The world mourns its loss of collective productivity today as Jagex has officially launched Old School RuneScape out of beta in its mobile form. The classic MMORPG hits Android and iOS devices following months of beta testing, with over one million users having pre-registered. Users are able to log in with their existing PC accounts and continue on either platform continuing to level up their characters.
Jagex CEO Phil Mansell stated:
“Today’s launch of Old School RuneScape on mobile leads the charge as we bring two of the world’s most popular MMORPGs to the world’s most popular gaming devices. We believe in taking our living games to wherever our players want them and, with the mobile editions offering full and seamless cross-platform play with PC, players can now continue their adventures on either platform and on the move. The arrival of Old School RuneScape on mobile, and our ongoing work to also bring RuneScape to mobile, is testament to our investment in the continued growth for both titles and building our vision for living games.”
This weekend marked Runefest, the annual festival of all things RuneScape. While discussing all things past, present, and future, Jagex announced that Old School RuneScape will receive a new skill in the form of warding.
Warding aims to fill a gap in RuneScape’s crafting. As the developer blog notes, while melee and range users have skills to create their armor, magic users aren’t so blessed. Mage equipment currently is either dropped from monsters or bought from players who in turn received them from monsters. The warding skill will aim to give mages their own alternative.
In order to craft armors, players will need to gather materials from skills such as farming, hunter, or killing certain monsters, using new crops and beasts that will be added alongside the skill. Rune energy will need to be drawn from the various monoliths scattered throughout the world. Soapstones will be used to draw runic wards on the ground, and then the materials are used to create the desired armor.
Warding will release at some point in the future. This marks the first skill available in Old School that is not in standard RuneScape.
Jagex this week announced that an employee has been fired and police have been brought in regarding “gross misuse of moderator privileges.” While the official post doesn’t go into much detail, reports from the Reddit forum indicate that the employee is Jed Sanderson, aka Mod Jed, and involves the now ex-staffer used his moderator status to compromise RuneScape accounts to steal excessive amounts of gold, presumably to either trade to other players or to sell on the open market for real money.
This isn’t the first time Mod Jed has been suspected of malfeasance. As a Jagex employee, Jed has been known to be a member of the Reign of Terror clan, a group notorious for using denial of service attacks against opponents in Jagex’s $10,000 Deadman Mode Tournaments. Jed was investigated last year in regards to these allegations and cleared of all suspicion.
“Following our investigation, we were able to resolve the issue before any significant impact was made to the wider game, or economy. We have also taken steps to return items and GP to any affected accounts. Whilst we generally do not return items or gold, we feel that given this unusual situation, we wanted to ensure no players lost out to the rogue actions of a member of staff. We are actively working with the Police regarding the incident, but given this an ongoing legal matter we are unable to provide further details.”
Given the enormous real world value of the gold stolen (estimates in the tens of thousands), Jagex has noted that it is actively assisting the police in investigating the matter. Players affected by Jed’s actions have reported receiving the items back that were stolen from them, or as close as possible as Jagex can ascertain the damages.
Jagex today announced the official launch of Old School RuneScape mobile will take place on October 30. The launch will bring the popular MMO to both Android and iOS devices, allowing gamers to play cross-platform with players on PC, and will be playable with existing accounts/characters.
Conor Crowley, director of game development at Jagex, stated:
“2018 has been a year of significant milestones for Old School RuneScape on mobile, from the first closed betas at the start of the year, to the successful Members Only Beta and recent Canadian and Nordic soft launches over the summer, but none of them have been as highly anticipated as this. We are incredibly proud to confirm that Old School RuneScape on mobile is now just a matter of weeks from a full launch; we know our players – both existing and returning – have long wanted to play the game they love while away from their PCs. The countdown to 30thOctober is underway!”
The app is currently available to pre-register for on the iOS and App Store. Old School RuneScape had previously soft launched in Canada, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
If Jagex isn’t careful, they’re going to have players throwing tea into Port Sarim.
The only guarantees of life in RuneScape are death and, apparently now taxes. This week’s update to Old School sees the implementation of several changes to combat real money trading, and the main headliner is the inclusion of taxes on duels. Winners will be charged a percentage depending on the size of the stake, ranging from .25% to 1% (see illustration above), and cash bets will need to be within ten thousand gold in value.
In addition, it will no longer be possible to stake items. Unlike most of Old School RuneScape’s changes, this update was not polled to players for approval.
The earliest commercial version of RuneScape has shut down today after seventeen years of service. RuneScape Classic, previously known just as RuneScape, launched in 2001 with a handful of servers and an even smaller handful of developers, going on to amass far more interest than creator Andrew Gower could have ever anticipated. In 2004, RuneScape launched a major update to its engine, introducing RuneScape 2 and relegating the initial version to the now unsupported “Classic” title.
