RuneScape: Dragonwilds 独立玩家接近300万，Jagex 规划多章节内容

Every now and then, there’s confidence and success in a game, where they don’t need to hide behind vague lines like “it was a success” or “it failed to hit targets”. During my conversation with the team behind RuneScape: Dragonwilds, I’m used to not getting numbers, so I said I wouldn’t ask for specifics. I got them anyway.

“Close to three million people have played the game now—unique players.”

It’s not a bad position for Jagex to find itself in with a game that departs from the MMO roots the company is known for, and it was smart to use this opportunity to expand the franchise in a new way. RuneScape: Dragonwilds is set in the same universe, and takes some fundamental ideas—skills, progression, fantasy and grind—and drops them into a survival game.

While at the recent RuneFest in Birmingham, I chatted with Executive Producer Jesse America and Creative Director Rick Turek. One thing is certain: after a long hiatus and earlier failed experiments like 8Realms, Carnage Racing, and Chronicle: RuneScape Legends (albeit FunOrb lasted a while), Jagex seems to have found its new success, which will continue now that 1.0 is out and about.

“There is a string of sagas planned, and we’re committed to the game for the long haul,” I was told, and that the team already has a plan for multiple years after the content that’s currently being announced. All things considered, that in itself is the real indicator that the gamble has worked with RuneScape: Dragonwilds.

Jagex Almost Went in a Very Different Direction

A RuneScape survival game wasn’t the first choice. In fact, the first choice—and something already in a sort of development—was an Action RPG. Jesse told me, “We had stopped a previous project, which was actually an action RPG.”

What happened next was a rethink of how they should approach making a new game. They surveyed thousands of RuneScape players about the other genres they thought would suit the franchise, and while Action RPG ranked close to the top, Survival wasn’t too far behind. Another consideration was how they would develop the game and work with the audience from the beginning.

“We also knew we wanted to go into Early Access”, Rick told me, adding, “The survival genre, that player fan base really sort of leans into that.”

Survival games and Early Access do fit together well, as seen from the countless entries in the genre. They’re games built around systems, iteration, additions and a player base willing to help shape those systems over time. It should also be noted that, when the decision was made, the market was significantly less crowded.

Jesse’s pitch to the company’s CEO was unusually straightforward, with Jesse telling me it was, “I think we should try our hand at a survival game.” Simple and straightforward, just how I like it, and far from the horrible stories we hear lately about the games industry.

Rather than immediately attempting to reach for a Triple-A Action RPG, Survival offered what he described as a more methodical route to building a new RuneScape title. The result is, of course, RuneScape: Dragonwilds.

Magic is the Trick to Removing Survival-Game Busywork in RuneScape: Dragonwilds

I’ve played far too many Survival games. More than enough to know that I’m generally bored with most of them right from the very start, without an interesting hook. The first tree felled can feel productive, but dozens of hours later, getting that next stack of wood makes you wonder why your heroic survival adventure has turned you into the world’s most repetitive lumberjack.

If I wanted that much wood, I certainly wouldn’t be playing a game. Or, at least not this game. Still, the advantage RuneScape: Dragonwilds has, I am told, is that it solves the grinding problem through magic. Or, as they call it, “survival through sorcery.”

The early game still has the traditional loop. You chop wood, mine resources, and develop your skills. However, as you improve, you begin to unlock magic that lets you get around the repetitive parts. Instead of manually chopping individual trees forever, for example, you can eventually summon a magical axe that tears through several of them.

After that, you get to use another spell that blows apart the wood, and then magic the resources right into your waiting body, or backpack, whatever orifice the game has you carry things in. It was described to me as making the Survival genre’s chores “more fun, more compelling and less frustrating.”

That’s a relatively simple idea, but it also strikes me as one of the better explanations for how the RuneScape IP lends itself to the survival genre. It has always been enormously interested in skills and progression, so turning the grind itself into the thing that eventually gives you the power to bypass part of that grind feels smart.

You Don't Need Thousands of Hours in RuneScape

The more difficult problem is making a RuneScape game that doesn't require people to understand RuneScape. As mentioned in the roundup of my chat on Old School RuneScape, I've only ever really dabbled in the franchise.

Given it’s older than an actor’s trophy wife, telling a newcomer to jump into an existing MMO or world with oodles of lore is a difficult thing. Having them jump into a brand new story set in the same world as an MMO, on the other hand, isn’t that difficult.

Jagex told me that RuneScape: Dragonwilds was deliberately built around that, saying: “We have deliberately created something that serves existing RuneScape fans, as well as players that may have never played a RuneScape game before.”

If you’ve spent thousands of hours in RuneScape, you will find some familiar characters, ideas and story beats. If you haven’t spent any hours in it, you’ll find a fantasy survival game in a universe, but with a story that stands alone.

The benefit for Jagex has been noticeable, though, creating a change in the audience. They told me that approximately 85% of RuneScape: Dragonwilds players at the beginning of Early Access were active RuneScape players.

