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What does the future hold for RuneScape? Here’s our very best plans for 2015, as discussed by Mod Mark at RuneFest 2014!!

Missed Mod Mark’s glimpse into the future on the main stage at RuneFest? Fear not, if you squint your left eye and stand on one leg in a crane position whilst gazing into a crystal ball you too could be privy to our exciting 2015 RuneScape plans.

Or, you could just read on…

Change our world

RuneScape is no longer just about what JAGEX do. It’s about what all of us do, including you! Our collective consciousness is shaping the world of Gielinor and that’s why we are inviting you to change our world in 2015.

2014 has been all about player power and you’ve already had a massive hand in a lot of things we have done but next year we want to take this even further. Next year we want you to be the authors, the shot callers, the makers. The forums are jam-packed full of amazing suggestions and we want to launch a system that will make those ideas, your ideas, a reality.

RuneLabs

Our idea is simple, and we’ve dubbed it “RuneLabs”.

We’re creating a brand new system that allows you to submit your ideas for everyone to see. Each idea in the system will have a “support” button that you can use to tell us if you like an idea or not. We can then review the top ideas and examine them for possible development.

We will then poll a collection of the best ideas and let you know exactly how we intend to make them, and just how much effort it will be.

Don’t worry though, we won’t be adding just any old thing to the game – we won’t be making any changes to the fundamental essence of the game and we won’t add anything that breaks the game. We will still have guidelines to take care of RuneScape’s long term health, making sure the game we know and love is STILL here for another 13 years.

It’ll then be up to YOU to choose which of those ideas we actually release into the game by voting in the next month’s polls. We’re taking what we have right now with Player Power and making it even more awesome, even more authored by you.

You don’t even need to be a designer to come up with ideas; we’ll take your idea, even the basic ones and run with them, filling in the gaps along the way. It could be a picture, a video, one line – anything! Don’t forget that you can use the forums, your clan mates and your friends to help you expand those ideas if you want.

Next year, half of the schedule will be dedicated to you and your ideas! We’ll be working to release one update based on your ideas per month, potentially increasing that number as we go.

So, get your thinking caps on!

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The Community Development Team

There’s plenty more coming to support you and your greatness and the next thing is…

The Community Development Team.

Whilst we are yet to come up with a name as funky as the ninjas, their job will be just as important! This team was born to improve your social and community features, they have been created (in a lab in Cambridge) specifically to create fun and engaging content to support events and add even cooler event orientated content to the game throughout the year, based on your suggestions!

They’ll be working alongside the community management team and will also be responsible for keeping you up to date with what’s going on at JAGEX, how player-created ideas are progressing and giving you clear insight into exactly what we are doing. We want to help you out on your streams, podcasts, twitch channels, you tube videos, and more, by giving you your own special tools. You are our ambassadors, we want to help you to make your own fun within the game, and we want to work with you to achieve that.

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What else is coming?

We know you’re dying to hear about what else we have planned in Gielinor for 2015 and the wait is finally over!

The 200th Quest

Next year marks a pretty momentous occasion for us; the release of our 200th quest! There’s been plenty of heroic acts and iconic adventures leading up to this 200th milestone and we started to ask ourselves a lot of questions: What if there weren’t any heroes in Gielinor at all? What if nobody made that cake for the king’s birthday? What if nobody thwarted the plots of a sea slug controlled penguin? What if nobody found out the truth behind the Ardougne plague? What if the bacon cultists really had eaten all the pigs out of existence?

Our 200th quest will see an entirely different Gielinor come to life. In this alternate universe Zemouregal is bored, he’s taken the throne of Varrock and no one has tried to stop him. He’s noticed that Arrav is no good at playing fetch, and is useless at keeping the rats out of the sewers, so he’s taken Gertrude’s cat’s kittens and turned them into war beasts of terror, but even they have become fat, lazy and overgrown.

And what has become of Delrith? After the black wizards successfully brought him into the world and demons ravaged Lumbridge and Draynor, he made a cake from the bones of King Roald. Now he’s decided to turn the whole place into a den of iniquity, inviting the world’s super villains to gamble with people’s lives, and he’s turning his timid staff into zombies just for pronouncing his name wrong.
We want you to visit this alternative Gielinor where the hero never existed. You’ll encounter in jokes, iconic references, and as many favourite characters as we can muster. Will you save the day this time? Will you pick up the flag of peace and prosperity in the face of such adversity?

It’s up to you; what does your alternate universe look like?

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Zamorak Heist

Have you been wondering what Zamorak’s been up too? Well, still furious at his untimely defeat at the hands of Saradomin, he’s been in hiding, plotting his next move. Willing to give the Mahjarrat one last chance at redemption, he wants them to form team, led by him, to steal back the stone of Jas and wreak revenge on the traitors that left him to die.

So, who’s in that team? Well, that’s up to you. We’ll be running polls to decide the members of the team - comical or deadly serious, it’s up to you. What will Zaros make of it? How will Sliske react to anyone trying to upset his diabolical plans? You’ll get to prove your love or hatred, and perhaps even join in on the greatest crime caper to ever take place in RuneScape.

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Elder Gods

Our 6th age storylines have focussed around 3 pillars. The stone of Jas line is being continued with the Zamorak heist quest, the dragonkin line was kicked off with “One of a Kind”, and our third line gets kicked off with our new quest, Elder Gods.

You told us via the polls that you didn’t want to discover all the secrets of the elder gods too early and we have obliged.

In this quest a well-known hero has seemingly gone mad and stolen a spell that can teleport the abyss into Gielenor! Your job will be to buddy up with your friends from the wizard’s tower and build a rune golem (a magical sniffer dog that can help you track your foe around hidden sites associated with the elder gods – of course). Finding out what the elder gods are doing, and why they have stolen such a spell, will lead you down the rabbit hole of truth.

