Runescape – Page 29 – MMO Fallout

RuneScape Unveils Free To Play Extravaganza

If you’re a non-paying player in RuneScape, odds are you hear the words “members only” quite often. It isn’t so often that free players receive new content outside of holiday events, and even those have become rather restricted in the past. This month, however, Jagex has unveiled its Free to Play Extravaganza. Starting today, you don’t need to subscribe in order to access a wealth of content, including bosses and combat options.

For starters, the King Black Dragon and Giant Mole can be killed by free players to sell their sweet, sweet loot for extra gold. Keep in mind, however, you can look but you can’t touch. While free players can obtain members loot, their only use is essentially to sell to members who can bury/utilize them.

Free players can now take on the mighty King Black Dragon by getting to his lair via the Wilderness. Only the bravest and best-equipped need apply. The drops, dragon bones and black dragonhides, are now sellable by free players, but can only be buried and processed by members. Note that the Edgeville artefact cannot be used in free-to-play worlds to access to this boss.

Access to dual-wielding, previously a members-only feature, is now freely available as well alongside a number of combat abilities. Dungeoneering has also had an update, increasing the level of gear that players have access to both inside and out of the dungeon.

You can check out the entire update below.

(Source: RuneScape)

Beta Perspective: RuneScape NXT Impressions

I consider myself something of a fan of RuneScape, having played it continuously since 2004 and racked up more than four thousand hours of gameplay, and I’m sure few would disagree with that statement. That being said, I’ve been heavily critical of Jagex as a company and certain facets of RuneScape as a game, and nothing has caught my attention quite like RuneScape’s bloated, near-useless client.

It’s no secret that RuneScape has become massive over the years, straining the client to the point where it’s basically held together with gum and tape. The old client’s days were numbered when the big browsers announced that the end of days were coming for Java support, due to its instability and general habit of opening massive security holes in people’s computers. For RuneScape, Jagex made the attempt to jump ship a couple of years ago with an HTML client, a venture that has so far come up empty thanks in part to the platform itself not coming along as quickly as expected.

Jagex could have launched NXT with none of the visual upgrades and this would instantly be my update of the year. The current RuneScape client is incredibly janky, depending where I am in the world and what I’m doing it will either run smoothly or horribly and turning the graphics down does absolutely nothing to fix this. In the NXT client, I am able to set everything to its maximum value and still manage to play the game at over 70 frames per second. I teleport, I start skilling, killing things, moving around to new areas, and the game remains stable and smooth as butter.

But to top it off, Jagex has made the game look better than ever. The draw distance is now massive, as far as the eye can see, and holds up RuneScape’s unique graphical styling. The new client has made it painfully obvious in some areas how laughably small the world is, a fact previously hidden by the game’s short-sighted draw distance, but for the most part so far Jagex has done its job to play tricks and make the smallness of the world a lot harder to notice.

My first real thought while playing on the NXT client is the depressing thought that this beta is going to end in a few days, and at least until the client launches sometime in…sometime, I’ll have to sit through the old client for the time being. There are numerous visual bugs that are present in the beta, but since the game is running on the live servers there isn’t much of a reason not to give it a go if you are eligible to play this weekend.

I’ll be playing RuneScape quite regularly through the weekend.

Jagex Unveils Casual RuneScape Spinoff

Jagex, makers of the wildly popular RuneScape, today announced the latest game in the MMO series. Dubbed RuneScape: Idle Adventures, the title is a little different than what RuneScape players might be accustomed to. Set in the world of Gielinor, the player takes on the role of the wielder of the Elder Artefact known as the Needle. Play sessions will last a few minutes and boil the MMO gameplay down to loot, levels, and watching your character train.

It’s an addictive, quick-to-play RPG boiled down to the basics of levelling and looting. In a typical session, you’ll spend a few minutes making choices for your customisable hero, then leave him or her to train, fight and quest in real time.

RuneScape: Idle Adventures is being developed by Hyper Hippo, who you may be familiar with from their work on AdVenture Capitalist. The game will be free to play and releases on Steam later this Spring with iOS and Android releases later this year.

