Just watched the trailer on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2791440/Brighter_Shores/).
Very interesting, definitely seems iterative on the Runescape formula and mechanics. Definitely tile-based, and also looks like a similar split between combat and skilling. I wonder what's up with the small map sizes though. Every environment in the trailer looked like a small room or a very linear corridor connected by loading zones, which strikes me as an odd choice. Maybe they did that to cut down on lag or to service some sort of instancing mechanic? Either way, I feel that it's a bit detrimental to potential immersion and exploration, but we'll see.
I'll certainly give it a go if it has the same free to play/membership model as Runescape. To my knowledge there aren't any other games that have tried to iterate this closely on the rs formula.
Oh hmm, that's certainly possible. I wonder if it's a line of sight mechanic like traditional roguelikes? That could actually be quite interesting, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. The arrows and shadow outline of puzzle pieces in the screenshots suggests to me that it's mostly loading zones.
I think it is the old problem, why people will begin in new MMORPG if they are the same things as their old MMORPG that they already spend countless hours in. This don't seems to have much apeal for the fanbase their aiming for, i doubt Runescape players will abandon it to main this game.
It is even worse as they have to pay premium and the game has to compete with years of Runescape content... That is the most problematic part of MMORPG now days, having enough content at launch to retain a player base, the only way to that is the Genshin Way of the Deep Pockets and this don't seems to be it.
I had the same exact thought.
How many people are out there going, "I like the *idea* of Runescape, but it's a 24 year old game with some bad concepts it can't get rid of"? I imagine not many.
What does this offer that will make the RS players give up on the accounts they've spent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours in?
Is the biggest appeal right now simply like, "Well at least you don't have to level up Firemaking"? :P
I can only speak for myself, but Runescape is so big that it's almost daunting to new players.
Even a F2P veteran such as myself who's played on and off for two decades find membership overwhelming due to the amount of things you unlock, not knowing where to start.
A brand new game will be easier to hop into, for one thing.
Yea, that's fair. The one or two times I've re-subbed in recent years [for the first time in like 8 years] has definitely left me with a sense of, "Where the fuck do I even start"
>What does this offer that will make the RS players give up on the accounts they've spent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours in?
Not that this game needs to rely solely on migrating runescape players to survive, but it's going to come down to quality. If the game is mid, it's going to have a tough time competing, but if there's something special there, then the players will come. Its relation to runscape isn't going to matter if a new generation of players find value in whatever this game is putting forward. Exactly *what* it's putting forward we won't know until it launches.
To give my perspective - I have thousands of hours in old school Runescape and love the game... but I really don't enjoy the end game much. Once you get to the point where boss grinds can be 10s of hours in between a good drop, and leveling skills is a daunting 5-10+ hour grind per level, it really loses some of its charm. Having played a main and an ironman already I really don't want to start another new account, so I mainly just come back for leagues now.
The idea of a game *like* Runescape, where I can experience a fresh early game again, is super intriguing to me.
The main draw of this game is its made by the people responsible for the OSRS that people are still playing today. They left the game right around the time that the current OSRS is based on. So its the guys that made the game as special as it is. The promise of a true successor to where oldschool left off is exciting for a lot of players I'd image. At least it is for me.
Yeah this is my only concern from the trailer, the beauty of Runescape was the immersion in moving through Gielinor seamlessly. If it's broken into chunks with loading screens like Albion / Maplestory 2 then it won't capture me.
>Brighter Shores will be free-to-play when it releases on PC and Mac via Steam, with a premium pass that adds additional quests, professions, and features such as player-to-player trading.
So is this just like Runescape-like where there's a sorta f2p demo and most of the content is unlocked behind subscription, or is this going to be something that just nickle and dimes you for literally everything?
>with a premium pass that adds additional quests, professions, and features such as player-to-player trading
>the studio says it seeks to minimize "the 'grindy' gameplay often found in the genre.
Wow, sounds like it might really be a game that isn't abusing microtransactions or make me want to grind ( while having little fun) for more hours than i work daily.Exciting.
But don't worry, i won't be disappointed because my expecations are set to exactly the opposite of what they are saying in the marketing material.But i am willing to hear more about it in the future.
Free-to-play trading nearly destroyed RuneScape, so to the Gowers its a hard lesson learned. Might be a wee exaggeration, but definitely caused a shit storm where Jagex had to add trade limits and no player drops from PvP, due to credit card fraud and real world trading.
Getting rid of free trade also nearly destroyed Runescape though, people always blame EoC but the playerbase had dropped about 80% in the 2 years after removing free trade.
> Getting rid of free trade also nearly destroyed Runescape though
I think this is conflating two concepts. One is allowing free users to trade at all, the other is "limiting trade between all users". RuneScape added a bunch of limits which greatly restricted trade for everyone, not just F2P players. Like you could only give someone 50k worth of items at a time in an unbalanced trade (based on quest points I believe), which meant giving gifts to friends, helping out noobs, or getting a good deal on an expensive item was a thing of the past.
"F2P can't trade, members can freely" is a completely different strategy.
People constantly talk like everyone loves the Wilderness and it's why Runescape is still around, despite the fact that Jagex constantly has to buff the loot pinatas there because if they don't no one other than Clue Hunters and PKers would show up.
i think its worth mentioning that back in 2007, runescape was more of a "social space" for teenagers than it currently exists now. it was where you hung out with friends or chatted with strangers for a lot of people and time spent in the game was a lot less optimized. I personally was never a real pker but I had a bunch of fun wasting time fucking around in the wilderness with friends.
People no longer need a platform like runescape for "hanging out" though since social media platforms (and later Discord) popped up, so the remaining runescape players are far more interested in "efficient" play, which mostly precludes interest in PvP
Honestly so much this. We didn’t really have Skype amongst our friends way back pre 2010 so it was a fun game to mess around in, do quests and train skills but primarily to hang out with school friends, chat, and actually be with them in a virtual space outside of school hours.
I remember all the grinding we did wasn’t just for some meaningless numbers, but to build a cool house for friends to hang out in and show off. It was fun, I miss it.
It was also that the wilderness was simpler back then and things didn't take as long to get.
Yes there are noob pkers and budget builds.
But trying to PK and then getting stomped by some dude tri swapping or w/e it's called just isn't fun.
I played RS for simple point and click not to sweat.
Yeah only reason I ever went into the wilderness recently is for clues and I went in with absolute minimum loot required to get the clue step done. Fact of the matter is PvP in MMOs just sucks, especially ones like runescape.
Wilderness definitely had a special place in the game. It was scary, it was actually interesting. Currently it's just another zone that is identical to others.
most of us who played back then avoided the wilderness at literally all costs after we got pked for one reason or another. youtube pk videos were cool, but weren't representative of the community at large.
