Play your own way gets a whole new meaning soon. During the latest RuneFest event, Jagex announced that Old School Runescape community servers are coming. Revealed on stage as Project Zanaris, the upcoming server initiative provides communities and players an unparalleled chance to carve out a niche of their very own, build a home for their community, and configure a wild array of options to make an experience that is all your own. To get a bit more detail on how this will play out, we sat down for a chat with Jagex’s Thomas Burke ( Mod Tomb), Senior Technical Designer, and Tom Jackson ( Mod TJ ), Senior Product Manager.
MMORPG: Thanks for your time today. We're here to talk about Project Zanaris and the community servers for Old School Runescape. How did the idea come about?
Tom Jackson: The idea has been floating around for a while. Part of the inspiration for it was seeing players creating their own challenges and modes, like Ironman mode, which we then added to the main game. Some YouTubers and Twitch streamers have even put self-imposed restrictions on themselves, whether that’s with a Runelite Plugin or their own actions.
We asked how we could make this better. We wanted to make it easier for players to create and engage with custom content. We didn’t want to put that in the main game, so we included questions about it in our annual survey, and the response was positive.
From there, we managed to talk to some players. We tried to speak to about an equal split of people who were pretty hyped from the survey response and people who were not so sure.
We interviewed all of them. We set up these interviews to be an hour long. They ended up two hours, three hours even. The players loved talking to us about this, and every single person we spoke to ended up leaving more positive than when they went in. In the end, the feedback was overwhelmingly supportive, which led to the development of the project.
MMORPG: How far along is the development of these community servers?
Tom Jackson: We're currently in pre-alpha.
Thomas Burke: We're hoping to get it into players' hands for testing very soon. We'll be running playtests over the coming months, and we encourage everyone to sign up through our blog, Discord, or website.
MMORPG: How do you plan to roll out testing for community servers?
Tom Jackson: We have a few approaches. We have a QA team for testing as you might imagine it, and we're also using automation for stress testing. We can use that to test what happens if 2000 people join up once and once or 2000 people quit at once, for example.
We’ll also get to test how players interact with it. Ideally, you’ll test everything, right down to asking if going through the web portal is a good flow? When you’ve been living in the product for two years it's just natural that it should be where it is. We'll also test The tooling that people can use to build experiences like Rat King themselves, meaning we will ideally try to test as much as possible.
We'll gradually scale up the number of players in tests over time, starting with smaller groups and eventually doing larger tests.
MMORPG: Will the testing be random, or will it focus on specific communities?
Tom Jackson: We'll try to be sensible about it. For example, if we're testing a PvP experience, we'll focus on PvP players. We'll also be very public with our roadmap when we’re ready.
Thomas Burke: I think for some of the playtests, we might focus on if we kind of trying to find out if certain things are fun if certain things are working, certain groups of things, and how groups of parameters are being interacted with.
MMORPG: Are you expecting to see emergent gameplay from these servers?
Thomas Burke: Absolutely. We're excited to see what players come up with. We expect to see a lot of creative and unexpected gameplay.
There was a really lovely moment when we were planning out kind of what exemplars to bring in at first. We had kind of like Rat King and Fight Club and we were brainstorming what to go with. We had this list of just kind of 400 parameters and there were about 11 of us in the room kind of brainstorming what can we think of, and there was this moment where the parameters all became more than the sum of their parts. We might have had 11 people in a room but soon it’ll be the whole community, and we're going to see everyone kind of going every direction we can possibly think of.
MMORPG: How expansive will the content be on these servers and how recent will the world be.
Thomas Burke:From an update perspective, it will be operating at content delay from Old School Runescape. So if you want to play, for example, sailing on launch and then Zanaris won't see sailing for quite a long time, for like several months.
Players will have access to the whole world, with as much granular control as we can to allow them to create as many experiences as we can. If they want to use the whole world they can. If they want to lock their world to 1 certain square somewhere and kind of play one character, they can do that. With the tooling available they can customize it as they like.
