RuneScape: Dragonwilds Announced as Jagex’s New Take on the Open World Survival Genre

Today, Jagex has announced that it’s bringing the world of RuneScape into a new genre: survival. The developer revealed RuneScape: Dragonwilds, a cooperative open world survival game coming to early access this spring.

Dragonwilds takes place in Ashenfall, a new continent within the RuneScape universe, where one to four players can work together to learn new skills, build camps, grow stronger, and survive against powerful enemies, including lots and lots of dragons. Ashenfall has two regions, with five unique biomes, and the potential for more to be added later post-launch. Though Ashenfall is not the same continent most of RuneScape proper takes place on, RuneScape fans will find a lot of familiarity in the world, including some locations that may resemble familiar places from RuneScape itself, like a wizard’s tower, or a certain castle…

Monsters may also look familiar, but come with a twist. While you’ll still see rats, dragons, trolls, cows, and other creatures you’ll recall from RuneScape, Ashenfall’s wild magic has warped these creatures into strange, nature-fied versions of themselves with new appearances and fusions with plants, thorns, and other wild bits.

Core to survival in Dragonwilds is development of skills, and yes, they include classic RuneScape activities like cooking and woodcutting. These skills allow you to interact with the world in various ways – when I saw a few clips of the game at the Game Developers’ Conference earlier this month, I was shown clips of a player using wind runes to gain the ability to glide through the air across distances. Even more nostalgic was a woodcutting skill that allows players to line up a row of trees and throw a spectral axe to chop them all down at once. It’s a move I was told was referred to as “ax-tral projection.”

RuneScape: Dragonwilds is entering early access on PC sometime this spring, with hopes for a wider launch (including console) sometime in 2026. Jagex will host a deep-dive reveal of the game on Twitch on April 15 at 9:00 AM PT.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.