Before I get to the fun comments: the title here is misleading - - I thought it meant Jagex, the company Andrew founded, but sold 15 or so years ago. It's really neat to see Andrew Gower put out a...
Before I get to the fun comments: the title here is misleading - - I thought it meant Jagex, the company Andrew founded, but sold 15 or so years ago.
It's really neat to see Andrew Gower put out a new game. A new game like Runescape, I don't thinking could start today - - it's unique to the time period where folks mostly socialized online with a strangers instead of people they knew in person, and ways to coordinate were a lot more rudimentary (forums and maybe something like MSN or AIM). The hours of chopping a virtual tree moved much faster, while you chatted with your Runescape clan chat =)
Back then, people had much, much lower expectations for graphics (because their computers couldn't run anything else), so developers could put out much larger amounts of story content that was low cost. Runescape's defining trait up through the early '10s was the immense amount of story content it had, along with its British sense of humor. The story content (at least for me) provided an incentive to do the incredible amount of grinding the game requires, with quest level requirements being very common.
But yeah, it's much less acceptable to make a game that looks kind of shitty now, and people aren't quite as tolerating of tens of thousands of hours of grinding en-masse for a new property anymore.
So I'm definitely wondering how Gower's new game will balance the needs of modern audiences with being an MMO, and I'm definitely interested in checking it out.
As an old school MMORPG player (Island/Legends of Kesmai and Ultima Online mostly, a small amount of Runescape and Drakkar), this looks really interesting to me. I'm a bit worried about "free to...
As an old school MMORPG player (Island/Legends of Kesmai and Ultima Online mostly, a small amount of Runescape and Drakkar), this looks really interesting to me. I'm a bit worried about "free to play MMORPG". Depending on how they monetize this will make it or break it for me.
I'm just glad it doesn't look like one of those MMORPGs that promise the world and fail to deliver. It looks like something they can realistically deliver and that's perfectly fine.
I'm just glad it doesn't look like one of those MMORPGs that promise the world and fail to deliver. It looks like something they can realistically deliver and that's perfectly fine.
Before I get to the fun comments: the title here is misleading - - I thought it meant Jagex, the company Andrew founded, but sold 15 or so years ago.
It's really neat to see Andrew Gower put out a new game. A new game like Runescape, I don't thinking could start today - - it's unique to the time period where folks mostly socialized online with a strangers instead of people they knew in person, and ways to coordinate were a lot more rudimentary (forums and maybe something like MSN or AIM). The hours of chopping a virtual tree moved much faster, while you chatted with your Runescape clan chat =)
Back then, people had much, much lower expectations for graphics (because their computers couldn't run anything else), so developers could put out much larger amounts of story content that was low cost. Runescape's defining trait up through the early '10s was the immense amount of story content it had, along with its British sense of humor. The story content (at least for me) provided an incentive to do the incredible amount of grinding the game requires, with quest level requirements being very common.
But yeah, it's much less acceptable to make a game that looks kind of shitty now, and people aren't quite as tolerating of tens of thousands of hours of grinding en-masse for a new property anymore.
So I'm definitely wondering how Gower's new game will balance the needs of modern audiences with being an MMO, and I'm definitely interested in checking it out.
As an old school MMORPG player (Island/Legends of Kesmai and Ultima Online mostly, a small amount of Runescape and Drakkar), this looks really interesting to me. I'm a bit worried about "free to play MMORPG". Depending on how they monetize this will make it or break it for me.
I'm just glad it doesn't look like one of those MMORPGs that promise the world and fail to deliver. It looks like something they can realistically deliver and that's perfectly fine.