Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Runescape-creators Jagex have announced a new game project, 8 Realms, which is due for release on the 5th of May. This time it’s a “social” strategy game. I’d like an anti-social strategy game, personally, but I guess that’s all hardcore RTS games since year zero… ANYWAY, here’s Jagex’s finely-crafted encapsulation quote: “8 Realms has been developed from the ground up to appeal to players with a passion for strategy gaming but who have been left underwhelmed by the social games available today,” said Mark Gerhard, CEO at Jagex. “With 8 Realms we saw a massive opportunity to push the technological boundaries of HTML games. Jagex has traditionally been an innovator in browser gaming and we saw this as our chance to bring a fresh perspective to the social space and the empire-building genre.”

Intriguement! For a chance to get on the beta you can “Like” the project on Facebook. Mm.

It turns out that Jagex’s planned MechScape MMO wasn’t the follow up to RuneScape after all – in fact it got scrapped – and instead they are planning a sci-fi MMO called Stella Dawn. Not much in the way of details yet, but there’s some art and a beta sign up form over on the site. Eurogamer report that a “sizeable chunk” of the game will be free, and that it is Jagex’s most ambitious game ever. I guess we’ll get to see a lot more of that in the coming months. I’d like to see someone do a genuinely playable sci-fi MMO that wasn’t just spaceships, at least.

I suspect Jagex are off your radar. They were off mine. While I was more than aware of their enormous success with the free MMO Runescape, I never quite filed it as something directly relevant to my interests in PC Games. A chance meeting with their recent brilliant arcade football game Kickabout League made me reconsider, so I grasped the chance to hook up at Develop with their CEO Mark Gehard, the Head of their new not-revealed MMO Mechscape Henrique Olifiers and PR Manager Adam Tuckwell. I come away with the impression of a proud, ambitious and iconoclastic company with a lot of big ideas. An MMO which looks at Master of Orion rather than Ultima as its inspiration? Picking up where Sensible Software left of? Real Men Programmers Do It In 64Mb? PC as pure populism, and taking that seriously? And not playing the hype game at all? It’s time Jagex got on your radar. You start here…
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