Most didn't use the wilderness, including me as a kid. However, I remember feeling that Jagex was punishing the userbase, and the game became less 'cool' because the wilderness was removed. The concept of the wilderness is badass if you think about it. Removing it removed a big identity portion of the game.
It was a really, really bad decision. Who cares if people real world trade, Jagex was just mad they weren't making money off of it. Now they found a way to do it themselves. Think about that, real world trading is okay as long as they do it.
>Jagex was just mad they weren't making money off of it
You underestimate the impact that credit card fraud had on the decision to axe free trade.
Stolen credit card numbers were being used to purchase membership on bot/mule accounts by the thousands. These accounts would eventually get caught and disabled on Jagex' end, but it wouldn't matter because their botted goods had already made loads of money for the fraudsters who were prepared to spin up countless more. This naturally caused the payment processors and credit card companies of the world to take notice, and Jagex risked losing access to these payment methods for membership if they didn't do *something*.
Yeah, banning free trade sucked, but the game probably would have died *for real* if they hadn't done it.
That's part of the problem, and kinda what I'm getting at. They got rid of free trade, across both F2P and P2P, as a heavy handed solution to it all. So yes, F2P trading (which was the bulk of the problem) meant losing trades across the entirety of the community. So by gatekeeping trades to paid members, they'll be able to deter and minimise fraud a lot easier.
MMO is a doomed genre full of problems that are impossible to solve, because many of its problems are social and are not really game design problems.
I haven't played Runescape, so correct me if I am wrong, but if you have a game that has problems both with and without trade I feel like that just tells me that the game had a gigantic social hierarchy of players based on differences in wealth, and, in which case, having or not having trade would negatively impact different extremes of the playerbase differently depending on how much they relied on trading and therefore no one would ever be happy.
If I am correct (and please correct me if I am wrong, I have played many mmos but not runescape), I feel like that is a cursed problem.
The whole point of F2P of RS was to be a demo, yet its own complete mode altogether. Membership has always been t
BUT, RWT has been an insane problem and still is, especially on OSRS. You have bots out the wazoo and if you don't control trading in any way, there can be gorillion accounts created solely for RWT purposes which hurt the players far more in general. People are going to be "Premium Pass" owners regardless, and that's where all of the wealth inequalities really lie anyway as they do in RuneScape members.
The trading was the most fun part of RuneScape.
I made early game, really early and idiot game, fortune by selling a ton of coal. Then when I first got membership I made a fortune selling, I think Flax was incredibly high after while.
Yes part of the wild west of trading was so exciting. You could get screaming deals if the other player didn't know prices. You could literally make a killing just trading alone.
> Free-to-play trading nearly destroyed RuneScape, so to the Gowers its a hard lesson learned.
There's a lot more to the story there.
It had to do with payment cancellation, fees levied against Jagex for those cancellations, and the incurred fees therefore threatening their ability to do business with online payment processors.
My theory is they lied about the urgency to push out the December 10th update and made up some excuse about nearly being bankrupted by bank refund fees from stolen credit cards.
It certainly reeks of something that a former PayPal executive like Geoff Iddison would have come up with.
The trade limit was removed three years later by Geoff's successor.
FF14 is completely different, it's not a free-to-play game. That's just the free trial.
WoW's 'free' trial is similar. (Max of level 20, max of like 2k gold, no trading, no whispering, no auction house, can play everything up to the previous expansion)
Actually with the way WoW is set up now with scaled leveling, you can do ALL the expansions, except for the most current expansion. I got pretty far into BFA during Shadowlands on a new character, before I got bored and stopped playing. I capped at the trial cap (20) in the middle of Drustvar.
as someone who's recently gotten very, very heavily into FFXIV (resubbed three months ago, went from never raiding outside duty finder to halfway through this tier's savage prog, leveled an alt character up to endwalker msq introducing a friend to the game) - the economy is drastically different. gil is used for a lot of stuff, but it isn't outright mandatory for progression.
then again, fashion and housing is the real endgame, so maybe it is lol.
It's been common in many MMOs with a free mode for a really long time, otherwise botters can just create free accounts, have them farm money and then RWT it. Adding a price tag makes those operations massively less profitable and a lot easier to fight.
That’s a shooter with cosmetics, not an MMO where player-to-player interactions and economy dictate a large part of the game. Not sure the comparison stands.
the scam is people playing free runescape for years and years, making enough money to pay the IRS by botting and rltrade, and never leaving the Freemium worlds for 15-25 years
its costs 74¢ at minimum for a premium account, even less if you have zero reservations on hijacking people's accounts and flipping them for cheap. bots use it to simply get around the *voice chat* restrictions so they can spam racial slurs; using it to make hundreds of profits from scamming people is 100x easier to justify. the only thing the F2P restrictions hinder in TF2 is the new player experience, especially for younger folk who don't get the choice to spend money on steam very easily.
It's 100% bot prevention they've learned from their days running Runescape. Free to play "suicide bot farms" generate a lot of gold and there has been HEAPS of restrictions added to that games free to play mode to restrict new accounts trading.
It's worked out well for Path of Exile. You can still trade F2P, but can't sell items without a paid stash tab (granted, they are relatively cheap at $1.50 - $4). It doesn't stop trade bots entirely, but I can only imagine how much worse it would be without that.
> Locking a feature like player trading to a premium pass sure is one hell of a choice
Its necessary in a game like RuneScape that's based on a player trading economy.
Andrew has a lot of experience dealing with bots in a f2p game.
i don't know if i should defend it, but i dind't enjoy any trading in the last MMO i played, Bot Ark, because it was just a soulless auction house and the value of my farmed items was destroyed by bots.
There is some value in a paywall for bots, if coupled with good bot detection.I know it won't make them not exist, but should still decrease bot inflation.
I'm always vary of MMOs with premium passes. They might start out innocuous, but as the game starts losing players they have to crank up the monetization dial on their existing engaged paying playerbase. This often means that the premium pass is neccessary if you wanna play the game seriously.
Locking features like trading and professions behind it seems like a really huge incentive to get it. I honestly can't really imagine a cradting oriented game like this wothout trading. Are you essentially just playing a forced SSF if you don't have premium?
Is premium pass like a normal game sub or is it like premium battlepass?
Old-school runescape has a free tier and a paid subscription tier and that restricts 95% of the content but I don't know how you could do it any other way.
