It’s been seven long years since I played Runescape. It was my first MMO. Back then, Runescape was magical. It marked the beginning of my, and many other’s, fascination with huge worlds populated by real people. But I left Gielinor behind: moved on to new games and new places.
Today, Jagex want me, and the millions of the other players that fell for the original Runescape back. They have a new plan, a new way of breathing life into Gielinor. They want to create a living world, content updates created from player demands, a game built to play across computers and tablets via HTML5, and an overhauled UI.
It’s the most ambitious project in Jagex’s history.
The question is: is it enough?
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We’ve already had Nick break down the technical ins and outs of what HTML5 means for Runescape 3 but, for those of us who can’t make head nor tail of technical talk, the first trailer of the game in action puts into lovely pictures what he put into erudite words.
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Java has powered Runescape for the last twelve years. That’s an impressive feat for a browser game that houses over a million regular players. But with the release of Runescape 3 (definitely a thing), a new tech is in town; boasting more horsepower, speed and options.
That tech is HTML 5.
Runescape 3 will be powered by the web standard HTML 5. It will give Runescape the technology base it requires to evolve and improve in the future. It means faster load times, better graphics and instantaneous updates. And Runescape 3 will be the first game of its kind to use this new tech.
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Boot up your nostalgia drive; Jagex have just announced Runescape 3, coming to players this summer. Executive Producer “Mod Pips" and Design Director “Mod Mark" announced the news in a bonus edition of “Behind the Scenes", a series which explores the latest developments of the Runescape world. It will use the same avatars that people are playing with right now, but the client has been completely rewritten in HTML 5 and utilises WEBGL.
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I remember 2007’s Runescape. That was about the time I’d look over my younger brother’s shoulder as he eyed his homework distrustfully - knowing fine well that somewhere in another tab, cardboard Flash people were hacking at rocks or each other with lead-grey pickaxes.
Since then, the game has moved on in hops (more quests), skips (combat system upgrades) and jumps (a fundamentally new graphics and audio engine). But nostalgia comes even to the young, and today sees developers Jagex launch early access to Old School Runescape.Read and Comment
What’s this? A weekly roundup? Well, sort of. I’m going to start experimenting with this a bit this year because I wasn’t quite happy with the shotgun approach I took last year, basically repeating everything we’d covered in the week. Link roundups can be a bit tedious, you see, and I worry that they aren’t as useful as something a bit more curated. So this week I’m trying something a bit different, and we’ll see where this approach leads us in 2013.
With that said, let’s take a journey through our finest words and some of the more important stories of the first week of the year.
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Ace of Spades mixes construction and destruction, building and blasting, being a multiplayer FPS that draws its very blocky inspiration from Minecraft. Steve first dug into this for us back in November and described a game where, sadly, the construction aspect was a little redundant beyond the game’s zombie mode. That same month, I tried a little Spading myself and found that, outside of the high-bandwidth security offered by a LAN, all the destructible terrain made play a little laggy.
Since then, the game has received two major updates which have included changes to the netcode and, let me tell you, Ace of Spades is coming along nicely.
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It feels a little odd to be suggesting not that you try a game, but instead join the queue to play it - but there Ace of Spades is, wheels spinning at the starting line. The indie-FPS-that-could-with-the-help-of-Jagex can't be pre-ordered as such, but over half a million potential players have registered their interest ahead of the game’s launch tomorrow.Read and Comment
I’ve never tried to round up enough pirates to staff a ship with - it’s a tricky life for startups in the current climate - but if I did I’d want to do so from the comfort of my own port. That, and the ability to lead your new friends into previously undiscovered Eastern Lands, is what RuneScape’s new high-level expansion is offering.Read and Comment
Amid the recent flood of astonishingly accomplished PC games to use Minecraft as their springboard, Ace of Spades is likely the most accomplished of all. It’s developed by an indie team, spruced up by Cambridge-based Runescape types Jagex, and our Steve described it as “one third-Minecraft, one-third standard multiplayer FPS and one-third a sort of realtime Worms 3D".
Like everything else launched in the next week, it will be going live on Wednesday 12.12.12, and will be available to buy from Steam for £6.99/€7.99/$9.99Read and Comment
Ace of Spades! It's a pun, because 'spade' also means 'shovel' and 'ace' also means 'very good at something'. But what is Very Good At Shovels all about? I'll tell you: this is the Jagex-published, sort-of-voxel-based, free-to-play-turned-premium FPS. It's one third-Minecraft, one-third standard multiplayer FPS and one-third a sort of realtime Worms 3D. I've played with it for a while, in a room full of laptops and games journalists in that there London town. One multiplayer map featured a giant dragon, which I broke, thoroughly impressing one man who had been watching me do it. So that was fun.Read and Comment
Although they're not a household name, you may well know Jagex as the developer behind the phenomenally popular fantasy MMORPG RuneScape. While the Cambridge-based coders have been busy with their flagship title for over a decade, they've gradually expanded their portfolio and, with Carnage Racing, are making the leap (or the stunt jump) onto Facebook. That said, they don't plan to make this just another Facebook game.Read and Comment
When we last wrote about Guncraft, apparently omnipotent PCGamesN reader digital_pariah pointed out that it “sounds like Ace of Spades Plus". We didn’t have the foggiest what that was, but at the time chunky FPS AoS had already garnered a following of around half a million active players a month.
That’s according to Cambridge Runescape devs Jagex, who have been working with a “handful" of indie developers to get the game ready for a full Steam launch in December.Read and Comment
Of all the unwritten MMO rules, none is unwritten so deeply or in such clear handwriting as this: either you play as a person, or a car, and never the twain shall meet.
In flagrant disregard for a constitution developer Jagex surely must have become aware of in their decade running Runescape, the debut trailer for Transformers Universe contains footage of both robot-people and cars - and what’s more, it transpires they’re one and the same.Read and Comment
RuneScape developers Jagex have just announced a thing: Carnage Racing. It's a Unity-powered Facebook game all about cars, not swords, and tracks, not spells. Intriguingly, it's being developed by the (presumably sexier and more tanned) Californian wing of the Cambridge-based studio, a team made up of ex-Rockstar devs who've worked on the acclaimed Midnight Club games. That's potentially great news for anybody who likes excellent games about cars.
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Runescapists will soon be able to choose the method by which persistent botters will meet their sorry end. As detailed with some relish by Jagex, guilty automatons will either be stomped by dragon-y foot, swallowed up by the abyss, or fried by heavenly rays from above which will “burn them to a crisp".Read and Comment
Humza Bajwa, 19, faces a 15 year sentence after using a replica gun to rob another player of 4.7 billion Runescape coins. Read and Comment
Last week I looked at the history of Runescape - the move from student dream to the biggest game developer in the UK - and the present of Runescape - the 200,000,000 user accounts, the 200 servers, the 500 employees. Today (adopts heroic model stance, gazing at horizon), today, I look to Jagex’s brave future.Read and Comment
On Wednesday, we looked at the history of Runescape. We saw how the game developed from two brothers’ desire to play games on university computers to a behemoth that has 500 people working on it. In the next piece, I’m going to be the ghost of Runescape’s future. But, today, I’m looking at its present.Read and Comment
To call Jagex an odd developer, would be an understatement. They’re the largest developer in the UK, but many gamers haven’t heard of them. In the eleven years they’ve been around, they’ve worked on just one notable game - RuneScape - which was released before they existed as a company. And they’re about to sign up their 200,000,000th user account, which must be more than any other game. We caught up with them to find out how the game was made, how they’ve changed it over the years, and how you keep working on the same game for over ten years.Read and Comment
