Loved RS but it’s too grindy for my life now. I don’t have hours to click on trees to level up :/ Definitely one of my all time favorites though, something magical about the game and hitting a 99 really took time / felt like an achievement. Excited to give this a try once it’s ready!
I think paradoxically in your comment, a lot of people associate a game with a time before life got optimized in various ways, things running at their own pace. You would do stuff you found fun or found the idea of it fun. Like making 100 cakes from scratch or something, but if you would play the game today, you would look up a guide, maximize your money asap to buy what you need for the cakes, find the stove closest to a bank, etc.
So what I think was magical about the game was that the ends were different back then (process then vs levels now). I really have to think about it consciously today when I play various games because it really does improve the enjoyment.
I played it in 2001 (I remember when paid memberships first came out) and yeah, I could spend ages doing everything because I was a kid with no responsibilities aside from schoolwork.
Nowadays with a wife and kid of my own it'd just be impossible to spend that much time on it.
I dunno about this. I know several people who got into coding because they were writing little scripts to autocraft in RuneScape. Min-maxing profit/skills has always been a thing in these games. As far as looking it up goes, we’d go to GameFAQs or forums (both are still viable - for older games I still use the text guides if I can find them because they were often so well written).
while that is true, a big core of runescape was the grind. I remember what an idiot I felt like after finding the forums spending time picking bananas for 25 gold as a 7 year old. Back then games were simpler and less stuff to compete with longer attention spans
I wish there was a millenial version of "too old to click around for 99 hours" where they just allow bots. Maybe they can be certain servers or certain account types, like ironman. We can call it botman.
In theory you could make a game where you’re max level everything from the start, but I think the pointlessness of that is obvious. The journey is the game to an extent, and the low attention requirements allow us to dream of all the possible efficiencies.
A lot of mobile games do auto-grind and auto-level you, so you have the endorphine spike of "number go up" without having to work (or possibly drop the game due to difficulty.) Some people really don't like the journey, it seems.
Different value prop. Playing on a bot server I imagine my goals would be different since the computer handles all the drudgery for you. Maybe I’d just quest or something idk.
For those like OP and me who don’t want to grind but want a little bit of the RuneScape-themed “number go up”, there’s Melvor Idle - originally RuneScape-inspired and I believe Jagex bought it eventually. I like to have it idling on the other monitor when I’m doing mindless admin on the pc, or will check it on my phone a couple times a day
Runescape was the first thing that got me into coding. Fell in love with the game and had a ton of admiration for the devs who could spend decades crafting the same game, to create such a wonderful playground for so many millions of people.
Stopped playing after a few years but still have many fond memories of the joy I had everyday after school logging onto that game.
It's special because it has been active for 25 years. There are no skill trees, instead every character has access to all 24 skills giving user's complete agency over what their character can do and has access too.
The game's rhythm is based off of a tick instead of click-and-wait. This can let skilled players abuse click rates for more xp or win PvP or high-leveled PvM fights.
The game takes a lot of time. Each skill needs over 13 million experience to get to max level, this requires significant investment for each skill, letting user's grow attached to their characters. I haven't made it this far, but there is a very rich and expansive endgame to reward the players that have made the grind to those high levels.
It can require less attention than a lot of other video games, so multi-tasking is possible and common.
I think for a lot of people it is the nostalgia around playing the same game when they were a kid.
There's high level boss encounters and such, they're quite difficult and fun.
As a vaguely related example I can recommend Settled's "Nightmare mode" player-invented game mode. I don't want to spoil it ahead of time, but he fights some cool endgame content with the caveat that if he takes even a single point of damage, his account is automatically deleted.
For anyone unaware this is stated to essentially be the MMO continuation of Runescape Dragonwilds which was a survival and crafting game that recently released into 1.0 after its commercial success.
Initially, I misread the headline as referring to RuneQuest, the Betamax of tabletop fantasy role playing. Better than D&D, but which didn't win the popularity contest.
It is one of three games I would love to see made into software, with the other two being Traveller and Paranoia (the computer is your friend, trust the computer)
Is graphical fidelity what people are looking for in a RuneScape game? Unreal seems like an interesting choice. OSRS has something like 5x the player base and the gap only seems to be growing, so it looks odd to me to putting so much investment into a continuation of RS3.
They've already confirmed that this is a new game, not a continuation of RS3. New world, different gameplay (WASD movement instead of clicking), different everything.
This is also not their first Unreal game, as they just released the 1.0 version of RuneScape Dragonwilds, their survival-crafting multiplayer game that has been both a critical and commercial success. It appears that RS4 is to some extent an expansion of Dragonwilds into a proper MMO.
Besides, if they're going to create a brand new big-budget MMO, what else other than Unreal could they realistically use? Graphics aren't the primary reason to replace the RS engine with Unreal - the reason is gameplay.
