With over 2 decades as a leading MMO, RuneScape is an classic in the eyes of many. Be it in the archaic but iconic Old School RuneScape, or in the complex and open RuneScape 3, players cannot get enough of this game. Thanks to incredibly free gameplay, allowing players to do whatever they want, the game is almost an alternative MMO, not shoehorning its fans into class restrictions like so many other games. Trading, archaeology, daring combat, and even the life of a noble fisherperson can await a RuneScape character. After 20 years of this abject freedom, the game is finally making its way to mobile, with a view to an even wider array of consoles.
Of course, this expansion into the wide world of cross platform entertainment is not without challenge, especially during a pandemic. In a recent Game Rant interview, Product Director Matt Casey and Senior Product Manager Liam Powney discussed exactly where the game is headed in the next few years. They also touched on the development process, what the mobile port brought to the original game, accessibility concerns, and what it was like to develop a bestselling MMO during a pandemic. With the upcoming mobile release of RuneScape, the studio hopes to attract a whole new crowd of players, while giving existing fans a brand new way to enjoy the game.
Q: Thanks to Old School RuneScape, you obviously have some experience launching a game like this on mobile – what have you learned from that launch that helped you with RuneScape Mobile?
Matt Casey: It goes right back actually; we’ve wanted to bring RuneScape to mobile for such a long time. I remember when I joined the company I said, “when are we going to get this on mobile so I can play it on the move?” It seemed impossible at the time because it was such a big game, so much content, the UI is all customizable – for a long time we thought it was going to be really difficult, but what we found was that our players are just the most resourceful bunch- they had already come up with their own solutions to this.
MC: We discovered that our players were using a thing called TeamViewer to play on iPads and phones, something that clones your desktop onto a mobile device. Our players had invented a workaround for it as far back as 2015, so we thought “we’re going to have to do something about this.
MC: We updated our game engine in 2016, which unlocked the ability to port the game properly to mobile. 2017 was the first time we got a proper prototype version in player’s hands, so we invited a bunch of people to the Jagex HQ in Cambridge to test it out and get feedback. They very clearly liked it, and then we took it to our it fan-fest. It was a very early prototype that just about worked, but everybody really liked it. After that, in 2018 we took it into a members-only stage on Android, and then in 2019 to 2021 we moved to the early access version, which has kind of taken us to where we are now.
Q: What was the biggest difference between developing RuneScape 3 for mobile as opposed to Old School RuneScape?
Liam Powney: Yeah, so the biggest one is definitely the UI. They don’t like it when I say this but comparatively speaking Old School had fewer challenges to get their game on a mobile device: the UI is fairly clean, and the combat system is a little less complex. For RuneScape 3, the biggest challenge we had was taking the players have in game, which is this highly customizable UI that they can set up however they like, and making it work on a much smaller screen.
LP: However, we also have to make it look and feel recognizable to say, a player coming in on mobile from PC or vice-versa. If you’ve been playing on a desktop for the last 20 years, and you’re suddenly on mobile and you’re not quite sure what the buttons do or you can’t find this feature that you’re used to playing with, it can be difficult to deal with this tiny postage stamp of a window on mobile.
Q: With this new release, do you feel like you’re catering to a new market on mobile, and if so, how will that affect how you plan and implement more content. Conversely, do you feel like this is just an extension of what’s already there?
LP: Yeah, I think it’s very much an extension of what’s already there. We want the game as a whole to be cross platform, so if you’re on desktop and you pop out for a day, you can carry on and pick it up. Maybe you’re at a family engagement, and you’re on your phone if it happens to be incredibly boring and you’ve got nothing else to do. That’s been the idea behind it – giving people the option to stay engaged with the game when they’re on the move, so there’s no point in making content that is mobile online.
LP: Whereas we have players who will choose to not do certain high level combat encounters on mobile just because they’re not as used to the UI or they prefer the security of having every single possible window all at once for all their potential actions. Equally, however, there are people taking on high end boss content on mobile and streaming it to the world along with their analysis of it. New competitions among the community to see who can get the best times on our highest-level bosses on mobile have become another little facet of the game which is awesome to see.
