All Posts by kesleri

 http://www.developmag.com/news/30000/Runescape-developer-Jagex-working-on-new-MMO

Runescape developer Jagex working on new MMO

Michael French Today, 1:08pm

But CEO says that infrastructure, not IP, is secret to the firm’s success

Runescape developer Jagex has revealed it is working on a brand new MMO due for launch in March 2009.

The unnamed MMO was revealed by CEO Geoff Iddison during a panel discussion at today’s GameHorizon Conference in Newcastle.

Dubbed ‘Nextscape’ by Iddison, the game was said to incorporate – as Runescape does – a variety of business and subscription models to drive consumer engagement, he said.

However, although the company has run its successful Runescape MMO since 2001 – offering biweekly content updates - with the new property due to join it early next year, Iddison said that Jagex’ real value isn’t its IP, but its infrastructure.

“We’ve got an infrastructure behind Runescape which is the real silver of the Jagex, the value of the company,” said Iddison. “It’s not the game, the game is going to come and go,” he said.

“The infrastructure is the thing that can scale. Runescape has 10 years of good growth – but the infrastructure is infinitely scalable,” he added of Jagex’ vast operation of servers and online support teams.

Well reading trough Darkfall's features makes you dream and wonder how wonderfull it would be if it came true, but you soon wake up and realize you ware only dreaming.

The nice features they keep mumbling about are addicting when you start to read them, and you stick to them with the hope of one day they would eventually become true.

Sadly this game's story is more of Fairy tale then one of a MMO.

Adding multiple servers on Eve Online will break the "One world" feature of their game. I doubt they will split the population anytime soon.

I tried this game and only managed to play 30 minutes untill i totally got bored

They even removed the option to send in supports...

There was a funny comic where a monkey had the option of clicking either  "Mute" or "Ban" when answering a support query. It was really funny...

Imho Jagex Customer Support team is like a large pack of monkeys who hunt for flees .

I doubt that a game that reached ~ 1 Million units in sales will ever go F2p, they will most likely shut it down before they would go F2p...

As i said before, you can't compare a browser based game with a game that has a client.

Tell me another game with better graphics that is ran trough a browser - That's how you should compare RuneScape to other games. And since there are no other similar games that can be ran trough a browser you can't compare it to anything else.

1st of all the people who try to discredit RuneScape for the graphics do not take in to consideration that the game is FULL JAVA, i mean no other developer managed to create such a complex artwork and complex system, and now they are adding even more graphics.

The graphical update is very well welcomed in our world, because a lot of time passed since they upgraded to RuneScape 2. Java doesn't use your Video card, it just relies on the power of your processor, that's why when you look at the "Task Manager" window when playing RuneScape you will see that it uses a lot of CPU power (that's one more reason why they didn't upgrade the graphical interface for so long by adding more textures, because they also needed to wait so the PC users could upgrade their PC's with a higher processing power), if not all of it. I don't know if it still uses a lot, since the last time i played RuneScape was about 1-2 years ago.

Anyhow i admire Jagex in their inovative way of taking small steps at a time developing the single 3D graphical MMO out there that can be ran trough a browser window.

I think the new PayPal CEO they hired last year has something to do with all the activity Jagex is showing ... Something it never did before.

I think it is time to summon the Lineage 2 card

I don't know who coppied what from whom but i know Lineage was there before WoW and it has a lot of features WoW has.

But as time passed WoW could afford to fix up their game and even add content to such a degree it surpassed Lineage 2.

So WoW started off by copying the same Korean MMO model, adapted to western markets and a flawless publishing company which is renouned for it's releases. The massive amounts of people flocking and squeezing in to WoW brought enuogh resources to allow the developers to quickly hire more personal to fix the bugs in a very short amount of time and add more content on a regular basis.

Now Lineage 2 one of the 1st MMO's which had the common Korean MMO system and which has been copied and pasted on every Asian release , is copying stuff from WoW because they are lacking ideas.

 For instance the last Lineage 2 expansion, if you look at the Radar you won't tell a diffrence between WoW and L2, i currently don't play any of the 2 games but it just shows how far WoW went and how much it caught up with other MMO's since it's release.

Jagex could make some decent money by firing all the Customer Suport staff. They could of course keep a few people around there for the paying customers but having Customer Suport for a free service is a totally waste of resources. Besides that the Free support of the RuneScape game is null, it's like talking to an Irc Bot that spams the same message a trillion times.

I think RuneScape has become a nursery for the pre-teen and teen audience of MMO's .

When they quit RuneScape either they move to another MMO with better graphics and etc. or either they realise that MMO's are the games which waste most of your  time and quit playing any kind of MMO's

Yea i was amazed myself :P , the link sent me to the vacancies section on Jagex.com on the Head of Runescape post.

Just saw an advert on www.mmorpg.com with "Jagex hiring Head of Runescape" ...

This is really amazing as they've never did this before

Jagex, if you are reading this please give me another chance at Runescape, you've banned me long ago :)

Well i take a look from time to time on the website and look for the job positions they are offering, the truth is this position is quite new. Either the former Head of Runescape quit or they never had such a position before.

The number on online players on Runescape.com you can only say that the population of active players went down with about 20-30% .

Anyhow based on Alexa Trafic in the past 3 months they only lost about 5% of the visitors which means some people still have hope for the game and many of us are still looking forward for things to change in a good way for us to come back.

Jagex is upgrading their Graphics so they can attract the younger crowds, they still didn't understand that we loved RuneScape because of the concept not because of the lawzy graphics.

And now that they decide to develop MechScape i hope it won't copy paste RuneScape's content, ideas or the Grand Exchange. ...