Their internal engine that they use for RS3 (and OSRS) is only suitable for games like current RS. Even RS3 is still fundamentally based on a 1 square meter grid, gameplay-wise 3D is an illusion (no jumping, climbing or flying), and most importantly game logic updates only once every 600ms, which is about one tenth of even World of Warcraft. They've made two pretty good games despite those limitations throughout the decades, but it can't scale to anything that feels more "modern".
> gameplay-wise 3D is an illusion (no jumping, climbing or flying)
3D is an illusion in this sense in every game, with the potential exception of space combat simulators. And they can only make it work by pretending inertia doesn't exist.
You can fly in World of Warcraft, but all of the content is on the ground, and the designers keep griping about how they don't want you to fly because it makes them feel bad when you skip their content.
You can jump in Quake. You can't jump in Doom. This makes no difference. Level layout is the same. Jumping gives you the ability to cross very small walls and/or gaps, which Doom handles by simply not placing things to jump over in its levels. Elevation is real in both games; you can always walk up a ramp. There are three dimensions whether you can jump or not.
What I'm talking about is how the game engine represents 3D space, and how engine capabilities enable and constrain game design.
> 3D is an illusion in this sense in every game, with the potential exception of space combat simulators.
In almost all general-purpose game engines, most game objects are modeled as 3D polygonal meshes and placed in the world using three coordinates. They can be scaled and rotated freely. The world can be viewed from any position and angle and with any projection (disregarding some of the limitations imposed by rasterization). Object movement and physics are continuous and handled uniformly regardless of direction. Whether or not this is an illusion is a question of philosophy, but I can't think of a way this could reasonably be more "real".
> And they can only make it work by pretending inertia doesn't exist.
This hasn't been true for decades. The Elite series has done this since the 90s, and the latest entry Elite Dangerous implements physics-based space dogfighting with momentum and inertia, though you need to disable Flight Assist to get the full simulation. For a more grounded simulation, Kerbal Space Program implements enough orbital mechanics to support satellites in different orbits, and is realistic enough to enable many real-world spaceflight techniques. And I also have to mention Outer Wilds and its small solar system with simulated spherical explorable planets and moons. All of these games would be fundamentally impossible without 3D.
> You can fly in World of Warcraft, but all of the content is on the ground, and the designers keep griping about how they don't want you to fly because it makes them feel bad when you skip their content.
This is a statement about Blizzard's game design, rather than anything fundamental about 3D. Yes, giving players the ability to fly requires a different approach to world design. That doesn't make WoW any less 3D. You can have a bridge, and one player can walk on it while another is under it. And a third player could be flying over it with a flying mount.
> You can jump in Quake. You can't jump in Doom. This makes no difference. Level layout is the same.
Doom levels are 2D with added height information. Quake levels are actually 3D. This imposes many fundamental limitations on Doom level design. You can't build a multi-floor building in Doom where you can see down to the previous floors. You can't have a pit in the middle of a room and leave the pit via a tunnel, because you can't have two walkable surfaces laid vertically on top of each other. You can't walk on top of a building and then enter it, or have floating platforms, walk under a bridge, have a spiral staircase that overlaps itself, etc.
> Elevation is real in both games; you can always walk up a ramp. There are three dimensions whether you can jump or not.
Doom has heights, but it cannot represent arbitrary 3D geometry, only a very limited subset.
RuneScape is somewhere between Doom and Quake, with its own set of limitations. While the game uses actual 3D models and therefore can display any 3D shape, much like Doom the world consists of top-down 2D levels with per-tile & object height information. The game does enable "rooms over rooms" by having up to four floors / layers per tile, used for things like multi-floor buildings. The player can't walk between floors; they must use an object like a ladder, a portal or agility shortcut to teleport to another floor.
The IP seems stickier than the graphics. People didn't revolt on Rs3 graphics because it was different, they revolted because they were bad. They've since improved and people seem to like it
As others have pointed out, it is not just graphics. You don't need to write your own networking, your own editor, scripting engine. It really saves a lot of time
Everything Jagex touches turns to shit. They are not good at creating. At best they are a steward for already created IP and the community provides that taste that makes it good.
Jagex blunders hard and gets very lucky each time. The entire Oldschool RuneScape idea came from a private server whose owner was sued out of existance by Jagex, only for the community to revolt, and when official servers launched, they only survived because Jagex upper management forgot about their existance until the community did enough marketing for it.
Blizzard didn't forget about it though, they just ignored it until it became too big to ignore with Elysium, and then took it seriously and launched a great version of vanilla WoW with Classic.
They very famously did not ignore it, with the whole "you think you want that but you don't", the shutdown of Nostalrius and so on. People were going to jail for WoW private servers before 2010
yes, I meant ignoring the customer base that wanted it, but actively denying them is probably a better term. pserver shutdowns always will happen regardless if they're visible. I used to do a lot with them when I was young
Maybe Jagex from ~15 years ago, but today they are hitting out of the park with OSRS updates. You can't tell me with a serious face that Varlamore or Sailing are bad or were not created by Jagex, sure they had to pass in the polls but only a few things have failed that.