This quest is all about setting the scene and unearthing information about these mysterious creators. Meeting them, discovering what they really want, and what they plan to do with their “perfect” world will have to wait.

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Christmas 2014

Who doesn’t love Christmas?! How do you fancy a spot of seasonal snowboarding in RuneScape?

This Christmas we’ll be launching a brand new seasonal minigame! Dubbed “The winter Gielenor games”, you’ll be shredding, stomping, and bailing out as you race your competitors down a slope, powering your board by grabbing gifts and presents as you make your way down the course.

We’ve also got world event sized giant crackers, that can be pulled by armies of players to reach the goodies inside.

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Ports Expansion

There’s another significant update coming for ports. We know you want more to do, and that you want the skill focus to be centred on agility, dungeoneering and divination.

We turned to the forums to discuss the different directions we could go in with the theme and one option turned out to be more powerful than any other! You wanted to visit unexplored islands in the Eastern Lands, enter sea monster grottos, find hidden tombs and treasures, unknown even to the Eastern Lands, and perhaps even encounter some zombies!

Our intention is to add three new adventurers, letting you explore in new directions rather than going for ever-longer voyages. There’s still long journeys, but we’ll be building up to them in this new direction.

We’re also adding new resources and rewards, potentially including level 85 melee and magic weaponry to fill out the ports gear. As well as this we’ll have lots of ninja-like fixes to Ports too, making it easier to access and check on your voyages. Head to the forums to let us know what you think could be improved.

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Chronicle: RuneScape Legends

Heard about our brand new RuneScape inspired game? We’ve created a card game where you can build quests with your favourite RuneScape characters, items and enemies.

It’ll be available on tablets, mobile, and on the PC and the best part? You’ll get to earn cards to use in the game while you play RuneScape!

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Whatever happened to…?

As well as some insight into our future plans we wanted to give you all an update on our previous promises; there’s a few things we haven’t managed to get to just yet – we’re only human!

Read on for an update on our previous aspirations.

HTML 5

So, whatever happened to our HTML5 client?

We had some very good reasons for wanting to write a new client, Java has become increasingly harder to run in a browser over the years, plus it’s written in a way that makes it difficult for us to squeeze out any more performance from it, or to add new features.

In any case, the HTML5 client was supposed to solve these problems and generally make it easier for you to play RuneScape. Unfortunately the client wasn’t fast enough, even on high-end computers. The performance problems we originally thought were just something we needed to work on, were rather more intractable than we had anticipated, for quite complicated technical reasons. So, we went back to the drawing board and decided that the only way we could sort things out properly was to write the client again.

Over the past year we have been quietly working to bring you something pretty awesome. Our next new client builds on the re-architecting we did for the HTML5 project to deliver what HTML5 could not – the performance you expect out of your computer when playing RuneScape, with all of the added benefits we had intended to give you before, and more.

That includes:

• Map loading without the “Loading – Please Wait” dialogs


• Getting into game without needing the initial loading screen


• Great performance with the graphics settings turned right up


• New graphical effects to help make the most out of our content


• The ability to add new features to the engine more easily than we could before, due to the improved architecture and performance

We’ve written this new client to run on multiple platforms, including natively on Windows, OSX and Linux, and in the browser, using a more focused form of the HTML5 technology we used before, so it should be easy for you to switch when the time comes. We’ll make the change as seamless as possible.

We are not quite feature-complete yet, but we hope to be ready to let you have a beta of this in a few months or so.

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Valley of the Dead

Last year we discussed plans we had for creating a new game all about permadeath, survival and PKing. Since then we’ve had a big rethink; many of the things we wanted to achieve we can do with the new IRONMAN mode that’s live on Monday next week.

On top of that we decided that it makes more sense to try and work on what we have rather than try to start from scratch, and that’s why we are commissioning more projects to secure PKing in RuneScape. This could mean many things, and we’ll be looking to you for inspiration and suggestions.

We know many of you want to add better information, add high scores, chase and escape methods, new roaming wilderness bosses, high level content, camouflage potions to hide your minimap dot, and we’ll soon be working to see which of your suggestions are the most important to you.

We know that just adding legacy mode wasn’t going to rejuvenate the wilderness overnight, there’s lots more for us to do, we haven’t forgotten about it. Your suggestions, up votes, and eventual polls will make all the difference.

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Inventor

When Inventor didn’t pass the vote it really made us question the things we wanted from the update and whether we had missed something.

Why don’t we add to and enrich existing skills, rather than just ignoring them in favour of a new skill? What do you think? The decision is up to you.

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World Events

Remember when we said some of our world events would be RuneScape vs ‘something’? Well…

TUSKA SLIDE

Meet Tuska, a giant beast that stampedes from world to world, breaking it apart and eating its life force. You’ve seen the destruction it can cause through Guthix’s memories, and now she’s going to turn her attention to RuneScape.

There’s a giant portal on her back, where her harbingers emerge, causing destruction to anything they touch. You’ll have to work together as she stampedes across the world, using skill and cunning, as well as brute force. There’s no guarantee that you’ll win, but either way there’s going to be some massive, long lasting ramifications to the world.

There will be plenty of content but the shape it takes will be up to you. We’ve got ideas for endgame battles, grouping with friends in massive multi stage conflicts, watching her chew the world up but nothing is certain... yet!

As well as all of this we’ve got many other crazy aspirations, including another god wars dungeon, plans for minigame spotlights, plus Ironman is launching next week but our future is in your hands.

Our most powerful update of 2015 is you! Let’s shape our game together.

Mod Mark and the RuneScape Team