MC: Just to add to what Liam was saying, I think it’s made us think a bit about the groups of players that we designed for as well. I think being a game that’s like 20 years old, we tend to cater to our veteran players, a lot of the time, because they demand more content, and we know that portion of the player base. With mobile we can expect a lot of new players. In fact, we saw this last year when we bought the game to Steam for the first time.
MC: So, we’re trying to design more with a wider audience in mind, and I think that’s changed the way we’re approaching development slightly. We do want to make everything for everybody, so everything’s more accessible, doing more things to get more people on board and just introduce the game to them at the right kind of pace.
Q: One of RuneScape’s biggest draws is arguably the consistent weekly content drops, is that schedule likely to change with the release of RuneScape Mobile?
MC: I think it’s affected it in a positive way. We’ve done over 1000 updates to the game over its history, which is pretty incredible. It’s actually given us the ability to build a team, you know, bring people with the right skills to move onto mobile because it’s not our predominant area of expertise. So, we’ve actually improved the rate that we’re pushing out content over the last 18 months, and that’s going to continue beyond launching on mobile as well.
Q: Fantastic, speaking of that switch to mobile, what are the biggest changes you’ve had to make to the RuneTek 5 engine that powers the MMO to adapt the title to mobile?
LP: To be honest, it was when we released the new rendering engine that was made to be a bit more open in terms of what platforms it could go on. Other more platform-specific changes we looked at included how we handle the downloading and caching of assets from our server. This means you get a smoother experience in your initial play, because you’ve downloaded the assets already.
LP: The gesture controls in the app as well have been a big thing. Touch controls were obviously completely unknown in RuneScape until we started working on this, so having that layer of API call-backs allowed us to have gesture control. Basically, the focus was moving it to a code base that wasn’t Java and could easily move between platforms.
MC: It’s also prompted us to look at real basic stuff, like how does your character appear, what does your avatar look like in game. With a lot of new players coming in through mobile we wanted it to look as good as possible, so that prompted us to start new projects. So, we’re just smartening up some small textures and improving resolution and stuff like that, and it just means that the overall game is going to feel much, much better and play more smoothly. The first impression that players get is going to be really important, I think.
Q: On the topic of gesture controls, do you think they’ll give mobile players a disadvantage over PC players? At one point, RuneScape had its own standalone PVP title, DarkScape – if elements like those came back, would mobile players find the game more difficult? If so, how would you adjust for that?
LP: No, I think, because of the way the RuneScape combat works, that there’s not going to be a huge disadvantage between being on mobile and desktop. I think the majority of the advantage will come with player skill and knowing their setup and knowing how their interfaces are set up. When it comes to combat, we’ve made sure that on mobile, you can access a good number of action bars, so that you would be effective in not just PVE and bosses but also in PVP as well. The main difference will still be the individual skill between players, I think.
Q: So, you mentioned people streaming themselves beating bosses on mobile – is the base game’s Twitch integration still available on mobile?
LP: No, Twitch integration is not a part of mobile play. Some players out there have managed to get OBS software and the like to hook up their devices to PC and are drawing their video input from there.
Q: The Jagex team is a heady mix of people like yourselves with over 15 years of experience in RuneScape, and people who have worked on titles like EVE online. How has that wealth of experience with the game itself and watching other games come up during its 20-year lifespan impacted the game RuneScape is today?
MC: That’s a really good question. I think it’s definitely changed a lot over the last five years. We’ve cast the net wider, brought in more people from overseas, and gotten people with more varied backgrounds. All of this is to just diversify the skill pool and the team. That’s transformed the business in so many ways over the last few years. Personally, I think it’s changed the level of ambition about what can be done, and what can be achieved, because we’ve got people with more experience doing things that we might not have tried.
MC: With launching things on consoles and mobile, you know, there was a time when perhaps we didn’t have those skill sets in house so much. It’s given us more confidence to be bolder with the things that we thought we couldn’t achieve or taken some of the more challenging things and helped us navigate through those particularly difficult projects.
MC: Again, we have so many fans of other games in our team, lots play different MMOs. You’ve got lots of World of Warcraft fans, lots of Final Fantasy fans, and people coming from other games as well. With that team, the game is almost like an alternative MMO, especially for newer players. RuneScape remains a very different experience, for me at least it plays like no other game.
