Jagex is making another RuneScape MMO. The project has the working title RS4, it is in Unreal Engine, and it is not a replacement for the games already running. The studio said so at RuneFest in Birmingham, in front of more than six thousand people at the NEC, and put the note up at play.runescape.com/4.
RS4 sits next to RuneScape, Old School RuneScape, and RuneScape: Dragonwilds. Each of those keeps its own team and its own roadmap. Jagex said the point of a fourth game is a bigger Gielinor, not a shutdown of the one you already play. Some people will live in one of them. Some will move between them. Some will meet the setting here first. Check out the first teaser trailer for the game below:
It is still early in development for the game. Jagex said it thought hard about showing the project now, because it is still at the start of a long build and still a few years from release. Platforms, monetization, and the actual combat loop are not locked. What played at the show was a CGI teaser, not a gameplay demo: a town in a green valley, floating islands, a dragon rider under attack from a three-headed dragon. More detail is promised next year. The early reveal is so players can send ideas and test things while the game is still being drawn, the same co-development pitch the studio uses for the live games.
The setting is the part that is decided. Sixth Age Gielinor. It opens in Ashenfall, the landmass northeast of the main continent that Dragonwilds already explored. The new game takes place years after that survival game, and years after the Dragon Queen Kuldra was destroyed. Ashenfall has had time to change. Jagex wants the map to grow past that starting land into places players already know and into places they do not. Ashenfall is the door, not the whole world.
The principles they are trying to focus on are Integrity, Permanent progression and Community-driven development. Jagex said it wants the tech lessons from Dragonwilds and the co-development lessons from RuneScape and Old School applied to something new. Permanent progression is the line that separates this pitch from a seasonal reset MMO. Gear and levels that stick are the contract Old School still runs on. Putting that in the first paragraph of a new Unreal project is Jagex telling that crowd the new engine is not a wipe of the old rules.
RuneScape is 25 years old. It started as a small browser world and a small team, and the player base did as much to shape it as the studio did. Old School is the 2007 backup that became the bigger game. The modern client kept moving. Dragonwilds took the setting into a survival crafting game. RS4 is the fourth box in that set, a new MMO rather than a mode inside one of the others.
Are you more interested in RS4 as a new Gielinor, or are you staying on Old School until there is actual gameplay? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.