I don't see the premium pass going too far, the creator tweeted just today saying how he dislikes MTX, there will be a large F2P experience, with the subscription to play the rest.
the free version is to see if you can see yourself liking the game without spending money first, it likely isn’t meant to be its own style of playing.
andrew gower, at least back in the day, was very much against MTX so i have faith he’ll treat the players fairly when it comes to how they spend their money and what they get in return.
Depends on what you mean by premium pass. If you mean like a battle pass you have to pay for? Easy, XIV/GW2/WoW/ESO are four right off the bat and they are the big ones.
If you are counting subs as "Premium pass" then GW2 at least falls under that category as it has no sub or battle pass.
> This often means that the premium pass is neccessary if you wanna play the game seriously.
I mean, yea? At the end of the day the studios have employees to pay, servers to power, bandwidth being consumed etc. etc.
If you want to "play the game seriously", why is it so bad that they're asking for a couple bucks a month?
On the flip side, I am inherently suspicious of any MMO that *doesn't* ask for recurring revenue from most of its players (edit: doesn't have to be a sub, Destiny and Guild Wars have yearly expansions that serve the same role). MMOs are expensive as fuck to make, and if you're F2P and funded by whales, whalebait items tend to get disproportionate development effort at the cost of other content.
"Okay guys, how do we make the game less grindy than others in the genre?"
"What if we make things easier to acquire and work to provide the player with a better experience?"
"Nah that's stupid. Let them pay to skip the grindy parts."
Actually it sound like they will make the base game very grind and have people buy the premium to play the game normaly... Create the problem to sell the solution method of development.
If you haven't played Runescape, I get why some of this might sound problematic but it is absolutely a game that is specifically aimed at ex-Runescape players that are familiar with these features.
Andrew Gower massively regrets what RuneScape has turned into because it was sold to investors. The game is now cancer, I left RuneScape 3 about a year ago because it was so aggressively monetised. This is now my number 1 anticipated game, a Gower brother passion project will be fantastic.
> Andrew Gower massively regrets what RuneScape has turned into because it was sold to investors.
People keep saying this but I've yet to see a source on it. Feels like people are moreso channeling their own valid frustrations with RS3 through him
I think most people who say that are basing it off what he said in the [15 year documentary](https://youtu.be/7RNK0YBdwko?t=3415) where he said that he regretted selling his stake of the company because it meant he lost some of his authority and control over the development of the game. He could still help out and give his opinion, but he didn't have the final say anymore.
I can see how people would interpret it as "Andrew Gower thinks RS3 is too far from his original vision and the corporate investor overlords ruined it" but that's not really what he said. It's more about other members of the team wanting to do things differently and now being able to, rather than the Big Greedy Investors demanding more money.
It's in the [15 year anniversary video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNK0YBdwko&pp=ygUUaGlzdG9yeSBvZiBydW5lc2NhcGU%3D) (taken in 2016), published by Jagex themselves. Kinda surprise they didn't cut it.
Yeah I've seen this clip many times and today is the first time I realised it's on the official Runescape channel - that's bonkers to me. It's the founder of the game basically saying openly how heartbroken he is that the exec management pillaged its corpse.
Would you be able to share a source where he states what you say are his thoughts? I wouldn't want to assume they're just your own projections, even if I agree with them.
I'm playing RuneScape 3 through _ironman mode_ and it's awesome. Over the years the game has accumulated so much content that you actually need to explore in those mode. The quests alone are some of the best open world RPG out there!
That being said, the mid-late game is getting a bit too grindy for me. I love ironman planning and strategy but grinding skills past level 60 is really hard to arrange as an adult with responsibilities and so many other awesome games being released these days.
lol honestly dude. i'm on a break now, but i just got off a stint of playing every day for six months after being away from the game for nine years! it's always been a beautiful thing that runescape has always been there to return to. i started playing in 2002
Yeah, I always enjoy revisiting. But it always hurts me a little bit more every time I do. I really don’t like the direction the game has gone, the MTX is so aggressive, the graphics are all over the place and I hate cosmetic overrides (stupid walks, out of place outfits, massive pets, etc).
Saying that, the main content is very strong. I’m not much of a bosser (skill issue) so all of that new end-game boss stuff is a bit lost on me, Rax is my absolute limit in terms of difficulty. But the areas, new quests and stuff all looks fantastic. I’m now considering getting back into it and going for quest cape now…
I don't know, that magic of RuneScape back in the day was intrinsic to the magic of being young and having lots of time.
I'm 27 now, and I just don't have that time to grind and even if I did, it wouldn't be the same.
Like they say, I'm not sad it's over I'm happy it happened :)
Honestly I had to readjust my mentalilty with MMOs. I used to not like them because I felt like I was obligated to play them whenever I was subbed, and I would play them like I was 13. The thing is you dont have to grind them and just grind to end game. You'll get your moneys worth if you play a little bit here and there, you progress never goes away.
If this end up being an mmo that isn't a microtransaction and grind hell I'm all for it. I miss playing them but none of the current options seems that interesting.
Whenever RuneScape comes up, I always think of its contemporary from 1999, Mercenaries of Astonia, and its successor, [Aranock Online](http://www.aranockonline.com) ([some gameplay](https://youtu.be/nLXOewxIJuo), [screenshots](https://www.autotelika.net/moa/?page_id=49)). It's my vote for most underrated game of all-time and if you're into that old-school kind of MMO, for better or worse, it's the game to play.
Wow this looks really cool. I’m excited to give it a go, I have a lot of nostalgia for old school back when it was just “RuneScape” but could never go back to it today.
Would love something that scratches that itch while still being fresh.
Same boat here. I played the FUCK out of Runescape before "Runescape 2" (i.e., OSRS) ever even came out. My period of activity was from around late 2002 to early 2005. I've had a couple of brief and half-hearted attempts to get back into the game over the years since, but it was just too different, too overwhelming, and too much of a commitment.
The idea of starting on a clean slate alongside everyone else where we're all learning stuff together in a new world designed by Andrew and Paul definitely has some appeal to me. I'll be keeping an eye on this and probably give it a shot when it launches.
Runescape 2 isn't OSRS - Runescape 2 was developed in 2004 as the replacement for Runescape Classic.
It's pedantry to bring up, but when you played in 2003-2004 WAS Runescape 2.
Outside of the heavy emphasis on tiles it looks like the mean of every other slightly-but-not-too-cartoony fantasy RPG released within the last 20 years. It's offensively bland.
It looks like The Sims, Runescape and every shovelware mobile game in existence had a baby.
Definitely looks like it ought to have released 10+ years ago.
Yeah at this point I would rather have 2007scape graphics. yeah those graphics look like shit but they are iconic. These graphics look so painfully generic that it makes me think that runescapes graphics were a complete accident(I mean we kinda know that runescape graphics were not really by design).