MC: I think that’s true and it always has been set apart for customers. It’s got an almost organic, indie homebrew kind of feel to it, and if when you go right back to the start it’s all about bringing people together. The development of the game and the themes, just the quirkiness of the whole thing has always been very unique.
Q: You used to have a system called “Botany Bay” that allowed players to vote on the fate of cheaters – do you anticipate a mobile release will lead to an increase in cheating across the game?
LP: Yeah, totally, this is something that our support team have got plans in place to monitor at launch and with any major launch. When we launched on Steam as well, we had support ramp up a little bit – they keep an eye on things. We’ve also got a dedicated system that basically sits there and watches activity in the game and finds suspect accounts, so to speak, that seemed to be a little bit too rhythmic in what they do. So, we’re prepared for an influx, and if there is one we’’ deal with it the way we always do.
MC: We also learned a lot from Old School RuneScape and its mobile port. With the early version and launch, we didn’t see a huge increase in that kind of activity from the mobile launcher, probably because it’s just more difficult to cheat using mobile. So, it’s not as big a concern, as Liam said, but we will be definitely monitoring it making sure we do everything we can if needs be.
Q: Between Old School and this newer version’s early access, RuneScape has had about 10 million downloads on mobile. Obviously, something about the mobile platform is very compelling to your players, why do you think that is?
LP: I think it’s mainly that it’s such a varied game, you know, you’ve got this character that isn’t really constrained from the very beginning of the game. It’s not like you have to pick a class, you can do pretty much anything you want in the game. For those people who want to carry on the RuneScape journey and engage with the game in allow intensity manner, maybe they’re at work (and I’ve caught a couple of our developers doing this before lockdown), and they’re just mining a little bit while knocking out a test plan or coming up with a marketing campaign.
LP: So, I think a huge part of it is that mobile gives you the option to play RuneScape where before it was probably a little bit harder to. You can stay engaged with the game, you can still go for your gains in a low intensity manner and save the harder stuff for when you’re at home. I think it’s opened up so many opportunities to fill these dull moments of our daily life with a little bit of fun.
MC: I agree, one of the aspects of the game, as well as the higher intensity stuff, is that there’s almost a “lean back” element to RuneScape. We sometimes refer to it being a perfect “second screen game”. It’s about having these different play styles, with some variety of different player types that want to do different things, and I think the mobile versions of it just opened up the game so much more.
Q: On that note, why do you think people enjoy fishing so much?
MC: [laughs]
LP: That’s a good point. I think it’s for a couple of reasons. It’s fairly low intensity, so it’s perfect if you’re looking to just chill at home or watch Netflix or something. It’s still a bad money maker, but if you have all your invention gadgets and everything you can be getting a little bit more with some XP.
MC: I think it’s also tradition, it’s one of the really social skills. We hear stories of people meeting up in the game to fish and chat a bit like you might in real life. Over the lockdown we’ve seen this really come into its own, because people are using it to make those connections socially now, and that’s what players really love.
Q: Jagex has talked to Game Rant before about how the lockdown affected RuneScape’s development, how did it impact the mobile launch for you?
LP: Obviously, it was very odd back in March last year when we were in the office one week and then we were all at home the next. The first two weeks was just figuring out basically what the hell was happening, how do we do our jobs. One thing I will say is that there are more meetings now. It’s much harder to just stop by someone’s desk and have a quick chat so we’re having to be really careful about people’s time. The biggest change for us is not what we’re doing but how we’re communicating with each other.
LP: Where before we could easily grab everyone in the building and have a quick chat with them having 20 minutes notice, that’s become a lot harder. We’ve become way better at planning thigs in advance and figuring out what work we need to do and what work is going to be most valuable. Since going into lockdown, we’ve been hiring more people, so it’s been mostly making sure that they’re well supported and able to do their jobs in an effective manner.
MC: This isn’t as interesting, but on the less personal side, testing at the office is much easier because we have the testing labs or whatever. But, since everyone is at home, we’re sending out phones left, right, and center, trying to buy iPads for people on short notice to test on, which has been one of the logistical problems.
Q: When players preordered RuneScape on mobile, they got a couple of in-game items, benefits, and some aesthetic teleport variants – with the launch on mobile, are there plans for micro-transactions using the different app stores, or is that market not really a concern?
