Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I never actually played much Runescape. Growing up, I was a snobby, Everquest-obsessed so-and-so. “Look at all these graphics,” I’d say. “My Iksar warrior is made up of so many polygons that you practically can’t count them but still kinda can.” I did have a few friends who swore by the lo-fi MMO, though, and it’s not hard to see why. Back then, free, easily runnable portals to lands beyond our wildest imaginations were hard to come by. Runescape, then, holds a very special place in many hearts, and for that reason it will never dieeeee. And so, we arrive at Runescape 3. Yes, there was a Runescape 2.  Find out what warrants the curvy, alluringly sensual new digit after the break.

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A shame SOE didn’t do this for Star Wars: Galaxies, or it might still be with us now. Following enthusiastic voting from some 440,000 paying RuneScape players, Jagex have resurrected the apparently beloved 2007 version of their long-running, secretly enormous MMORPG, to run alongside the flashier current version. It’s being pitched not as a roll back but a favour to the faithful, who will also play a part in deciding what gets updated in the old client.
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Quietly one of the most popular games on the net, RuneScape is not exactly short of players. It has, for the longest time, however, been short of a way to provide those players with the same kind of community-building infrastructure as other popular online games. The latest update fixes that, and it’s proving popular, as Jagex report: “In just 24 hours more than 250,000 RuneScape players have formed clans, including over 370 clans containing 50 members or more. The update gives RuneScape clans a real presence in the game and included a host of new features including individual clan camps, chat channels, clan customisations, clan websites and new in-game content; Rated Clan Wars.”

RuneScape is free to play, and has been out for a very long time indeed.

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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