The Jagex of today is worse. For every good update there is a landslide of terrible balancing that erodes 100s of hours of progress. They have paved over so much of the game they cant really be called old school runescape. Sailing should never have been released.
No, todays Jagex is just as oblivious and short-sighted as ever. They don't only make OSRS. It took Jagex over a decade to remove Treasure hunter (microtransaction gambling) from the game despite its addition (and continued operation at the obvious requirement of whatever of several, 7-ish? PE firms owned the studio). It was added for the obvious goal of increasing revenue on top of subscription cost, but grew into a game feature that overcame traditional levelling and moneymaking in exchange for real world payments. There was a period of about 5 years where the meta for training any skill was to kill engdame bosses and then gamble with the gold you made, using the xp rewarded from treasure hunter to level up. It was simply a more efficient use of time to train any of the 26 skills by not training any of the skills and instead gambling. It was so bad that they added an option for this interface to gamble multiple times upon a single user input and automatically redeem the rewards.
OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.
Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.
That was a year+ ago, which notably is when they decided to clean the game up. I don't see the point of using the past as an example when they very explicitly (like it was the very first set of criticisms aired in their keynote yesterday) are trying to move away from that.
What you're describing at the end is an attempt for a company to diversify and cutting their losses early to stem bleeding from projects which wouldn't have met the expected ROI. Gaming is a difficult industry and the majority of games do not get big. It's not surprising that the majority of their efforts to branch out failed.
None of your criticisms of the main game apply during the past year of updates. That + their attempt to create "sanitized" servers this year looks like another attempt to diversify - away from the microtransaction-based revenue source into a stable subscription source, assuming they get the playercounts.
It's insulting because RS/RS3 was designed from the perspective that everything leads to everything else. Prior to the sixth age, and I'm not calling that a mistake, and especially MTX, skills had a certain curve and quest lines made sense
What the MTX team apparently did is pocket all of it while not using the money to improve the game
Whether or not they're doing a good job now, their behavior across many years was/is despicable
Their new game, Dragonwilds, has been very successful. Jagex leadership today is not the same as Jagex leadership 10 years ago.
If anything, they're one of the first companies proving that getting away from gatcha/pay-to-win/pay-for-aesthetic/seasonal mechanics can be a good business decision in 2026, where there are many, many gamers who care about earned power (and earned aesthetic) and no longer want to be on a seasonal loot/rating treadmill.
For me, that's personal and I'm happy about it. I've played MMORPGs my whole life, really the only genre I'm interested in. Everquest, EQ2, GW, WoW (and many xpacs), OSRS, etc. Other than OSRS more recently, I've felt left behind for many, many years now. I want to play games where the journey is the point, and where earning what you have is fundamental.
WoW Forever, which in terms of player numbers is looking to be Blizzard's most successful move in over a decade, is coming largely due to the trail blazed by OSRS and the Jagex team.
Personally, I find Lord of the Rings online to be killer if you want the journey...
I've been playing for ~20 years and still haven't hit max level (currently, I have a 138 out of 160 as my highest). Still have about half the map left to explore too - its HUGE and still gets regular updates. Freeps vs Creeps is a neat take on PVP if thats your thing too
That's all there is. I could have been very curious to see how their British humour and kitchen sink fantasy would have worked in a sci-fi setting. I would have loved to devour the lore. Unfortunately it got cancelled.
IDK if those equate to an MMO resurgence. WoW Forever is just milking an old cow, and Runeterra is vaporware, as is RS4. MMO talk is cheap. Shipping something original and not half-baked trash is rare.
I do think Riot is in a good position to develop an MMO though, and maybe GW3 will deliver something as well, but the genre is on life support IMHO.
I think the success of expanded offshoots (OSRS, TurtleWow, Ascension, etc.) showed there is plenty of demand for games that add new features to older, slower, and more sociable games. many features in wow forever are lifted directly from some of these offshoots. blizzard leaning into things like sd models, no flying mounts shows this is beyond just nostalgia bait (something wow classic has been poked for) and indicates that these older iterations that had less streamlined experiences can still have a lot of juice if brought in new directions.
I'd say as a watcher of the genre, some of the major developers are going through a simultaneous point of reflection after seeing some throwback games (that they were dragged into releasing) garner so much audience without cannibalizing their other game. They've realized they may have been leaving customers who want their style of fantasy at the door; that the capacity of people who want their style of fantasy is much greater than the capacity of people that want a single style of MMO game design.
I hesitate to fully confirm it a resurgence as if it's going to be an indicator of a trend in greater pop culture. The genre before was just kind of excessively strangling itself of potential sales that were there due to the high capital costs for new entrants and the major developers previously not wanting to field anything else but one major game.