(Source: RuneScape)

Chronicle Servers Going Offline For Open Beta

Jagex has revealed that Chronicles, the card game based on the RuneScape game series, has shut down as of February 8th. In an announcement posted on the official website, the servers are shutting down for approximately six weeks in order to prepare the game for open beta. During that time, the dev team is adding in more features, balancing, and infrastructure to provide a better experience for customers.

When the beta returns in March, players can expect Venescula, the fifth legend character, arriving alongside more than forty new cards. Alongside Venescula is Dungeoneering, a skill that tasks players with PvP challenges in return for coins, gem shards, and platinum. The legends you have will have the ability to be outfitted with cosmetic customizations and improving skills with experience gained after each fight. Finally, two new locations (one previewed above) and improved client performance will be coming alongside open beta launch.

Players who participated in the closed beta will receive an exclusive card back, title, emblem, and coin chest. The open beta is the last time that Chronicles will wipe player progress.

(Source: Chronicles)

RuneMetrics: What You Need To Know

Last month marked the announcement of RuneMetrics, an upcoming stat-tracking tool for RuneScape developed by Jagex. At the time, all we knew is that the tracker would allow players to see certain statistics like experience per hour and logged drops, and that there would be a free and a paid version.

There’s advanced XP tracking including an ETA to your next level up. There is also an amazing drop log that tracks everything you’ve gained through combat, as well as damage calculators giving you your total damage EVER and your average damage per minute, and plenty more on top!

In a developer Q&A posted today, the team answered a number of questions regarding how RuneMetrics will work and why it costs money. You can find the entire 20 minute video below but for brevity we have posted the highlights below.

Check out below for the full Q&A as well as some screenshots from the livestream.

There is an in-game tracker and a website tracker.
The in-game tracker follows xp per hour, time to next level, exp gained.
Real time graphs follow the past few minutes.
The web application goes further back in time and will replace the Adventurer’s Log.
Everything that is available in the Adventurer’s log will be free in RuneMetrics.
Everything is tracked and can be viewed (kills, drops, worlds changed, deaths, etc).
The feature will not “cheat” for you (ie: clue scroll answers, farming patch status, etc).
The free version covers counting based functions while RuneMetrics Pro (paid) will be required for calculation-based functions.
RuneMetrics requires a subscription due to the immense storage and maintenance costs.
There are no plans for a permanent buy.
If your subscription lapses, after a while the data will be deleted.
Premiere Club members get two weeks free plus half off on the cost.

The web portion will look similar to how it is below. The top portion is available for free with the bottom half requiring a monthly subscription.

Jagex Unveils RuneMetrics, Paid Stat Tracking

In the Behind the Scenes for February, Jagex officially unveiled a new stat tracking service coming to RuneScape this month. Named RuneMetrics, the service is advertised to log a wide variety of player actions, giving in-depth details on how efficiently the player is training, what they are collection, and how much damage they are dealing out. While many of the tracking features will be free, some parts of RuneMetrics will be held behind a paywall, at the cost of a bond per month. Premiere Club members receive a 50% discount.

There’s advanced XP tracking including an ETA to your next level up. There is also an amazing drop log that tracks everything you’ve gained through combat, as well as damage calculators giving you your total damage EVER and your average damage per minute, and plenty more on top!

Also set to release this month is a new quest, a mini-game involving Sliske, a double experience weekend, further additions to Invention, and a seasonal event for the Chinese new year.

(Source: RuneScape)

Jagex Devotes February To Old School QoL Updates

Old School RuneScape operates on player majority for content, requiring that 75% of the voting community agree to an update before the team is allowed to put it in. In a recent blog post, the Old School team has announced that February is being devoted to quality of life updates, with a new poll running each week to determine player interest in small tweaks that have been popularly suggested through the forums and various other avenues.

The current poll runs until February 1st and covers issues like skipping questions, increasing click areas to make certain objects easier to select, and boosting experience rates on two agility mini-games. Jagex evidently hit the mark on how popular these questions are, as every single option is currently beating the 75% margin by a mile except for the poll to add a spell allowing players to convert wine to wine of Zamorak.