MC: Obviously, we’re thinking about the commercial opportunities for mobile, but we want to present the right content to players in the best format. We recognize that mobile players have different patterns – so we’re looking at things like subscriptions, for example. RuneScape has always predominantly been a subscription-based game and usually we sell membership time in chunks of like 2 or 4 weeks.
MC: With mobile, we thought people might want to experience the benefits of that in smaller chunks, so we’ve introduced things like one day/three day/seven-day subscriptions as alternatives. So, that’s something that prompted us to make a bit of a departure from what we’ve been in t he past to try and cater for what those types of players are more likely to be interested in.
Q: Many players finance their subscription by grinding in-game currency in the free-to-play version, will that still be possible?
LP: That’s a really valid route for a lot of players paying for their membership.
MC: It’s a great method, and you can use gold in the game to get bonds, and you can use bonds to exchange for membership or other currencies. That still exists in exactly the same way on mobile, and we love the fact that a lot of players use that to fund a full membership. It’s a great way to experience the game, so that absolutely saves the same, and some of the new stuff we’re adding is additional, but we’re not taking anything away.
Q: How long would you estimate that the mobile port’s been in development for?
LP: Roughly how long? I’d say it’s been roughly 5 years – okay, maybe 6. When we started this, it was a huge idea and we were just basically trying to figure out how you squeeze the game onto mobile, which began with trying to figure out how we squeeze the UI onto the screen. That bit has been like a magnum opus because there’s been so many iterations of it. If people have been playing through the beta, they’ll probably recognize how many changes we’ve done over the years. It’s been a long journey.
Q: How did you fit the complicated menu system onto mobile?
LP: I think being able to have two sets of action buttons on screen with a mini-map, and then being able to slide out your inventory mid-combat so you can eat some food, on a tiny, tiny screen that has been probably the biggest for the team that took a lot of iteration. I remember our UX designer creating a simple mock-up that was on a phone screen.
LP: He would just call out numbers that were mapped to buttons on this mock-up, and he would see how quickly you would get to each thing with your thumb. It would really crank up in difficulty, so you would feel like you were playing Dance Dance Revolution by the end of it, to get the best mapping of buttons to the screen.
Q: During this five-year development progress, you were still creating the base game. What challenges, if any, did you face developing content for a game that you knew would eventually come to mobile but wasn’t there yet?
LP: To be honest, a lot of the problems we encountered was with older content. The new content was fairly easy to adapt, because it was being built form the ground up with mobile in mind and the teas have been testing on mobile, so they’ve got a very good appreciation for how to design for mobile and desktop and the time. We’ve not managed to go through 20 years of content and fix everything, for obvious reasons, but some of that older content does struggle with relying on the right click system on desktop.
LP: It’s still present, you know, and on mobile you can tap and hold to get up your context menu. However, that’s an extra layer of teaching that we have to give not just to new players, but the desktop players that are coming across the mobile version and have never seen that before. It’s about making sure that an active player with history on the desktop version doesn’t feel lost when they come to mobile so they feel like they’re comfortable and can make the same decisions they would on desktop.
Q: What are some of the benefits of developing for mobile?
MC: One of the things we found earlier on looking at the game on a small screen was the legibility. We’ve got a lot of players and members of staff as well that find some of the text quite difficult to read. We’ve also got people with accessibility issues, ad we hadn’t done a huge amount of work to tackle that, so one of the good things for mobile was it helped us surface those issues and address them. So, we’ve improved things like the aliasing on the fonts on the text in the game and that’s a thing we can transfer in the desktop. As such, it’s going to impact all users, and just improves the general legibility of the game hugely.
MC: I was really pleased to see that tackled, and I think it just extended to other areas like that. We learned things form doing mobile that we’ll probably experiment with and take over to the main game as well, to where the PC and Mac users are.
Q: What kind of community do you hope the mobile launch will foster that maybe wasn’t present before? Alternatively, what do you hope will carry forward from the current community?
MC: To me, it’s about maintaining the welcoming, friendly nature that made RuneScape’s community always feel different to me than other MMOs I’ve played. It’s quite close knit, and everyone seemed to share the joy of the game, but also some of its difficulties. The fact is it can be quite a confusing game in a few areas, and everyone is very willing to help.
MC: People will ask you to join groups, to bring you into their circle of knowledge, and that’s something we saw happening with the Steam launch. Players just want to bring more people to the community and welcome them in and I think that’s what we want to foster and develop.