Jagex has kept the Old School servers online for fourteen years despite not officially supporting the product, and eventually shut down the ability for new accounts to even access the servers due to the sheer number of bot accounts and Jagex’s inability to provide updates due to the game no longer being supported. Account registration was periodically opened up over the years, and in May it was finally announced that the servers would be brought down for good due to accumulating bugs and Jagex’s inability to keep the game properly supported.
Players gathered to watch the servers come down for one last time today, with the event permanently etched in digital stone via the Twitch link below.
I went into Old School RuneScape’s mobile beta with two questions in mind: How well this game would run on my Google Pixel (original, non XL), how well it would perform in my office which is a lead-wrapped dead zone, and how many seconds it would take my Pixel to be drained of its battery. Sorry, make that three questions.
The answer is surprisingly well on all accounts. I didn’t have much reason to doubt that my Pixel could run RuneScape at a good framerate, although I will never underestimate the ability for phones to mess up running the kind of software that computers of 10 years ago could pull off without a hitch. The game equally performed well in an area where Youtube videos regularly have trouble loading (thank you Cricket), and ultimately it drained by battery only slightly less quickly than I assumed it would.
Mobile Old School answers the demand for when you still want to play RuneScape uninhibited by having to go to work, school, or other obligations. It’s honestly the perfect game to port over to mobile, considering 80% of the leveling in the game is best played while having something else do to and not looking at the screen. Jagex designed the user interface from the ground up, and it makes intuitive use of the touch screen controls in order to present a game that is not horrible to play over a long period of time.
I was afraid that the awkward finger tapping controls of your average phone game would compound the already slightly awkward controls of RuneScape, but Jagex has managed to pull off a rather smooth system. Many actions in the game are notably slower than their PC counterpart, especially anything that would require you to right click (hold your finger on screen), but OSRS compensates making it rather easy to right click NPCs even when they are moving. Clicking anything while your character is running can be a chore, but then again I find it equally a chore to do so in the full version.
The only parts of Old School RuneScape Mobile that I didn’t like were factors that ultimately have nothing to do with the phone itself. Tapping the screen with my fingers is responsive, but everyone’s fingers become fat sausage links when you’re dealing with a game that tiles its buttons on what feels like a 10×10 pixel radius. There’s also the matter of battery, which RuneScape just ate a percentage of in the time it took me to write this previous sentence. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the fact that cell phone batteries these days just suck, and if you’re the kind of person that wants to game on their phone or do anything more taxing than idling, and doesn’t carry around a battery pack, I unfortunately can’t help you.
Thankfully Old School RuneScape Mobile uses the same accounts, same characters, same servers as its desktop version, so when you get home and you’re ready to play on the big screen, you’ll be able to transition without a hitch.
Old School RuneScape is reeling from a massive bug that resulted in the servers being taken offline for a few hours and, in an unprecedented move, Jagex rolling characters back to pre-update. An unfortunate oversight in this week’s update allowed players to turn various items into fat stacks of cash upon death. As you can imagine, Jagex didn’t want players generating coins in the billions out of thin air and out of concern for the integrity of the game, they delivered a quick Vulcan nerve pinch and brought the servers offline so the bug could be fixed.
When converting a stack of items into a stack of coins, it’s appropriate to check that the calculation doesn’t overflow the max integer limit of the game’s language (2.1 billion). Unfortunately, the logic used for this calculation was incorrect, and when executed on stacks of other items (not the pouch itself) the result was to convert the stack to 2.1b coins. Regrettably, although the pouches were found to be acting correctly during testing, the flaw affecting other items was not spotted as it was not expected to have changed.
Unfortunately MMO Fallout investigations have discovered evidence that Jagex didn’t so much reverse the update as much as it did transport all of us to a timeline where the bug never happened, and all of us happened to conveniently disappear around the same time. Keep an eye out for doppelgangers.
Old School RuneScape has officially hit open beta on Android devices and every member will get their chance to play. Following a successful first day, Jagex today has allowed an additional 250,000 members in with increasing access over the next couple of weeks. With the full launch later this year, including release on iOS devices, players will be able to get their grind on no matter their location (so long as they have cell service).
Also important to note is that the beta is not a segregated part of the game, and players will be on the live servers with their live characters.
As MMO Fallout’s official only staffer and the internet’s number one games journalist, I’ve seen a lot. Betas, alphas, pre-alphas, day one patches, you name it. Last year I reviewed to rather poor reception the pre-release build of Shadow of War, and while the preview was condemned as “tone deaf” and “stupid,” I came out of that experience pretty sure that I would never encounter an odder product. And then this week I was sent what I can only assume is a beta build of Old School RuneScape Mobile.
