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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.'
>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?
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
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 learned programming writing Runescape Macros in Pascal.
Honestly still enjoy writing automations today because of it, I've gotten to use a lot of the skills I learned from OG RS at work.
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.
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
Citation needed on jail time for WoW private servers.
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.
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.
they should reboot ace of spades (game I liked that they bought, immediately enshittified, and suffocated, seemingly overnight)
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.
This argument is bordering on being as silly as saying that ackshually, everything is 2d because it is projected onto a 2d screen.
> 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
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
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
Runescape... Forever?
I would have preferred to see MechScape / Stellar Dawn.
tbh they should have just made a normalscape, basically runescape set in the current timeline
"Congratulations, you have reached level 99 in buerocracy."
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.
I figured they'd continue with Dragonwild. Didn't expect them to make a new MMO.
What's with this resurgence in MMO's? WoW Forever, Runeterra, and now this?
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
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.
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.
'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.'
SaaS is dead and other AI doomerism, might as well play games. Nobody knows so might as well guess.
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
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.
Now just to coincide release with a global pandemic!
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
From a Java applet into yet another Unreal Engine game, quite the trajectory.