I wish there was a millenial version of "too old to click around for 99 hours" where they just allow bots. Maybe they can be certain servers or certain account types, like ironman. We can call it botman.

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.

Maybe Jagex from ~15 years ago, but today they are hitting out of the park with OSRS updates. You can't tell me with a serious face that Varlamore or Sailing are bad or were not created by Jagex, sure they had to pass in the polls but only a few things have failed that.

they should reboot ace of spades (game I liked that they bought, immediately enshittified, and suffocated, seemingly overnight)

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 was a choose-your-own-adventure version of Paranoia on BSD Unix systems in the 1980s, looks like somebody's ported it to Python:

https://github.com/spkane/py-paranoia

https://foundryvtt.com/packages/mgt2e

tbh they should have just made a normalscape, basically runescape set in the current timeline

"Congratulations, you have reached level 99 in buerocracy."

Damn, how have I not heard about this until now. Can you say more about it? All I could find was this blurry trailer:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Glk2SQ6g-g

IDK if those equate to an MMO resurgence. WoW Forever is just milking an old cow, and Runeterra is vaporware, as is RS4. MMO talk is cheap. Shipping something original and not half-baked trash is rare.

I do think Riot is in a good position to develop an MMO though, and maybe GW3 will deliver something as well, but the genre is on life support IMHO.

I'd say as a watcher of the genre, some of the major developers are going through a simultaneous point of reflection after seeing some throwback games (that they were dragged into releasing) garner so much audience without cannibalizing their other game. They've realized they may have been leaving customers who want their style of fantasy at the door; that the capacity of people who want their style of fantasy is much greater than the capacity of people that want a single style of MMO game design.

I hesitate to fully confirm it a resurgence as if it's going to be an indicator of a trend in greater pop culture. The genre before was just kind of excessively strangling itself of potential sales that were there due to the high capital costs for new entrants and the major developers previously not wanting to field anything else but one major game.

My two theories:

1. The original player base of these games is starting to hit retirement

2. AI has made it more profitable to develop a reasonable pace of content for these games

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.

Were the frick where you the last 10+ years? shareholders want biggest return on lowest risk and remakes are a safer roi as you have decade long real life data that they worked once so they will work twice.

'Claude, what product should we push to maximize monthly recurring revenue while minimizing overall labor and maintenance costs? Ideally we'd also like to be able to bump revenue with DLC and other premium content without imperiling the recurring revenue stream.'

SaaS is dead and other AI doomerism, might as well play games. Nobody knows so might as well guess.

>did jagex actually turn down the opportunity to publish minecraft.

I'm not familiar with the market economics around indie games. Is there any value that Jagex would've added by being the publisher, rather than solo publishing as an indie dev?

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/6av3sa/runescape...

That would likely not pan out well. I’m just talking about RS3 here, but their bot detection strictly works off behavioral characteristics - something that’s quite vulnerable to the current/upcoming bots which incorporate LLMs into the mix.

From what I could tell they have zero client-side detection like other, more competitive games. Maybe they wanted to pull out of that cat-and-mouse game? Their solution’s likely very domain-specific.

And bot detection isn’t a field where you can cleanly get a bot/human result. Especially with how bot-like some hardcore players get at the game. If it’s too strict you’ll get false bans, which is a support nightmare. It can’t be easy threading this line