'Claude, what product should we push to maximize monthly recurring revenue while minimizing overall labor and maintenance costs? Ideally we'd also like to be able to bump revenue with DLC and other premium content without imperiling the recurring revenue stream.'
Were the frick where you the last 10+ years? shareholders want biggest return on lowest risk and remakes are a safer roi as you have decade long real life data that they worked once so they will work twice.
>did jagex actually turn down the opportunity to publish minecraft.
I'm not familiar with the market economics around indie games. Is there any value that Jagex would've added by being the publisher, rather than solo publishing as an indie dev?
Wife and I cancelled our subscriptions when the CEO cancelled the LGBTQ event in game, claiming that it was "too political" -- an event that had already ran for years up to that point. The continuation of the event was not too political, but its cancellation sure was.
Jagex can do what it wants, wife and I are staying away from any product that panders authoritarian dogwhistling.
There's been gameplay leaked of this I think right during a twitch stream (years ago!), an employee accidentally showed his monitor with the game in the background for like 9 seconds and he immediately switched it off. He got fired if I remember.
I dug into this a bit and he did not get fired. And the thing being leaked was the existence of "NextGen" by the logo being shown, not the gameplay. NextGen was a different project, later cancelled.
I'd like to see something in-between regular runescape and skill-based aiming. Feel like when you just spin up a survival server that is designed to reset its hard to get into. Runescape is boring as hell because all the "skills" amount to clicking on different sprites. If they had hero-shooter style game play with skilling that would be based. I am guessing they're just going to do RS3 with better graphics though...
They should pivot to a bot detection company with the game as a sort of R&D asset. They have like a decade or two of advantage, but then again, they never were too good at it.
That would likely not pan out well. I’m just talking about RS3 here, but their bot detection strictly works off behavioral characteristics - something that’s quite vulnerable to the current/upcoming bots which incorporate LLMs into the mix.
From what I could tell they have zero client-side detection like other, more competitive games. Maybe they wanted to pull out of that cat-and-mouse game? Their solution’s likely very domain-specific.
And bot detection isn’t a field where you can cleanly get a bot/human result. Especially with how bot-like some hardcore players get at the game. If it’s too strict you’ll get false bans, which is a support nightmare. It can’t be easy threading this line
Yeah, they are not good at it, they don't really have an incentive to filter out bots, they increase revenue by paying for the game and adding players. The players also like using modded clients like runelite, so they don't do their part either.
They have the ecosystem to test bot detecting/banning tech, but definitely not the tech. A pivot would require prioritizing bot detection over gaming, which is something that requires both management and players to mature beyond a game.
Loved RS but it’s too grindy for my life now. I don’t have hours to click on trees to level up :/ Definitely one of my all time favorites though, something magical about the game and hitting a 99 really took time / felt like an achievement. Excited to give this a try once it’s ready!
I think paradoxically in your comment, a lot of people associate a game with a time before life got optimized in various ways, things running at their own pace. You would do stuff you found fun or found the idea of it fun. Like making 100 cakes from scratch or something, but if you would play the game today, you would look up a guide, maximize your money asap to buy what you need for the cakes, find the stove closest to a bank, etc.
So what I think was magical about the game was that the ends were different back then (process then vs levels now). I really have to think about it consciously today when I play various games because it really does improve the enjoyment.
I played it in 2001 (I remember when paid memberships first came out) and yeah, I could spend ages doing everything because I was a kid with no responsibilities aside from schoolwork.
Nowadays with a wife and kid of my own it'd just be impossible to spend that much time on it.
I dunno about this. I know several people who got into coding because they were writing little scripts to autocraft in RuneScape. Min-maxing profit/skills has always been a thing in these games. As far as looking it up goes, we’d go to GameFAQs or forums (both are still viable - for older games I still use the text guides if I can find them because they were often so well written).
while that is true, a big core of runescape was the grind. I remember what an idiot I felt like after finding the forums spending time picking bananas for 25 gold as a 7 year old. Back then games were simpler and less stuff to compete with longer attention spans
Life certainly was simpler back then!
I wish there was a millenial version of "too old to click around for 99 hours" where they just allow bots. Maybe they can be certain servers or certain account types, like ironman. We can call it botman.
In theory you could make a game where you’re max level everything from the start, but I think the pointlessness of that is obvious. The journey is the game to an extent, and the low attention requirements allow us to dream of all the possible efficiencies.
A lot of mobile games do auto-grind and auto-level you, so you have the endorphine spike of "number go up" without having to work (or possibly drop the game due to difficulty.) Some people really don't like the journey, it seems.
I run a free private server which is exactly this! Come bot via your coding agent by sharing this link with them
https://github.com/MaxBittker/rs-sdk
Is that 55h to max out?! That’s nothing.
Hey, I'm working on exactly this! If you're interested please subscribe to my newsletter at alfheimgame.com
I'd much rather just not need to grind instead of throwing compute and time at it?