(Source: Old School)

Column: Jagex and the RuneScapes

I’ve written quite a bit about Jagex and the issue of “not-RuneScape” in the past, and while I penned an editorial about its history over at MMORPG.com earlier last year, I’ve been meaning to give the topic another look for quite some time. If you aren’t acquainted with Jagex’s history of developing games that are not RuneScape, I highly recommend reading that article before you continue here otherwise it’ll probably look like I’m just trashing a successful company for no reason. It’s a long history of failed “hobby projects,” mismanaged and abandoned long before anyone would bother to inform the public.

So since my last full editorial in 2012, there has been a lot of stuff going on at Jagex. Transformers Universe went into beta and, as I suspected, it fumbled the ball at the two yard line and Hasbro pulled the IP. Block N Load launched and has subsequently plummeted in traffic, relaunched as a free to play game and has been on the decline ever since. The winter league was a mess and ended in a cancellation due to the number of teams dropping out. Carnage Racing, released on Steam in 2013, can no longer be purchased and its online was shut off with no announcement if you read the forums. It looks like Jagex pulled out of publishing Entropy since they are no longer credited and the game has a monthly average of six users.

But something else happened in that time frame, Jagex successfully launched Old School RuneScape. So successfully, in fact, that Old School has surpassed the population of RuneScape 3. It launched as a snapshot of what the game was like back in 2007 with Jagex talking about how they might make a few small changes here and there, and it has grown into a separate title entirely, one that continues to receive substantial content on par and possibly even better than its bigger budget big brother considering the team size.

If I had to comment on Old School, however, I’d say that the original point I made years back still stands: That RuneScape is Jagex’s sacred cow, and that any venture outside of that property is doomed to failure. Old School RuneScape was an experiment that went right, but at the end of the day it is RuneScape. It’s like the model train you pull out of a box in the attic. While you dust it off, give it a fresh coat of paint, and make some additions to it, its core remains the same. The guys and gals working on Old School made the right choice by allowing the community to dictate what updates the game is allowed to receive.

RuneScape Chronicle is in beta right now and we’ll have to see how it does considering that while it is based on the RuneScape lore, it isn’t RuneScape. There is still the MMO that Jagex announced earlier last year that may or may not be Stellar Dawn. Ace of Spades and Block N Load are still online with their small communities.

But who knows where Jagex’s new CEO will take the company. Mark Gerhard apologized a few years ago for treating their non-RuneScape games like “hobby projects.” We’ll have to see what direction the company takes under Rod Cousens, and I’m holding on to faith that the company can break ground into games that are not RuneScape.

In the meantime, check out our interview with Jagex on Deadman Mode from last year.

Deadman Polling Death/Combat Changes

Jagex has announced that notable changes to Deadman mode will be coming in a future content poll. The latest developer diary details a number of content additions to be added in the upcoming player poll, including additions and tweaks to the recently released Zeah continent. Among the changes, however, are two key tweaks for Deadman Mode content. The first, whether the community will approve of new players receiving a six hour grace period during which they cannot be attacked. The second, whether or not killing a player more than forty levels below you will no longer generate a bank key.

Other Deadman updates include a timer on login similar to that found in pvp worlds, the ability to obtain dragon claws as a very rare drop from dragons, and adding pvp armor to wilderness boss drops. Voting opens soon.

(Source: Deadman)

RuneScape Classic Open To All Again

In celebration of RuneScape’s 15th birthday, Jagex has once again made the oldest iteration of the game available to the public. Starting today and running through mid-March, players can log in and secure themselves indefinite access to the classic servers with all of their old school glory. Your account from RuneScape won’t transfer over, so if you haven’t played before you’ll be starting over.

The availability of RuneScape Classic is limited to current RuneScape members. If you are a member and wish to take advantage of the open window, head over to the official page and log in with your current RuneScape account from 11 January at 12:00 UTC until 11 March at 12:00 UTC. Once you’ve made a character, you will have access to RuneScape Classic whenever you want to play it.

RuneScape Classic remains online for the remaining community that continue playing as well as players who would like to see how the game looked pre-2004. Due to the ease of cheating, the game is mostly closed off to the public with small windows of time where new players can obtain access. The last time that the servers were open to new players was 2011, at which time Jagex claimed that the game would not be opened to the public again. Whether the current event is a one-off exception is unknown.

(Source: RuneScape)

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