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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Am I misremembering?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleAL_Ovr74
https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/6av3sa/runescape...