Honestly it wouldn’t be the same. You had to earn a 99.
And how would you earn it with a bot?
Different value prop. Playing on a bot server I imagine my goals would be different since the computer handles all the drudgery for you. Maybe I’d just quest or something idk.
Why not simply remove the skills levels, or make them depend only on the time since making the account? That would be almost the same as allowing bots
For those like OP and me who don’t want to grind but want a little bit of the RuneScape-themed “number go up”, there’s Melvor Idle - originally RuneScape-inspired and I believe Jagex bought it eventually. I like to have it idling on the other monitor when I’m doing mindless admin on the pc, or will check it on my phone a couple times a day
Melvor idle was so fun!
I have some bad news: Playing the new game will not make you 14 with no responsibilities again, no matter how good a job they do making it.
Runescape was the first thing that got me into coding. Fell in love with the game and had a ton of admiration for the devs who could spend decades crafting the same game, to create such a wonderful playground for so many millions of people.
Stopped playing after a few years but still have many fond memories of the joy I had everyday after school logging onto that game.
I never played RuneScape. It looks cool but what makes it special? I read its wikipedia entry but it didn't really reveal anything.
It filled a niche at the right place / right time.
It was the first MMO for many, so it still has a following / nostalgia factor.
This is about Old-School Runescape, not RS3.
It's special because it has been active for 25 years. There are no skill trees, instead every character has access to all 24 skills giving user's complete agency over what their character can do and has access too.
The game's rhythm is based off of a tick instead of click-and-wait. This can let skilled players abuse click rates for more xp or win PvP or high-leveled PvM fights.
The game takes a lot of time. Each skill needs over 13 million experience to get to max level, this requires significant investment for each skill, letting user's grow attached to their characters. I haven't made it this far, but there is a very rich and expansive endgame to reward the players that have made the grind to those high levels.
It can require less attention than a lot of other video games, so multi-tasking is possible and common.
I think for a lot of people it is the nostalgia around playing the same game when they were a kid.
> but there is a very rich and expansive endgame to reward the players that have made the grind to those high levels
Can you elaborate on this?
There's high level boss encounters and such, they're quite difficult and fun.
As a vaguely related example I can recommend Settled's "Nightmare mode" player-invented game mode. I don't want to spoil it ahead of time, but he fights some cool endgame content with the caveat that if he takes even a single point of damage, his account is automatically deleted.
For anyone unaware this is stated to essentially be the MMO continuation of Runescape Dragonwilds which was a survival and crafting game that recently released into 1.0 after its commercial success.
I went to Runefest and was told it originally started as a mod/DLC to Dragonwilds
Initially, I misread the headline as referring to RuneQuest, the Betamax of tabletop fantasy role playing. Better than D&D, but which didn't win the popularity contest.
It is one of three games I would love to see made into software, with the other two being Traveller and Paranoia (the computer is your friend, trust the computer)
There was a choose-your-own-adventure version of Paranoia on BSD Unix systems in the 1980s, looks like somebody's ported it to Python:
https://github.com/spkane/py-paranoia
https://foundryvtt.com/packages/mgt2e
I learned programming writing Runescape Macros in Pascal and later Java.
Honestly still enjoy writing automation today because of it, I've gotten to use a lot of the skills I learned from OG RS at work.
Is graphical fidelity what people are looking for in a RuneScape game? Unreal seems like an interesting choice. OSRS has something like 5x the player base and the gap only seems to be growing, so it looks odd to me to putting so much investment into a continuation of RS3.
They've already confirmed that this is a new game, not a continuation of RS3. New world, different gameplay (WASD movement instead of clicking), different everything.
This is also not their first Unreal game, as they just released the 1.0 version of RuneScape Dragonwilds, their survival-crafting multiplayer game that has been both a critical and commercial success. It appears that RS4 is to some extent an expansion of Dragonwilds into a proper MMO.
Besides, if they're going to create a brand new big-budget MMO, what else other than Unreal could they realistically use? Graphics aren't the primary reason to replace the RS engine with Unreal - the reason is gameplay.
Their internal engine that they use for RS3 (and OSRS) is only suitable for games like current RS. Even RS3 is still fundamentally based on a 1 square meter grid, gameplay-wise 3D is an illusion (no jumping, climbing or flying), and most importantly game logic updates only once every 600ms, which is about one tenth of even World of Warcraft. They've made two pretty good games despite those limitations throughout the decades, but it can't scale to anything that feels more "modern".
> gameplay-wise 3D is an illusion (no jumping, climbing or flying)
3D is an illusion in this sense in every game, with the potential exception of space combat simulators. And they can only make it work by pretending inertia doesn't exist.
You can fly in World of Warcraft, but all of the content is on the ground, and the designers keep griping about how they don't want you to fly because it makes them feel bad when you skip their content.