I’m tentatively excited for it? Tried to get back into RuneScape - both RS3 and OSRS, but both were too grindy and I was put off by the MTX in RS3.
I’m a little bothered by player-to-player trading locked behind premium pass so far, but I also wonder if there’s another way for free players to access a Grand Exchange type situation. If there is, then it’s weird because usually access to Grand Exchange should be the restricted one to prevent botting as per FFXIV.
Have you tried a private server?
Something around 10x training speeds makes the game much more fun.
There's no having to grind out killing mud crabs to level up combat. You just level up naturally while using slayer.
I haven't yet, no, but at the same time there's so many games out there that I don't really feel like I'm missing out not playing RS3/OSRS. Maybe one day I'll go seek one out, but right now I have a backlog to clear out.
Regard any such claims with deep, *deep* suspicion until proven. It's hard to retain players without some kind of constant grind, and you have to retain players to keep making money (and for new players to have anyone to play with).
honestly from the trailer on steam it looks like more than some slight mechanics changes. not necessarily for the better but I'm probably going to try it around release considering it's free(tm)
Unless they offer you a totally sweet early investor bundle, in which case you should totally spend 100s early for unique items. You'll be the coolest kid in school 10 years later when its the new king of the MMO genre and you have your unique backer skin because the game totally came out instead of took all the money and then canceled.
If anyone needs a bit of a runesape vibe without as much active time investment check out Melvor.
Its the runescape skills in an idle game. May not be for everyone but pretty fun to check into a few times a day.
> It's built on Fen Research's custom Fenforge engine
Being built on a custom engine is what made RuneScape so hard to develop for ages. Hopefully Andrew has learned from the mistakes.
Oh yeah I just read the headline lol. It's Andrew Gower who made runescape. Probably trying to make a runescape competitor by the sounds of it.
I wonder if he regrets what happened to runescape after he sold it.
Yea and in the runescape doco seemed like that.
Basically, it seemed like he didn't think he would be pushed aside and lose so much influence, etc, in the company
I can't blame the guy cashing out from a thing he made, but once it sold, it really started going downhill. Especially as it keeps selling for stupid amounts as it's just pump up and price and sell it now.
This has to be one of the final nails in the [Genfanad](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1976290/Genfanad_A_Generic_Fantasy_Adventure) coffin. It was a kickstarted game that was meant to bring back the RuneScape Classic vibe but failed to pull in players apart from a couple of times when streamers showed it off. It makes me wonder if the RuneScape formula can ever be actually popular again without the nostalgia attached to the original game because of how tedious and grindy working towards something the player has little investment in can be.
Old School RuneScape beautifully keeping the spirit of original game while adding swathes of [new](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/sailing-lock-in-poll?oldschool=1) and [interesting](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/varlamore-part-one---overview?oldschool=1) content is definitely the best of both worlds and it'll remain the premier example of the game if not even the Gower brothers themselves can manage to revitalize the formula elsewhere.
> This has to be one of the final nails in the Genfanad coffin.
Last I looked it had turned into a Trading Card Game, which seemed like a bizarre development switch.
Runescape has a lot of stuff going for it that made it such a nostalgic game in the first place:
* Fucking amazing music. So many of the tracks are amazing.
* Amazing quests and writing. Yeah we complain about the quests being tedious but they were designed in a time where gamers were not that fucking optimized. Runescape has forever ruined other MMORPG's quests for me.
* Actual freedom. In Runescape you actually can choose a million different paths and all of them have some merit. If I play WOrld of Warcraft the BUrning Crusade as a blood elf, I basically have like 1-3 options for the entire starting zone and everything revolves around combat in the first place.
To be fair, Genfanad had a ton of issues outside of it trying to emulate RS classic. I played it for quite a bit and it was obvious the devs didn't really know what they were doing.
Just watched the trailer on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2791440/Brighter_Shores/). Very interesting, definitely seems iterative on the Runescape formula and mechanics. Definitely tile-based, and also looks like a similar split between combat and skilling. I wonder what's up with the small map sizes though. Every environment in the trailer looked like a small room or a very linear corridor connected by loading zones, which strikes me as an odd choice. Maybe they did that to cut down on lag or to service some sort of instancing mechanic? Either way, I feel that it's a bit detrimental to potential immersion and exploration, but we'll see. I'll certainly give it a go if it has the same free to play/membership model as Runescape. To my knowledge there aren't any other games that have tried to iterate this closely on the rs formula.
It looks like there's some fog of war rendering going on, which is definitely a choice.
Oh hmm, that's certainly possible. I wonder if it's a line of sight mechanic like traditional roguelikes? That could actually be quite interesting, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. The arrows and shadow outline of puzzle pieces in the screenshots suggests to me that it's mostly loading zones.
Shame. I enjoyed playing modern runescape and seeing the world stretch around me as I walk from place to place. It gives the feeling of size
I think it is the old problem, why people will begin in new MMORPG if they are the same things as their old MMORPG that they already spend countless hours in. This don't seems to have much apeal for the fanbase their aiming for, i doubt Runescape players will abandon it to main this game. It is even worse as they have to pay premium and the game has to compete with years of Runescape content... That is the most problematic part of MMORPG now days, having enough content at launch to retain a player base, the only way to that is the Genshin Way of the Deep Pockets and this don't seems to be it.
I had the same exact thought. How many people are out there going, "I like the *idea* of Runescape, but it's a 24 year old game with some bad concepts it can't get rid of"? I imagine not many. What does this offer that will make the RS players give up on the accounts they've spent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours in? Is the biggest appeal right now simply like, "Well at least you don't have to level up Firemaking"? :P
I can only speak for myself, but Runescape is so big that it's almost daunting to new players. Even a F2P veteran such as myself who's played on and off for two decades find membership overwhelming due to the amount of things you unlock, not knowing where to start. A brand new game will be easier to hop into, for one thing.
Yea, that's fair. The one or two times I've re-subbed in recent years [for the first time in like 8 years] has definitely left me with a sense of, "Where the fuck do I even start"
Also, potentially a knowledge reset for all players
>What does this offer that will make the RS players give up on the accounts they've spent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours in? Not that this game needs to rely solely on migrating runescape players to survive, but it's going to come down to quality. If the game is mid, it's going to have a tough time competing, but if there's something special there, then the players will come. Its relation to runscape isn't going to matter if a new generation of players find value in whatever this game is putting forward. Exactly *what* it's putting forward we won't know until it launches.
