Recently Jagex announced the Citadels Expansion for the venerable and ever-popular RuneScape.  Aimed squarely at giving Clans a place to live, play, and design their own content (you read that right), Citadels is looking like a massive addition to an already epic game.  Managing Editor Bill Murphy got the chance to sit down with three of the game's designers and talk about the expansion.

Clans have always been a big part of the RuneScape player community, but one we hadn’t until recently provided much support for in terms of content.  Clans are great for an MMO, players in a community that they have bonded with will want to stay in that community, even if they tire of the scripted content. An MMO with a thriving clan community is a healthy MMO.

 

So in April we released the systems to allow clans as an in-game concept, and Citadels is using that infrastructure to give clans some amazing content.   We can now provide clans with a whole load of things that were impossible before – A home of their own, in game goals and rewards, ways of displaying clan status and identity.  The various aspects of the Citadel will give the Clan community reasons to recruit and organise, and reward them for their efforts. So the aim is to give a boost to the clan community, and to give fun reasons for more players to get involved in social play.

Read the rest of Bill's interview with Jagex: Clan Citadels Expansion Q&A

you know I'm not really a fan of Jagex, or runescape, but i hand it to them. This sounds like an amazing iddea and if they only fixed there combat i might actually play it.

I would definitly hope more games adopt this style of play -- "player generated content" ftw!

I played Runescape for a long time since 2006 and this game has came along way in its time and it keeps improving and getting better and better with more and more content. There is enough content in this game to keep you here for years. I don't play this game no more raelly but i do love how jagex does updates and expasions very very frequtly 

That sounds amazing!

Some significant issues here:

1. Each clan has a single "owner", so basically, this content is his/hers. Others can/may contribute, but ultimately the end product is going to "belong" and be controlled by a single player. The potential for serious problems with that are quite obvious. Clans have enough interpersonal control/drama issues, this is going to set them off the charts.

2. If someone is not in a clan, this update does squat for them. This is going to Jagex's major update for 2011, and it's not going to include everybody.

3. There are no in-game rewards for efforts made either in the skilling or battlefied sides of this, other than bragging rights for someone else (the clan owner). While this update may be well-utilized early on as it's new, RuneScape is a game for compulsives, and the lack of rewards, along with reduced experience rates, for participating will result in this being a largely unused addition to the game, like so much of what they've added the past few years.

4. This is obviously an instanced, out-of-world update. It removes people from the main, social part of the game and balkanizes them even more. For some this is a plus, but reducing socialization options for players is not really a good thing in an MMO.

The only positive is that I think the Citadels will be under-utilized due to their uselessness in the greater scheme of RuneScape's inherent grindfest, so #4 likely won't be a real problem.

 Been quite some times since i played this game & for all the shit i give it; they do a good job with the game.