Q: Is there anything about the mobile release that might entice back older players who dropped off?
LP: It depends on how long they’ve been out, but I think if you’ve suddenly just heard that it’s coming out on mobile, and it’s a game you used to play back in the day – that’s going to be super interesting to come and dip your toe back in and see where they game you loved a few years ago and where it’s come to.
LP: Alongside all of the RuneScape mobile stuff that we’re doing, we also realized that we wanted to do something big and showy to attract lapsed players back. One of the things we hit on was the Elder God Wars Dungeon, a content theme that’s going through the air while releasing it on both mobile and desktop.
LP: That sort of harkens back to that sort of classic God Wars dungeon which is a really nostalgic piece of content for a lot of players. So yeah, just having things like that ready to release around the same time as mobile. Just making sure that there’s some awesome content for existing and new players, and something that is exciting and mysterious for the lapsed players is important. Something that you see on the store and think “damn, I need to check that out.”
MC: It’s part of the attraction, people come back in and look and think “wow, there’s a lot of new stuff that changed.” I think for people coming back it’s going to be great, and I think for new players, well hopefully they’re going to find it a really enjoyable experience as well.
MC: You can sit there and say, “Okay, let’s see, that’s on my phone, I’ll get that, the download doesn’t take long.” So, I can be back in and try it really quickly, and I just think that kind of accessibility will give a lot of people a good reason to jump in and give it another try. That’s great, I think.
MC: Sometimes, when you get back into it, it’s quite a challenge to remember what you were doing. I think there’s a lot we can probably still do to help people who are coming back in.
Q: So, we’ve had RuneScape, and then RuneScape 2 and 3, we’ve had DarkScape, and now the mobile release this summer. My question is, what’s next? Will fans be able to wander around their living rooms and be transported to blocky 2001 Gelinor in VR?
MC: I think we already did that, briefly. I remember at one of the first RuneFests I went to, there was a VR version which was playable, and that was quite enjoyable. I’d say right now, VR is not something we’re actively exploring. For me, it’s about where do you go to find the next generation of RuneScape players. We try to follow where our players are.
MC: It’s weird, RuneScape’s a game that you know you want it to be accessible from wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, and whatever you’re playing on. So, we’re definitely exploring other options that it lends itself to well. There are definite complications with things like Xbox and PlayStation in terms of controls, but with the switch where you’ve got touchscreen we’ve done some of the groundwork there as well.
MC: No promises or anything guaranteed, but I’d love to see it available. We talk a lot about cross play as really important, but to me it’s a game that should be available wherever you are, whatever you’re on. So, almost “platform agnostic” is my vision for us.
LP: I totally think that’s where we see the future being. I keep saying to the mobile team, we’ll eventually evolve beyond the mobile team. We’ll become maybe the “cross-platform team” or something, but I keep telling them RuneScape is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. We’ve been going for 20 years, with constant improvement over those years. That is just set to continue we’re just doing on more platforms and we’re making the game understandable and accessible for even more people for the next 20 years.
Q: Is there a recent trend, new mechanic, platform, way of experiencing games in the industry that makes you think: “Wow, that would be a great place for the game to be?”
MC: There’s a lot of change in the entertainment industry as a whole in terms of how people consume content and how people pay for content. With the rise of services like Netflix, things are way less about ownership of content but more about a service. It’s really interesting for us because we’ve kind of come through that whole journey.
MC: As I mentioned, we were predominantly subscription-based game and we kind of weathered that whole journey from subscription to free to play. Ultimately, we’re very well positioned to be that game as a service, and as you know it’s a continual relationship with our players. I think we’re going to see more of that in games that are cross platform. I think RuneScape is really well placed to take advantage of that and it’s something I’d really like to see us lean into.
Q: So, if you had one sentence to summarize RuneScape and where it’s going in say, the next year, two years – what would it be?
LP: Okay, I would say in the next couple of years we’re probably going to be focused around making RuneScape even more cross platform, making it a more modern experience; as well as maybe polishing it up and giving it a 2020s aesthetic rather than a 2000s aesthetic.
MC: I’m just going to say: “RuneScape – Everywhere”.
RuneScape is available on PC and Mac. It will release on mobile in June 2021.