Now I’ve been in some strange betas before, including one for [redacted] where the developer asked us to download a Torrent and then had the nerve to ask us to seed it for each other, but this takes the cake. My beta instructions came in a fancy little box which, upon opening, revealed its contents to be mostly powders and some strange doohickeys: stars and little bits of paper that say “RuneScape Old School” on them. The beta version I was sent is code named “Vanilla Cupcakes,” suggesting that someone at Jagex is taking cues from the Android style of naming updates.
A little bit odd, but I had a job to do.
Now I don’t know much about technology, being a tech journalist, but I do know that one of the basic tenets of mobile is that apps are supposed to be simple to start. Take the photo app I’m using to capture these pictures, I click once to start the app, then click once for every photo I want to take. The setup for this beta has eight steps, the first of which includes preheating the oven and creaming some butter.
Clearly this must be some kind of trial, after all RuneScape is about overcoming bigger foes and if I can’t 1v1 some butter, then what kind of scrub would I be to take on the full beta? This is like one of those Man Crates, that novelty item where the contents are delivered in an actual crate that you have to open with a crowbar. The first half of the tutorial asks you to solo pk some butter, followed by cupcake mix and two eggs at the same time. I’ve been playing RuneScape long enough to remember the Recipe for Disaster quest so none of this really blew my mind. I had to provide my own eggs though, I hope this is going to be fixed for the full release.
All this butter drops on death is more butter.
The OldSchool RuneScape beta comes in the form of six consumables, not unlike how Nintendo handles demos on its systems, and they appear to expire after a couple of days once loaded and you pretty much have to prepare them all at the same time, so I’ll have to make good use of each one. I went onto the RuneScape Reddit to see if anyone else was complaining about this style of beta build but couldn’t find a single person talking about it. I guess this business model is just accepted now.
And then I saw this note and everything became clear.
Silly me, this isn’t the beta itself, it’s a quest that will inevitably lead me to the beta. Just to show there was no hard feelings, I took the six “mobile devices” I was sent and decided to toss them in the oven to think about what they’d done. A good seventeen to nineteen minutes at 325 degrees will teach a valuable lesson about coming into my kitchen and bamboozling me to get my eggs. Boy does it smell like vanilla bean in my house.
While I let those hotheads cool off, a statement which I’m pretty sure doesn’t qualify as a pun, I went back to the task list. Next step was to cream more butter and beat it with the icing mix. You know it’s hard to fully comprehend just how much butter is in 200g of butter until you see it sitting out on a measuring plate. Hint: It’s a lot of butter.
As I creamed the second batch of butter, I got to thinking about the possibility that I’ve been doing this whole thing wrong and that the list of instructions may have just been a metaphor not meant to be taken literally, like I’d come to find that it’s not the cupcakes on the plate that matter but the cupcakes in my heart. Perhaps this was a sort of strange live event and, upon my completion, my door would be kicked in by Mod Ash who would grab the cupcakes and make a run for it. Maybe, just maybe, I was the target of the world’s most genius, not to mention expensive, plot to trick someone into baking snacks for some hungry, tired developers. Ocean’s Eleven, but British and with only six people.
The last two steps are to cover the cupcakes with icing and then decorate with the stars and those bits of paper with the RuneScape logo on them. The instructions call them “wafers” which apparently mean edible paper, as if implying that the stuff you use to print documents isn’t edible, but I digress. I’ve decided to dub these “ScapeCakes,” because it flows off the tongue easier than “CupScapes.” It might still need some workshopping, I tried to float the idea past my roommate but she was wholly uninterested in the ordeal and seemed more content with napping in front of the heat of the oven.
In conclusion, I’m 35% certain that I was never actually playing any OldSchool RuneScape during this whole process, but I learned some important life lessons along the way like how there’s really never a bad time for cupcakes, I should probably take a class in cupcake decoration, and that this crew of Jagex staffers will get their mitts on my cupcakes when they pull them out of my cold, cupcakeless hands. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t qualify as a preview since I didn’t play anything, but I’m frankly too full of cupcake to remember what the original intention of this article was.
Verdict/Disclosure: 4.5/5 – Jagex has discovered an innovative and delicious new way to deliver beta content, albeit this version isn’t as mobile as a game played straight from the phone. Thank you to Jagex for sending the cupcakes, this is not a sponsored post but more of an example on why I’m not allowed nice things. I don’t actually have access to the Old School Mobile Beta.
MMO Fallout 