RuneFest, the annual celebration for everything to do with RuneScape, is taking place this weekend in Birmingham, United Kingdom. The biggest announcement of the event is that Jagex is working on RuneScape 4, another MMO set in the RuneScape universe.
In a pre-RuneFest virtual briefing attended by Polygon, RuneScape: Dragonwilds executive producer Jesse America explained that RuneScape 4 was originally supposed to be an expansion for Dragonwilds called Shadows of Ashenfall. Players said they wanted more social mechanics in the survival game, so the team started work on making Dragonwilds more closely resemble a “typical Jagex game” with features including persistent servers, high player counts, and player-to-player trading.
“The team embraced that challenge with a lot of creative ambition and enthusiasm,” America said. “When we saw the very first prototypes and read the designs that they’d brought together, we realized that the game direction of all of this pointed at a completely different scope. We came to the realization that it essentially would be an MMO, and that it deserved its own game.”
America also revealed that RuneScape 4 is being developed using Unreal Engine. The trailer shows that the MMO will focus on dragons, which players can both fight and ride. While Jagex is split into a few different teams, America explained that “this is something that the entire studio will work on, all of us together.”
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Jagex has yet to confirm the future of its other games: RuneScape (also known as RuneScape 3), Old School RuneScape, and RuneScape: Dragonwilds. America described RuneScape 4 as the studio’s fourth pillar, which implies the other three will continue to be supported. Still, it’s easy to imagine a future where RuneScape 3 sheds most of its player base as they move over to the sequel.
RuneScape 4 is in very early development, so there’s no information regarding its release window, platforms, or gameplay.