So I Tried Runescape Dragonwilds.. | Asmongold TV

Asmongold went into RuneScape: Dragonwilds expecting a joke. The game launched around April 1st, and he assumed it would be a meme-tier cash-in on the RuneScape IP. Instead, after several hours of play, he came away genuinely surprised. "Very positive," he said. "Pleasant surprise. Very pleasant surprise." The game is an early-access survival-crafting title that blends the genre's familiar loop—chop trees, mine rocks, build a base, fight monsters—with RuneScape-style skill progression and a magic system that rewards resource management over mana regeneration. For a player who has sunk hundreds of hours into Valheim and Enshrouded, the comparison was inevitable, but Dragonwilds held its own.

The Survival Loop: Familiar, With One Clever Twist

The opening minutes are standard fare: you wake up on a beach, talk to an NPC named Merlin, and are told to collect water, craft a stone club, and build a campfire. Asmongold moved through these steps efficiently, noting that the game's tutorial is unobtrusive and lets you figure out mechanics by doing. The early level-ups come fast—he hit level two in Woodcutting after a few swings—which he identified as a deliberate design choice to keep players engaged. "The really fast level ups at the beginning of the game makes the player feel like they're making a lot of progress," he said.