You can jump in Quake. You can't jump in Doom. This makes no difference. Level layout is the same. Jumping gives you the ability to cross very small walls and/or gaps, which Doom handles by simply not placing things to jump over in its levels. Elevation is real in both games; you can always walk up a ramp. There are three dimensions whether you can jump or not.
Doom is actually a 2.5D game and it cannot have free look or rooms over rooms. Quake can have both, since it’s genuinely a 3D engine.
> You can jump in Quake. You can't jump in Doom. This makes no difference.
What are you smoking, lol. It makes all the difference.
https://youtu.be/XhzK5fL1mj0
This argument is bordering on being as silly as saying that ackshually, everything is 2d because it is projected onto a 2d screen.
What I'm talking about is how the game engine represents 3D space, and how engine capabilities enable and constrain game design.
> 3D is an illusion in this sense in every game, with the potential exception of space combat simulators.
In almost all general-purpose game engines, most game objects are modeled as 3D polygonal meshes and placed in the world using three coordinates. They can be scaled and rotated freely. The world can be viewed from any position and angle and with any projection (disregarding some of the limitations imposed by rasterization). Object movement and physics are continuous and handled uniformly regardless of direction. Whether or not this is an illusion is a question of philosophy, but I can't think of a way this could reasonably be more "real".
> And they can only make it work by pretending inertia doesn't exist.
This hasn't been true for decades. The Elite series has done this since the 90s, and the latest entry Elite Dangerous implements physics-based space dogfighting with momentum and inertia, though you need to disable Flight Assist to get the full simulation. For a more grounded simulation, Kerbal Space Program implements enough orbital mechanics to support satellites in different orbits, and is realistic enough to enable many real-world spaceflight techniques. And I also have to mention Outer Wilds and its small solar system with simulated spherical explorable planets and moons. All of these games would be fundamentally impossible without 3D.
> You can fly in World of Warcraft, but all of the content is on the ground, and the designers keep griping about how they don't want you to fly because it makes them feel bad when you skip their content.
This is a statement about Blizzard's game design, rather than anything fundamental about 3D. Yes, giving players the ability to fly requires a different approach to world design. That doesn't make WoW any less 3D. You can have a bridge, and one player can walk on it while another is under it. And a third player could be flying over it with a flying mount.
> You can jump in Quake. You can't jump in Doom. This makes no difference. Level layout is the same.
Doom levels are 2D with added height information. Quake levels are actually 3D. This imposes many fundamental limitations on Doom level design. You can't build a multi-floor building in Doom where you can see down to the previous floors. You can't have a pit in the middle of a room and leave the pit via a tunnel, because you can't have two walkable surfaces laid vertically on top of each other. You can't walk on top of a building and then enter it, or have floating platforms, walk under a bridge, have a spiral staircase that overlaps itself, etc.
> Elevation is real in both games; you can always walk up a ramp. There are three dimensions whether you can jump or not.
Doom has heights, but it cannot represent arbitrary 3D geometry, only a very limited subset.
RuneScape is somewhere between Doom and Quake, with its own set of limitations. While the game uses actual 3D models and therefore can display any 3D shape, much like Doom the world consists of top-down 2D levels with per-tile & object height information. The game does enable "rooms over rooms" by having up to four floors / layers per tile, used for things like multi-floor buildings. The player can't walk between floors; they must use an object like a ladder, a portal or agility shortcut to teleport to another floor.
Underwater
The IP seems stickier than the graphics. People didn't revolt on Rs3 graphics because it was different, they revolted because they were bad. They've since improved and people seem to like it
As others have pointed out, it is not just graphics. You don't need to write your own networking, your own editor, scripting engine. It really saves a lot of time
You can’t just yolo an MMO with unreal engines server. Not unless you want your MMO to have a max of about 60 players in the world.
You need to write you own version of all that stuff and effectively just use UE as the graphics engine.
It depends on what style of mmo want. Sure a full WoW one wont work out of the box, but a sharded/Guild Wars/Destiny style one would work
Everything Jagex touches turns to shit. They are not good at creating. At best they are a steward for already created IP and the community provides that taste that makes it good.
Jagex blunders hard and gets very lucky each time. The entire Oldschool RuneScape idea came from a private server whose owner was sued out of existance by Jagex, only for the community to revolt, and when official servers launched, they only survived because Jagex upper management forgot about their existance until the community did enough marketing for it.
Same thing happened to Blizzard
Blizzard didn't forget about it though, they just ignored it until it became too big to ignore with Elysium, and then took it seriously and launched a great version of vanilla WoW with Classic.
They very famously did not ignore it, with the whole "you think you want that but you don't", the shutdown of Nostalrius and so on. People were going to jail for WoW private servers before 2010
yes, I meant ignoring the customer base that wanted it, but actively denying them is probably a better term. pserver shutdowns always will happen regardless if they're visible. I used to do a lot with them when I was young
Citation needed on jail time for WoW private servers.
