Would you pay $15 a month for access to classic RuneScape? No not that far back, we’re talking 2007’ish, before the original trade restrictions were put into place. Well do I have news for you. In a blog post on the RuneScape official website today, Jagex has outlined plans to release a snapshot version of RuneScape dated back to August 2007. Before, well, a whole lot. Just imagine, a RuneScape where Jagex never restricted trade (or nuked bots), where Dungeoneering doesn’t exist, no God Wars or top tier equipment, no grand exchange (auction house), etc. No evolution of combat and no microtransactions.
Want to go back to the nostalgic days? All you have to do is vote.
So, just like the poll for the return of the Wildy & Free Trade, which saw a jaw dropping 1.4 million votes , we will be running a similar poll and letting you – our valued members – decide the fate of ‘Old School RuneScape’, given that you directly fund the game’s ongoing development and supporting services. This decision – along with the level of service, investment and potentially any additional fee for the service – is truly up to you to determine.
The blog post highlights several stages of development depending on how many votes the poll gets, from the bare minimum (50 thousand) where the service comes back as a $15 a month subscription (yikes) and only receives critical maintenance.
- At 250,000 votes, the membership fee comes down to $5 and will support a small development team to fix bugs and (hopefully) implement the modern anti-bot technology as best they can.
- At half a million votes, the game will have a full development team and no additional costs, as well as some content development and anti-bot technology.
- At 750,000 votes, the game will have all of the above plus the free portion available to non-members.
These servers, at any of the above levels, would be the exact version from back in 2007 and would maintain the ‘old school’ vibe and rules. The old graphics, hiscores, log-in, are all part of the same archived build and would be retained. We wouldn’t ever add any micropayment updates.
The poll will be live on February 15th and run for two weeks. Your options are yes, or don’t vote.
(Source: RuneScape Website)
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