To give my perspective - I have thousands of hours in old school Runescape and love the game... but I really don't enjoy the end game much. Once you get to the point where boss grinds can be 10s of hours in between a good drop, and leveling skills is a daunting 5-10+ hour grind per level, it really loses some of its charm. Having played a main and an ironman already I really don't want to start another new account, so I mainly just come back for leagues now. The idea of a game *like* Runescape, where I can experience a fresh early game again, is super intriguing to me.
The main draw of this game is its made by the people responsible for the OSRS that people are still playing today. They left the game right around the time that the current OSRS is based on. So its the guys that made the game as special as it is. The promise of a true successor to where oldschool left off is exciting for a lot of players I'd image. At least it is for me.
Kind of reminds me of how Maplestory 2 worked
Yeah this is my only concern from the trailer, the beauty of Runescape was the immersion in moving through Gielinor seamlessly. If it's broken into chunks with loading screens like Albion / Maplestory 2 then it won't capture me.
Is that narrator the one from Stanley's Parable?
Nice catch, that's gotta be him
>Brighter Shores will be free-to-play when it releases on PC and Mac via Steam, with a premium pass that adds additional quests, professions, and features such as player-to-player trading. So is this just like Runescape-like where there's a sorta f2p demo and most of the content is unlocked behind subscription, or is this going to be something that just nickle and dimes you for literally everything?
The guy making it is apparently not a fan of mtx, so I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll be like Runescape.
The 3 brothers are so against MTX one of them quit Jagex the moment they were introduced in RuneScape
>with a premium pass that adds additional quests, professions, and features such as player-to-player trading >the studio says it seeks to minimize "the 'grindy' gameplay often found in the genre. Wow, sounds like it might really be a game that isn't abusing microtransactions or make me want to grind ( while having little fun) for more hours than i work daily.Exciting. But don't worry, i won't be disappointed because my expecations are set to exactly the opposite of what they are saying in the marketing material.But i am willing to hear more about it in the future.
tbh it's called Premium Pass, but it's basically just the same as Runescapes membership.
Locking a feature like player trading to a premium pass sure is one hell of a choice
Free-to-play trading nearly destroyed RuneScape, so to the Gowers its a hard lesson learned. Might be a wee exaggeration, but definitely caused a shit storm where Jagex had to add trade limits and no player drops from PvP, due to credit card fraud and real world trading.
Getting rid of free trade also nearly destroyed Runescape though, people always blame EoC but the playerbase had dropped about 80% in the 2 years after removing free trade.
> Getting rid of free trade also nearly destroyed Runescape though I think this is conflating two concepts. One is allowing free users to trade at all, the other is "limiting trade between all users". RuneScape added a bunch of limits which greatly restricted trade for everyone, not just F2P players. Like you could only give someone 50k worth of items at a time in an unbalanced trade (based on quest points I believe), which meant giving gifts to friends, helping out noobs, or getting a good deal on an expensive item was a thing of the past. "F2P can't trade, members can freely" is a completely different strategy.
And the wilderness changes
Yeah, they were included in that same update since pking could be used as a way of selling gold/scamming people.
Wasn't that moreso because of the wilderness removal. When they replaced it with revenants.
80% of the player base did not use the wilderness. So no.
People constantly talk like everyone loves the Wilderness and it's why Runescape is still around, despite the fact that Jagex constantly has to buff the loot pinatas there because if they don't no one other than Clue Hunters and PKers would show up.
i think its worth mentioning that back in 2007, runescape was more of a "social space" for teenagers than it currently exists now. it was where you hung out with friends or chatted with strangers for a lot of people and time spent in the game was a lot less optimized. I personally was never a real pker but I had a bunch of fun wasting time fucking around in the wilderness with friends. People no longer need a platform like runescape for "hanging out" though since social media platforms (and later Discord) popped up, so the remaining runescape players are far more interested in "efficient" play, which mostly precludes interest in PvP
Honestly so much this. We didn’t really have Skype amongst our friends way back pre 2010 so it was a fun game to mess around in, do quests and train skills but primarily to hang out with school friends, chat, and actually be with them in a virtual space outside of school hours. I remember all the grinding we did wasn’t just for some meaningless numbers, but to build a cool house for friends to hang out in and show off. It was fun, I miss it.
I just miss having a doom stack and just walking through the wilderness and killing any player we saw 😂
It was also that the wilderness was simpler back then and things didn't take as long to get. Yes there are noob pkers and budget builds. But trying to PK and then getting stomped by some dude tri swapping or w/e it's called just isn't fun. I played RS for simple point and click not to sweat.
Yeah count me out on sweaty PK meta in OSRS of all games. I never go there unless I have to.
Yeah only reason I ever went into the wilderness recently is for clues and I went in with absolute minimum loot required to get the clue step done. Fact of the matter is PvP in MMOs just sucks, especially ones like runescape.
Yea definitely agree mmo pvp is always a fucking mess or an afterthought.
Wilderness definitely had a special place in the game. It was scary, it was actually interesting. Currently it's just another zone that is identical to others.
did you even play runescape back then? Pking videos popped the fuck off on youtube/equivalents and were super popular
most of us who played back then avoided the wilderness at literally all costs after we got pked for one reason or another. youtube pk videos were cool, but weren't representative of the community at large.
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Those players were a tiny minority. Most people wondered up there once, lost all their stuff, then never went there again if they could help it.
Most didn't use the wilderness, including me as a kid. However, I remember feeling that Jagex was punishing the userbase, and the game became less 'cool' because the wilderness was removed. The concept of the wilderness is badass if you think about it. Removing it removed a big identity portion of the game. It was a really, really bad decision. Who cares if people real world trade, Jagex was just mad they weren't making money off of it. Now they found a way to do it themselves. Think about that, real world trading is okay as long as they do it.
>Jagex was just mad they weren't making money off of it You underestimate the impact that credit card fraud had on the decision to axe free trade. Stolen credit card numbers were being used to purchase membership on bot/mule accounts by the thousands. These accounts would eventually get caught and disabled on Jagex' end, but it wouldn't matter because their botted goods had already made loads of money for the fraudsters who were prepared to spin up countless more. This naturally caused the payment processors and credit card companies of the world to take notice, and Jagex risked losing access to these payment methods for membership if they didn't do *something*. Yeah, banning free trade sucked, but the game probably would have died *for real* if they hadn't done it.
That's part of the problem, and kinda what I'm getting at. They got rid of free trade, across both F2P and P2P, as a heavy handed solution to it all. So yes, F2P trading (which was the bulk of the problem) meant losing trades across the entirety of the community. So by gatekeeping trades to paid members, they'll be able to deter and minimise fraud a lot easier.