Source: I made it up, apparently, my memory failed me and they never went to prison. They just owed Blizzard $88594539.
Maybe Jagex from ~15 years ago, but today they are hitting out of the park with OSRS updates. You can't tell me with a serious face that Varlamore or Sailing are bad or were not created by Jagex, sure they had to pass in the polls but only a few things have failed that.
The Jagex of today is worse. For every good update there is a landslide of terrible balancing that erodes 100s of hours of progress. They have paved over so much of the game they cant really be called old school runescape. Sailing should never have been released.
No, todays Jagex is just as oblivious and short-sighted as ever. They don't only make OSRS. It took Jagex over a decade to remove Treasure hunter (microtransaction gambling) from the game despite its addition (and continued operation at the obvious requirement of whatever of several, 7-ish? PE firms owned the studio). It was added for the obvious goal of increasing revenue on top of subscription cost, but grew into a game feature that overcame traditional levelling and moneymaking in exchange for real world payments. There was a period of about 5 years where the meta for training any skill was to kill engdame bosses and then gamble with the gold you made, using the xp rewarded from treasure hunter to level up. It was simply a more efficient use of time to train any of the 26 skills by not training any of the skills and instead gambling. It was so bad that they added an option for this interface to gamble multiple times upon a single user input and automatically redeem the rewards.
OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.
Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.
That was a year+ ago, which notably is when they decided to clean the game up. I don't see the point of using the past as an example when they very explicitly (like it was the very first set of criticisms aired in their keynote yesterday) are trying to move away from that.
What you're describing at the end is an attempt for a company to diversify and cutting their losses early to stem bleeding from projects which wouldn't have met the expected ROI. Gaming is a difficult industry and the majority of games do not get big. It's not surprising that the majority of their efforts to branch out failed.
None of your criticisms of the main game apply during the past year of updates. That + their attempt to create "sanitized" servers this year looks like another attempt to diversify - away from the microtransaction-based revenue source into a stable subscription source, assuming they get the playercounts.
It's insulting because RS/RS3 was designed from the perspective that everything leads to everything else. Prior to the sixth age, and I'm not calling that a mistake, and especially MTX, skills had a certain curve and quest lines made sense
What the MTX team apparently did is pocket all of it while not using the money to improve the game
Whether or not they're doing a good job now, their behavior across many years was/is despicable
I’m not an OSRS player but an RS3 player - they’re generally hitting it out of the park on this side of the fence as well.
OSRS is the exception that proves the rule and it was created out of desperation in order to disprove the rule.
Their new game, Dragonwilds, has been very successful. Jagex leadership today is not the same as Jagex leadership 10 years ago.
If anything, they're one of the first companies proving that getting away from gatcha/pay-to-win/pay-for-aesthetic/seasonal mechanics can be a good business decision in 2026, where there are many, many gamers who care about earned power (and earned aesthetic) and no longer want to be on a seasonal loot/rating treadmill.
For me, that's personal and I'm happy about it. I've played MMORPGs my whole life, really the only genre I'm interested in. Everquest, EQ2, GW, WoW (and many xpacs), OSRS, etc. Other than OSRS more recently, I've felt left behind for many, many years now. I want to play games where the journey is the point, and where earning what you have is fundamental.
WoW Forever, which in terms of player numbers is looking to be Blizzard's most successful move in over a decade, is coming largely due to the trail blazed by OSRS and the Jagex team.
Personally, I find Lord of the Rings online to be killer if you want the journey... I've been playing for ~20 years and still haven't hit max level (currently, I have a 138 out of 160 as my highest). Still have about half the map left to explore too - its HUGE and still gets regular updates. Freeps vs Creeps is a neat take on PVP if thats your thing too
Varlamore and Sailing are bad, as is almost everything introduced into OSRS since they added the GE in 2015
they should reboot ace of spades (game I liked that they bought, immediately enshittified, and suffocated, seemingly overnight)
I would have preferred to see MechScape / Stellar Dawn.
Damn, how have I not heard about this until now. Can you say more about it? All I could find was this blurry trailer:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Glk2SQ6g-g
That's all there is. I could have been very curious to see how their British humour and kitchen sink fantasy would have worked in a sci-fi setting. I would have loved to devour the lore. Unfortunately it got cancelled.
tbh they should have just made a normalscape, basically runescape set in the current timeline
"Congratulations, you have reached level 99 in buerocracy."
Runescape... Forever?
Unreal Engine means it's a pass from me, especially for this - if it's not RuneTek, it's not RuneScape
I figured they'd continue with Dragonwild. Didn't expect them to make a new MMO.
Im too old now to dedicate my life to an MMO but man Runescape was/is such an amazing game Im excited to see what they do with it
What's with this resurgence in MMO's? WoW Forever, Runeterra, and now this?
