Xbox Game Pass keeps September rolling. The newest day-one addition is RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Jagex's open-world co-op survival game, which lands on the service today as the sixth title to join the lineup this month. You can catch the original reporting over at MSN.

If the studio name sounds familiar, it should. Jagex has been running RuneScape for over two decades, one of the longest continuously-operating MMO houses in the business. So when they turn around and build an open-world survival crafting game set in the same universe, people pay attention. Dragonwilds drops you and up to three friends into Ashenfall, a continent overrun by dragons, where you gather, build, and fight your way toward taking down the big lizards themselves.

The co-op is the whole draw here. This is the kind of game where one person is off chopping trees, someone else is brewing potions and the fourth is standing in base asking why nobody built walls yet. Classic survival chaos, and those are the sessions you end up talking about in Discord for weeks.

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: Game Pass day-one is the smartest possible home for a co-op survival game. The number one killer of these titles isn't bugs or balance, it's an empty friends list. Nobody wants to buy a four-player crafting game and then find out their crew already moved on. A built-in subscriber base means there's always someone to play with, and that's what keeps a game like this alive past launch month.

Dragonwilds already had a solid early access run on PC, so this console arrival comes with a pile of updates and refinements baked in. It's also hitting PS Plus Extra on the same day, so Sony players aren't left watching from the window.

How the player base holds up now that the gates are open on both platforms, that's what I'll be checking back on. For now, if you've got Game Pass and a couple of friends who owe you a favor, tonight's a good night to call it in.