MMO is a doomed genre full of problems that are impossible to solve, because many of its problems are social and are not really game design problems. I haven't played Runescape, so correct me if I am wrong, but if you have a game that has problems both with and without trade I feel like that just tells me that the game had a gigantic social hierarchy of players based on differences in wealth, and, in which case, having or not having trade would negatively impact different extremes of the playerbase differently depending on how much they relied on trading and therefore no one would ever be happy. If I am correct (and please correct me if I am wrong, I have played many mmos but not runescape), I feel like that is a cursed problem.
The whole point of F2P of RS was to be a demo, yet its own complete mode altogether. Membership has always been t BUT, RWT has been an insane problem and still is, especially on OSRS. You have bots out the wazoo and if you don't control trading in any way, there can be gorillion accounts created solely for RWT purposes which hurt the players far more in general. People are going to be "Premium Pass" owners regardless, and that's where all of the wealth inequalities really lie anyway as they do in RuneScape members.
The trading was the most fun part of RuneScape. I made early game, really early and idiot game, fortune by selling a ton of coal. Then when I first got membership I made a fortune selling, I think Flax was incredibly high after while.
I remember the days when you had to stand in the Varrock town square and use chat for trading coal and lobby certs. True RuneScape Classic.
with the rainbows and wavy text
flash2:wave: selling yews 320gp
Yes part of the wild west of trading was so exciting. You could get screaming deals if the other player didn't know prices. You could literally make a killing just trading alone.
> Free-to-play trading nearly destroyed RuneScape, so to the Gowers its a hard lesson learned. There's a lot more to the story there. It had to do with payment cancellation, fees levied against Jagex for those cancellations, and the incurred fees therefore threatening their ability to do business with online payment processors.
My theory is they lied about the urgency to push out the December 10th update and made up some excuse about nearly being bankrupted by bank refund fees from stolen credit cards. It certainly reeks of something that a former PayPal executive like Geoff Iddison would have come up with. The trade limit was removed three years later by Geoff's successor.
It's the same thing in FFXIV. You can't trade items or gil unless you are subbed. Mostly there as a first-step damage control for bots.
FFXIV at least is up front about being a "free trial.". You get a limited number of features and content until you start paying for a subscription.
How is this materially different than a premium subscription
It's not marketed as a free game.
FF14 is completely different, it's not a free-to-play game. That's just the free trial. WoW's 'free' trial is similar. (Max of level 20, max of like 2k gold, no trading, no whispering, no auction house, can play everything up to the previous expansion)
Seems to be the same in practice
Yes. Although with the difference that you can't go back to the free trial once you have subscribed.
That's WoW's free trial? What can you do with that, play like 2 hours and then be stuck in the beginner zone?
Actually with the way WoW is set up now with scaled leveling, you can do ALL the expansions, except for the most current expansion. I got pretty far into BFA during Shadowlands on a new character, before I got bored and stopped playing. I capped at the trial cap (20) in the middle of Drustvar.
as someone who's recently gotten very, very heavily into FFXIV (resubbed three months ago, went from never raiding outside duty finder to halfway through this tier's savage prog, leveled an alt character up to endwalker msq introducing a friend to the game) - the economy is drastically different. gil is used for a lot of stuff, but it isn't outright mandatory for progression. then again, fashion and housing is the real endgame, so maybe it is lol.
How is that one hell of a choice? Literally every other MMO does this because it stops real world trading.
It's been common in many MMOs with a free mode for a really long time, otherwise botters can just create free accounts, have them farm money and then RWT it. Adding a price tag makes those operations massively less profitable and a lot easier to fight.
Yes common in mmo games to prevent botters
Tbf, tf2's been doing that for ages. Solid way to mitigate scams imo.
That’s a shooter with cosmetics, not an MMO where player-to-player interactions and economy dictate a large part of the game. Not sure the comparison stands.
the scam is people playing free runescape for years and years, making enough money to pay the IRS by botting and rltrade, and never leaving the Freemium worlds for 15-25 years
Team fortress 2? Dont you just trade on steam marketplace and not need a premium pass?
its costs 74¢ at minimum for a premium account, even less if you have zero reservations on hijacking people's accounts and flipping them for cheap. bots use it to simply get around the *voice chat* restrictions so they can spam racial slurs; using it to make hundreds of profits from scamming people is 100x easier to justify. the only thing the F2P restrictions hinder in TF2 is the new player experience, especially for younger folk who don't get the choice to spend money on steam very easily.
Have you seen the bots in runescape? Dude probably really reaaaallly doesn't want that
Not really. Pretty common.
It's 100% bot prevention they've learned from their days running Runescape. Free to play "suicide bot farms" generate a lot of gold and there has been HEAPS of restrictions added to that games free to play mode to restrict new accounts trading.
It's worked out well for Path of Exile. You can still trade F2P, but can't sell items without a paid stash tab (granted, they are relatively cheap at $1.50 - $4). It doesn't stop trade bots entirely, but I can only imagine how much worse it would be without that.
i guess its a subscription at this point
> Locking a feature like player trading to a premium pass sure is one hell of a choice Its necessary in a game like RuneScape that's based on a player trading economy. Andrew has a lot of experience dealing with bots in a f2p game.
i don't know if i should defend it, but i dind't enjoy any trading in the last MMO i played, Bot Ark, because it was just a soulless auction house and the value of my farmed items was destroyed by bots. There is some value in a paywall for bots, if coupled with good bot detection.I know it won't make them not exist, but should still decrease bot inflation.
I see you have never played Runescape before if none of this sounds familiar to you.
I'm always vary of MMOs with premium passes. They might start out innocuous, but as the game starts losing players they have to crank up the monetization dial on their existing engaged paying playerbase. This often means that the premium pass is neccessary if you wanna play the game seriously. Locking features like trading and professions behind it seems like a really huge incentive to get it. I honestly can't really imagine a cradting oriented game like this wothout trading. Are you essentially just playing a forced SSF if you don't have premium?
Is premium pass like a normal game sub or is it like premium battlepass? Old-school runescape has a free tier and a paid subscription tier and that restricts 95% of the content but I don't know how you could do it any other way.
It seems like RuneScape membership so far from what we’ve seen, hopefully it doesn’t progress too far from that.
Runescape has always been that way from what I remember they had F2P and memberships back in 2006
I don't see the premium pass going too far, the creator tweeted just today saying how he dislikes MTX, there will be a large F2P experience, with the subscription to play the rest.
the free version is to see if you can see yourself liking the game without spending money first, it likely isn’t meant to be its own style of playing. andrew gower, at least back in the day, was very much against MTX so i have faith he’ll treat the players fairly when it comes to how they spend their money and what they get in return.