IDK if those equate to an MMO resurgence. WoW Forever is just milking an old cow, and Runeterra is vaporware, as is RS4. MMO talk is cheap. Shipping something original and not half-baked trash is rare.
I do think Riot is in a good position to develop an MMO though, and maybe GW3 will deliver something as well, but the genre is on life support IMHO.
I think the success of expanded offshoots (OSRS, TurtleWow, Ascension, etc.) showed there is plenty of demand for games that add new features to older, slower, and more sociable games. many features in wow forever are lifted directly from some of these offshoots. blizzard leaning into things like sd models, no flying mounts shows this is beyond just nostalgia bait (something wow classic has been poked for) and indicates that these older iterations that had less streamlined experiences can still have a lot of juice if brought in new directions.
I'd say as a watcher of the genre, some of the major developers are going through a simultaneous point of reflection after seeing some throwback games (that they were dragged into releasing) garner so much audience without cannibalizing their other game. They've realized they may have been leaving customers who want their style of fantasy at the door; that the capacity of people who want their style of fantasy is much greater than the capacity of people that want a single style of MMO game design.
I hesitate to fully confirm it a resurgence as if it's going to be an indicator of a trend in greater pop culture. The genre before was just kind of excessively strangling itself of potential sales that were there due to the high capital costs for new entrants and the major developers previously not wanting to field anything else but one major game.
My two theories:
1. The original player base of these games is starting to hit retirement
2. AI has made it more profitable to develop a reasonable pace of content for these games
Recession indicator?
'Claude, what product should we push to maximize monthly recurring revenue while minimizing overall labor and maintenance costs? Ideally we'd also like to be able to bump revenue with DLC and other premium content without imperiling the recurring revenue stream.'
Were the frick where you the last 10+ years? shareholders want biggest return on lowest risk and remakes are a safer roi as you have decade long real life data that they worked once so they will work twice.
Guild Wars 3 is another very big announcement from one of the titans of the MMO industry.
SaaS is dead and other AI doomerism, might as well play games. Nobody knows so might as well guess.
i heard a rumor that perhaps someone on here can confirm or deny. did jagex actually turn down the opportunity to publish minecraft.
is that true?
>did jagex actually turn down the opportunity to publish minecraft.
I'm not familiar with the market economics around indie games. Is there any value that Jagex would've added by being the publisher, rather than solo publishing as an indie dev?
Marketing, customer support, product support (art, audio, etc), professional guidance/advice.
Wife and I cancelled our subscriptions when the CEO cancelled the LGBTQ event in game, claiming that it was "too political" -- an event that had already ran for years up to that point. The continuation of the event was not too political, but its cancellation sure was.
Jagex can do what it wants, wife and I are staying away from any product that panders authoritarian dogwhistling.
There's been gameplay leaked of this I think right during a twitch stream (years ago!), an employee accidentally showed his monitor with the game in the background for like 9 seconds and he immediately switched it off. He got fired if I remember.
Am I misremembering?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleAL_Ovr74
I dug into this a bit and he did not get fired. And the thing being leaked was the existence of "NextGen" by the logo being shown, not the gameplay. NextGen was a different project, later cancelled.
https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/6av3sa/runescape...
I'd like to see something in-between regular runescape and skill-based aiming. Feel like when you just spin up a survival server that is designed to reset its hard to get into. Runescape is boring as hell because all the "skills" amount to clicking on different sprites. If they had hero-shooter style game play with skilling that would be based. I am guessing they're just going to do RS3 with better graphics though...
They should pivot to a bot detection company with the game as a sort of R&D asset. They have like a decade or two of advantage, but then again, they never were too good at it.
That would likely not pan out well. I’m just talking about RS3 here, but their bot detection strictly works off behavioral characteristics - something that’s quite vulnerable to the current/upcoming bots which incorporate LLMs into the mix.
From what I could tell they have zero client-side detection like other, more competitive games. Maybe they wanted to pull out of that cat-and-mouse game? Their solution’s likely very domain-specific.
And bot detection isn’t a field where you can cleanly get a bot/human result. Especially with how bot-like some hardcore players get at the game. If it’s too strict you’ll get false bans, which is a support nightmare. It can’t be easy threading this line
Yeah, they are not good at it, they don't really have an incentive to filter out bots, they increase revenue by paying for the game and adding players. The players also like using modded clients like runelite, so they don't do their part either.
They have the ecosystem to test bot detecting/banning tech, but definitely not the tech. A pivot would require prioritizing bot detection over gaming, which is something that requires both management and players to mature beyond a game.
When I was playing, ~20 years ago, sometimes a real staff member popped up to talk with you when bot-like behavior was detected
It was pretty effective with people letting the bots run unattended (and annoying).
Of course that can't work as well now with LLMs.
From a Java applet into yet another Unreal Engine game, quite the trajectory.
Now just to coincide release with a global pandemic!