Since then, that balance has shifted dramatically. “Over time, that balance sort of leveled out as more people tried the game,” the team explained, adding that it’s now approximately even. Interestingly, though, the traffic isn’t one-way only: People are moving from RuneScape: Dragonwilds into OSRS or even RuneScape proper.

There’s “a fair amount of travel” between them, I’m told. Arguably, this is the most valuable thing the game has brought, adding a level of synergy that may not have been expected in early development.

Nearly Three Million Players

We come back around to that number again, and it wasn’t in isolation. When I asked whether having a multi-year roadmap meant Jagex considered Dragonwilds’ Early Access and following launch a success, the initial answer was simple: “Yes.”

As mentioned, I said I wouldn’t ask for figures. I got them anyway, and here they are again: “Close to three million people have played the game now—unique players.”

The important distinction here is that this isn’t a straight sales figure. RuneScape: Dragonwilds can be bought outright, and can also be found on subscription services like Game Pass. I did ask for the breakdown, but I couldn’t be given exact figures—there was something interesting, though; players who bought Dragonwilds on Steam and consoles collectively outnumber its Game Pass users, and the Game Pass audience itself was described as “pretty massive”.

“Massive” is also the word used to describe the daily activity, and questions of a precise figure were unsuccessful. What can I say, I like to ask for numbers. I did ask if I could guess a ballpark figure until they gave in and told me—that wasn’t successful, but it did lead to me being told that “Sony and Microsoft are extremely happy with results and interaction with RuneScape: Dragonwilds*” and that it’s “Higher than what they normally see”.

Console Development Has Been a Learning Experience

RuneScape: Dragonwilds is also significant for another reason: it’s the first time Jagex has shipped something on a console, with Jesse telling me, “Jagex as a company has never shipped a console game before internally”.

Of course, this creates some easy-to-understand challenges, but they may be a little more painful in practice. A good example is patches. On the PC, during Early Access, Jesse told me there was a point where they patched the game 11 times in just 24 hours.

Try doing that when Sony and Microsoft may want to certify an update. One of them may be perfectly happy letting a hotfix through without question; the other may want to examine it, which could take a few days. Then, you need to remember that the game is cross-play, so it can’t simply push an update to one part of the player base and leave the rest behind.

“You can’t bring down half of the network, so to speak,” Jesse explained.

Fortunately for Jagex, they have developers with console experience from Ubisoft, EA and Activision, so these issues weren’t entirely unexpected. However, knowing how it works and actually having something held up are two entirely different things, Jesse saying, “Those things are more pronounced in reality than they are when you plan ahead.”

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Then There Are Mods

Consoles also make another of Jagex’s ambitions for RuneScape: Dragonwilds more interesting, and that is mods. The game already has a modding community, but installing its creations currently requires at least some technical ability. To jump this hurdle, Jagex is partnering with CurseForge.

Being me, I mentioned that the modding scene tends to create things that may not be safe for work, and some of them may not even be safe for humans in general. Some of them, however, may give you a different sort of wood than you may expect in a survival game.

CurseForge’s experience with both Unreal Engine games and other survival communities appears to be one of the central reasons Jagex chose the partnership in the first place, particularly with moderation and curation.

The plan is for players to discover and install mods directly in Dragonwilds, using an integrated browser and installer. Ease of use like that is handy on the PC; on a console, it’s essential. Being on a console also means that Jagex can’t simply open the floodgates and allow anything through unchecked. “There will be oversight”, the team confirmed.

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Dragonwilds Isn't Finished

Perhaps the most important takeaway from my conversation is that RuneScape: Dragonwilds has moved beyond any question of whether Jagex intends to keep supporting it. It does. The more interesting question is how large the game could become.

There is already shared DNA between RuneScape: Dragonwilds and RuneScape 3, including characters, references and story material for the particularly lore-obsessed players to find. The teams across Dragonwilds, OSRS and RuneScape 3 also talk to each other about where those connections can go next, even hinting that content revealed elsewhere in the RuneScape universe may eventually find its way into Dragonwilds.

Naturally, I wasn’t given any details on this. What they would say is that the plans extend considerably beyond the next update, and even beyond the next year. “We do have a multi-year plan,” I was told.

I did ask exactly how many years, but of course, they couldn’t tell me that, either. You can’t blame a girl for trying. What I got instead was, “There is a string of sagas planned, and we’re committed to the game for the long haul.”

A survival spin-off based on a 25-year-old MMO franchise approaching three million players, expanding onto consoles, preparing integrated mod support and already planning multiple future sagas is perhaps not the most obvious outcome when Jagex decided to try something new. Whatever the expectations were, it’s clear that RuneScape: Dragonwilds is now a new pillar for Jagex to lean on, while the studio works on the freshly revealed fourth MMO project.

About the author: Chris Wray has been writing at Wccftech gaming section since 2015 and is an opinionated bloke from the north of the UK (think Ned Stark). He enjoys video games, films, books, beer, whisky and other alcohol. He also supports Manchester Utd and for some reason he writes profile pages in the third person. His expertise is in gaming and the games industry, primarily on the PC. In addition to this, he works with and contributes to the finance and tech sections.

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