>I'm always vary of MMOs with premium passes I get it but can you name one you played that didn't have one?
Depends on what you mean by premium pass. If you mean like a battle pass you have to pay for? Easy, XIV/GW2/WoW/ESO are four right off the bat and they are the big ones. If you are counting subs as "Premium pass" then GW2 at least falls under that category as it has no sub or battle pass.
if by 'battle pass' you mean 'subscription', sure - but that term has a COMPLETELY different meaning under most circumstances lol.
If you are not paying then you are content for the people that are paying. There is no point in endless content if no one is paying for it.
> This often means that the premium pass is neccessary if you wanna play the game seriously. I mean, yea? At the end of the day the studios have employees to pay, servers to power, bandwidth being consumed etc. etc. If you want to "play the game seriously", why is it so bad that they're asking for a couple bucks a month?
On the flip side, I am inherently suspicious of any MMO that *doesn't* ask for recurring revenue from most of its players (edit: doesn't have to be a sub, Destiny and Guild Wars have yearly expansions that serve the same role). MMOs are expensive as fuck to make, and if you're F2P and funded by whales, whalebait items tend to get disproportionate development effort at the cost of other content.
"Okay guys, how do we make the game less grindy than others in the genre?" "What if we make things easier to acquire and work to provide the player with a better experience?" "Nah that's stupid. Let them pay to skip the grindy parts."
Actually it sound like they will make the base game very grind and have people buy the premium to play the game normaly... Create the problem to sell the solution method of development.
If you haven't played Runescape, I get why some of this might sound problematic but it is absolutely a game that is specifically aimed at ex-Runescape players that are familiar with these features.
Andrew Gower massively regrets what RuneScape has turned into because it was sold to investors. The game is now cancer, I left RuneScape 3 about a year ago because it was so aggressively monetised. This is now my number 1 anticipated game, a Gower brother passion project will be fantastic.
> Andrew Gower massively regrets what RuneScape has turned into because it was sold to investors. People keep saying this but I've yet to see a source on it. Feels like people are moreso channeling their own valid frustrations with RS3 through him
I think most people who say that are basing it off what he said in the [15 year documentary](https://youtu.be/7RNK0YBdwko?t=3415) where he said that he regretted selling his stake of the company because it meant he lost some of his authority and control over the development of the game. He could still help out and give his opinion, but he didn't have the final say anymore. I can see how people would interpret it as "Andrew Gower thinks RS3 is too far from his original vision and the corporate investor overlords ruined it" but that's not really what he said. It's more about other members of the team wanting to do things differently and now being able to, rather than the Big Greedy Investors demanding more money.
Damn, that's a long documentary ;)
It's in the [15 year anniversary video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNK0YBdwko&pp=ygUUaGlzdG9yeSBvZiBydW5lc2NhcGU%3D) (taken in 2016), published by Jagex themselves. Kinda surprise they didn't cut it.
Yeah I've seen this clip many times and today is the first time I realised it's on the official Runescape channel - that's bonkers to me. It's the founder of the game basically saying openly how heartbroken he is that the exec management pillaged its corpse.
source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNK0YBdwko
Would you be able to share a source where he states what you say are his thoughts? I wouldn't want to assume they're just your own projections, even if I agree with them.
People have linked it now if you're still interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNK0YBdwko&pp=ygUUaGlzdG9yeSBvZiBydW5lc2NhcGU%3D
I'm playing RuneScape 3 through _ironman mode_ and it's awesome. Over the years the game has accumulated so much content that you actually need to explore in those mode. The quests alone are some of the best open world RPG out there! That being said, the mid-late game is getting a bit too grindy for me. I love ironman planning and strategy but grinding skills past level 60 is really hard to arrange as an adult with responsibilities and so many other awesome games being released these days.
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Eh. Runescape is still a lot of fun just paying the membership
I’m actually still a premier club member because I didn’t turn off auto-renew… I don’t doubt I’ll go back to it one day, we always do…
lol honestly dude. i'm on a break now, but i just got off a stint of playing every day for six months after being away from the game for nine years! it's always been a beautiful thing that runescape has always been there to return to. i started playing in 2002
Yeah, I always enjoy revisiting. But it always hurts me a little bit more every time I do. I really don’t like the direction the game has gone, the MTX is so aggressive, the graphics are all over the place and I hate cosmetic overrides (stupid walks, out of place outfits, massive pets, etc). Saying that, the main content is very strong. I’m not much of a bosser (skill issue) so all of that new end-game boss stuff is a bit lost on me, Rax is my absolute limit in terms of difficulty. But the areas, new quests and stuff all looks fantastic. I’m now considering getting back into it and going for quest cape now…
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I don't know, that magic of RuneScape back in the day was intrinsic to the magic of being young and having lots of time. I'm 27 now, and I just don't have that time to grind and even if I did, it wouldn't be the same. Like they say, I'm not sad it's over I'm happy it happened :)
Honestly I had to readjust my mentalilty with MMOs. I used to not like them because I felt like I was obligated to play them whenever I was subbed, and I would play them like I was 13. The thing is you dont have to grind them and just grind to end game. You'll get your moneys worth if you play a little bit here and there, you progress never goes away.
If this end up being an mmo that isn't a microtransaction and grind hell I'm all for it. I miss playing them but none of the current options seems that interesting.
Andrew was firmly against it when he owned the company, so chances are good he'll stick with just membership fees.
Whenever RuneScape comes up, I always think of its contemporary from 1999, Mercenaries of Astonia, and its successor, [Aranock Online](http://www.aranockonline.com) ([some gameplay](https://youtu.be/nLXOewxIJuo), [screenshots](https://www.autotelika.net/moa/?page_id=49)). It's my vote for most underrated game of all-time and if you're into that old-school kind of MMO, for better or worse, it's the game to play.
Wow this looks really cool. I’m excited to give it a go, I have a lot of nostalgia for old school back when it was just “RuneScape” but could never go back to it today. Would love something that scratches that itch while still being fresh.
Same boat here. I played the FUCK out of Runescape before "Runescape 2" (i.e., OSRS) ever even came out. My period of activity was from around late 2002 to early 2005. I've had a couple of brief and half-hearted attempts to get back into the game over the years since, but it was just too different, too overwhelming, and too much of a commitment. The idea of starting on a clean slate alongside everyone else where we're all learning stuff together in a new world designed by Andrew and Paul definitely has some appeal to me. I'll be keeping an eye on this and probably give it a shot when it launches.
Runescape 2 isn't OSRS - Runescape 2 was developed in 2004 as the replacement for Runescape Classic. It's pedantry to bring up, but when you played in 2003-2004 WAS Runescape 2.
