format for Dragonwilds, America didn’t say. However, player agency and freedom was a constant at the forefront of his mind during our discussion.

“Freedom is really important for RuneScape players to determine their own play path, their own sort of journey through their game experience, which fits with open-world survival. And then there are things that you see in all of these games, like base building and resource gathering and combat and a variety of other features, and every survival game has its own.”

Skilling & killing

That desire to never shoehorn the player into a specific playstyle bleeds into other areas, too. Like RS3 and OSRS, Dragonwilds allows players to utilize magic, melee, and ranged as the three primary methods of combat, but where their paths diverge is the eschewing of any combat triangle. No combat ‘style’ is weak or strong against another. You’re free to use all three wherever and whenever you please.

“It is a little bit more free-form than the combat triangle itself. But again, we are in Early Access, and as with a lot of things that we developed for this game, we took a balanced approach of these are things that belong to the MMO,” he tells me. “These are things from the survival genre that we need to be beholden to, and we are going to make that blend.”

Where the open-ended approach starts to become more uniform and rigid in nature is Dragonwilds’ skills. Like RS3 and OSRS, each encompasses a specific activity and can be leveled to 99, a carryover of the aforementioned games’ level cap that America was particularly happy to reveal.

“You will be levelling key, familiar RuneScape skills to level 99,” he said with a smile, confirming that each skill would have its own exclusive unlocks, including so-called Survival Magic spells.

“Reaching new levels in Woodcutting, for example, will unlock Survival Magic. There are perks and bonuses that you unlock as you level up, but also access to specific types of magic belonging to that skill which have a specific utility within the survival realm.”

Whether each of Dragonwilds’ skills will take as long to max out as those found in its sister games remains to be seen, but serious experience grind or not, the intention is undoubtedly to have players specialize in different skills early on and share the wealth, as it were, with others. Don’t have the Woodcutting level to chop a certain tree? Worry not, that’s what friends are for.

Explorers together strong

Co-op is a hallmark of survival games, and Dragonwilds supports up to four players, all able to progress together in a shared world.

“So your progress is based, or is held within your character. Everything that’s on your character, and what you have achieved carries over with you, even if you were to, for instance, jump into somebody else’s world. You can make meaningful progress somebody else’s world,” America explained.

One component of that progress will be quest and story progression. Often lauded in the MMO community for offering bespoke quests packed with narrative, unique puzzles, and mechanics.

“I’m not going to say too much about the story because that is one of the things we want players to experience day one, but when it comes to quests, we definitely wanted to start with quests that were more in the realm of quality storytelling rather than, ‘Go out and kill 10 rats.’”

That’s not to say basic kill orders for the purposes of tutorials won’t be present, but America affirmed that the plan was to lean “much more into the quest and lore aspect of the game as we develop it further.”

A central part of the narrative will be hunting down the Dragon Queen and her brood, who have taken a liking to the island of Ashenfall.

“We are definitely going to be leaning into the dragon slayer fantasy where taking out these bosses, their underlings, their offspring, yields rewards that show you are a dragon slayer and by which you can improve your power.”

Cutting down building-sized lizards ten times your size is hard graft, though, and every adventurer needs a place to call home after the daily grind. Construction is one of Dragonwilds’ skills, and just like RS3 and Old School, it’s all about home improvements.

“We want, at the very least, to offer people an experience that even if you’re not that big of a fan, a good experience. According to feedback we’ve gotten during the Alpha, we actually delivered on making a really good building system with snapping, rotation and individual building pieces, all of which give you experience.”

Can dragons dive-bomb your house and scorch it to its foundations? I didn’t ask, but one threat to your hard work, if you opt to allow the option, will be other players.

Friendly Fire

“The short answer is yes, Dragonwilds has PvP. We call it friendly fire. It’s an option you can turn on when you create a world for you and your friends.” America considers PvP as one area brimming with potential, but again stressed the importance of player feedback regarding how much of a focus it and other types of content would be in the future.

“For us, it’s really important what the feedback is going to be on this game. What will players want to see? What gets priority? Obviously, we have our own stable of ideas that we are really in love with, but some of that direction and those priorities will be decided by what the community tells us.”

America’s excitement and belief in Dragonwilds’ potential for success grew palpably with every response in a delightfully infectious manner during an interview that placed great importance on the concept of collaborative game development between studio and audience.

Whether Dragonwilds will be the addition to Jagex’s portfolio of success stories it has sought for long remains to be seen, but if ever there was a chance, this is it. Marrying sandbox MMO with survival (emphasis on the latter) is a no-brainer that Jagex is uniquely positioned to pull off.

RuneScape Dragonwilds enters Steam Early Access this spring.