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