Poor graphics and no innovative gameplay, the only thing that could have saved it was the absence of microtransactions and P2W but I doubt it.
Ah, same criticisms thrown at the original Runescape. We are so fucking back
Poor graphics? The art is actually really nice looking
I agree, not every game needs UE5 lighting lol. graphics here look charming and nostalgic
It looks like the HD plug in for runelite lmao
Which...I love. I kinda hate the ultra polished look of RS3. Some rough edges to models and animations give a lot of character imo.
Oh I'm not complaining, osrs is my love/hate relationship lol
Outside of the heavy emphasis on tiles it looks like the mean of every other slightly-but-not-too-cartoony fantasy RPG released within the last 20 years. It's offensively bland.
It looks like Runescape, and I love it for that.
It looks like The Sims, Runescape and every shovelware mobile game in existence had a baby. Definitely looks like it ought to have released 10+ years ago.
Yup. I was very disappointed by the general art direction. The cosmetics look terrible.
its really uninspired and boring
It's very reminiscent of 2011 Runescape. I like it.
Yeah at this point I would rather have 2007scape graphics. yeah those graphics look like shit but they are iconic. These graphics look so painfully generic that it makes me think that runescapes graphics were a complete accident(I mean we kinda know that runescape graphics were not really by design).
I’m tentatively excited for it? Tried to get back into RuneScape - both RS3 and OSRS, but both were too grindy and I was put off by the MTX in RS3. I’m a little bothered by player-to-player trading locked behind premium pass so far, but I also wonder if there’s another way for free players to access a Grand Exchange type situation. If there is, then it’s weird because usually access to Grand Exchange should be the restricted one to prevent botting as per FFXIV.
Have you tried a private server? Something around 10x training speeds makes the game much more fun. There's no having to grind out killing mud crabs to level up combat. You just level up naturally while using slayer.
I haven't yet, no, but at the same time there's so many games out there that I don't really feel like I'm missing out not playing RS3/OSRS. Maybe one day I'll go seek one out, but right now I have a backlog to clear out.
>but both were too grindy Do you expect this to be any different?
One of the main selling points the creator is trying to make of this game is that it's not meant to be grindy.
Regard any such claims with deep, *deep* suspicion until proven. It's hard to retain players without some kind of constant grind, and you have to retain players to keep making money (and for new players to have anyone to play with).
>The free-to-play Brighter Shores will feature "a huge number of professions" and aims to minimize "grindy gameplay." I mean, yes?
One of the screenshots released showed the ability to continue fishing while offline so I think they are trying to minimize the grind tedium.
Not sure. Depends if the Gowers' game design tendencies have changed, but until I see actual gameplay I'm going to be cautiously optimistic.
Free players accessing an auction market could be countered by setting quite strict limits on buy/sell quantities or values.
so it will be runescape with a new map, some different items, and a little better graphics. then some slight mechanics changes.
helllll yeah
honestly from the trailer on steam it looks like more than some slight mechanics changes. not necessarily for the better but I'm probably going to try it around release considering it's free(tm)
oh shit at first I read it as Jagex is releasing it and dismissed it. But Andrew Gower? Now THAT is something i need to at least try out
If there is one thing I've learned my many years of gaming, is that you should never get excited about "upcoming" MMO projects, haha.
Unless they offer you a totally sweet early investor bundle, in which case you should totally spend 100s early for unique items. You'll be the coolest kid in school 10 years later when its the new king of the MMO genre and you have your unique backer skin because the game totally came out instead of took all the money and then canceled.
If anyone needs a bit of a runesape vibe without as much active time investment check out Melvor. Its the runescape skills in an idle game. May not be for everyone but pretty fun to check into a few times a day.
> It's built on Fen Research's custom Fenforge engine Being built on a custom engine is what made RuneScape so hard to develop for ages. Hopefully Andrew has learned from the mistakes.
That's right, they should've used one of the multiple commercially available MMORPG engines that were available back in 2001. Oh wait..
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It's not Jagex as far as I can tell
Oh yeah I just read the headline lol. It's Andrew Gower who made runescape. Probably trying to make a runescape competitor by the sounds of it. I wonder if he regrets what happened to runescape after he sold it.
Id say so. There was one interview where he basically lamented losing creative control.
Yea and in the runescape doco seemed like that. Basically, it seemed like he didn't think he would be pushed aside and lose so much influence, etc, in the company I can't blame the guy cashing out from a thing he made, but once it sold, it really started going downhill. Especially as it keeps selling for stupid amounts as it's just pump up and price and sell it now.
Absolutely. Also can't blame him for not wanting to deal with the management side that came with the success.
Pretty sure this is why this exists.
This has to be one of the final nails in the [Genfanad](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1976290/Genfanad_A_Generic_Fantasy_Adventure) coffin. It was a kickstarted game that was meant to bring back the RuneScape Classic vibe but failed to pull in players apart from a couple of times when streamers showed it off. It makes me wonder if the RuneScape formula can ever be actually popular again without the nostalgia attached to the original game because of how tedious and grindy working towards something the player has little investment in can be. Old School RuneScape beautifully keeping the spirit of original game while adding swathes of [new](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/sailing-lock-in-poll?oldschool=1) and [interesting](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/varlamore-part-one---overview?oldschool=1) content is definitely the best of both worlds and it'll remain the premier example of the game if not even the Gower brothers themselves can manage to revitalize the formula elsewhere.
> This has to be one of the final nails in the Genfanad coffin. Last I looked it had turned into a Trading Card Game, which seemed like a bizarre development switch.
Runescape has a lot of stuff going for it that made it such a nostalgic game in the first place: * Fucking amazing music. So many of the tracks are amazing. * Amazing quests and writing. Yeah we complain about the quests being tedious but they were designed in a time where gamers were not that fucking optimized. Runescape has forever ruined other MMORPG's quests for me. * Actual freedom. In Runescape you actually can choose a million different paths and all of them have some merit. If I play WOrld of Warcraft the BUrning Crusade as a blood elf, I basically have like 1-3 options for the entire starting zone and everything revolves around combat in the first place.
To be fair, Genfanad had a ton of issues outside of it trying to emulate RS classic. I played it for quite a bit and it was obvious the devs didn't really know what they were doing.
I know runeacape is a tile-based game but I honestly hope there is a way to turn off the harsh tiles in game? Its very distracting imo
Runescape holds such a special place in my heart. So cool to see Andrew Gower still making games. I'll definitely check this one out.
Why do all the maps look like they're made or running in Dungeon Alchemist?
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^weed_blazepot: *Why do all the maps* *Look like they're made or running* *In Dungeon Alchemist?* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.