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MMORPG: What will the tooling look like for players to create custom content?
Thomas Burke: We have a browser-based portal where players can toggle settings and create worlds. We'll start with basic UI where you'll be able to search for a world. When you're creating worlds you have this kind of gigantic list of rules where you'll be able to basically toggle on and off certain things. Once we push that to players, we will expand and improve it based on player feedback.
Tom Jackson: The intention is to have something accessible for players. We’re not going to simply have a text file everybody needs to code. Where you’ll need names, expect a text box, and where a number is needed we’ll have a slider or a drop-down. We tried to make the way players interface with server options super simple so that as many people as possible can get involved because the more people the better ideas.
We’re hoping that, for those people who do have the expertise, we do want to go deeper and further because we're going to provide a lot of parameters, and like the number of permutations and combinations and combinations will be phenomenal. Not everything can be done through parameters, and for those who have the skill we want to enable them to jump into the technical code as well. I can't tell you exactly what it will look like right now, but the ambition is there.
MMORPG: Will players be able to share their servers’ templates as well as simply allowing people into them?
Tom Jackson: 100%. So, at the moment using our demo you’d get you go through and there's a Deadman option. The idea is when it's a fully fleshed-out product, you would click the Deadman template, and all those options would switch on. The goal is if players want to create these and share them, they'll be able to do that. Then, if you don't want to look through 2000 or however many parameters, we end up having, you can just, in one click, have a mode and boot up your server.
Of course, players will be able to share and control access to their own server thanks to links that you’ll be able to share, as well as server passwords, and visibility controls when listing these.
MMORPG: How will moderation work on these servers?
Tom Jackson: The same rules as the main game will apply. On top of that, we'll kind of have new reporting avenues. For example, if you were aware of a world breaching our terms of service, you could report the world, and we'll deal with it. That's very different, where reporting in the past has been on a player basis rather than a world basis. Additionally, in terms of moderating player behavior on your own world, you'll be able to ban people too. If somebody is cheating, trolling, or doing something against the general terms of service, you'll be able to ban them.
MMORPG: Will players have access to servers in their regions?
Tom Jackson: Yes, we plan to support all current regions and potentially, with the tech we’ve developed for this, add more in the future.
MMORPG: Will the technological improvements from this project benefit the main game?
Thomas Burke: Yes, many improvements will feed back into the core product, enhancing both the main game and the community servers. A really nice example. We have a content side is region locking. We kind of we took the region locking in the game by like geographical area and actually tweaked that on the back end so you can effectively look at the world map and regions as this arbitrary square you've decided. And we kind of rewrote that on the back end and then just immediately gave it back to Old School.
MMORPG: With the main game benefitting from Zanaris tech updates, will players get the same tech here as the main game. I’m mainly thinking of mods and plug-ins?
Tom Jackson: Our goal is to have plugins working in Zanaris. The exact technical method, and how that works, we don't know yet. I can't firmly tell you how the experience is going to be, but we want customization in all shapes and forms in Zanaris.
MMORPG: What are you most excited to see from this project?
Tom Jackson: I'm excited to see players enjoying it. Secondly, I can’t imagine what the outcome will be. What emergent gameplay will occur or imagining the next big game genre coming out of this. Remember that MOBAS exploded in popularity thanks to player mods.
Thomas Burke: I'm looking forward to seeing community-driven worlds and the unique experiences players will create. For me I love the idea of, back in the day, playing like the first World of Warcraft expansion and watching the new areas unlock and the whole community moving into them as one. That sense of togetherness, whether it be exploring an area or achieving a goal is really exciting.
MMORPG: Thank you both for your time and insights. This has been a fascinating discussion.
Project Zanaris is an eagerly-anticipated community program that lets players tweak and modify their own worlds, set their own rules, and create entirely new ways to play and experience Old School RuneScape. Playtest sign-ups are now open. Players can sign up to register their interest in participating via the official Discord or on the website, with the first wave of closed tests looking to start in April.
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