Runescape was a game I played as a kid when World of Warcraft seemed too expensive. Over a decade later, somehow the online MMORPG is still going strong, and then some. Jagex has released significant updates within the past couple years, and some of those additions are definitely light-hearted. The most recent of these was announced during the annual RuneFest conference in London. Runescape has ambitious plans ahead. As it entered the 15th year, players gathered this past Saturday to commemorate 250 million total user accounts. Naturally, the total amount of cheaters and scammers removed by force from the online game certainly piled up. But Runescape‘s developers at Jagex have found a use for that pile of data sitting around. The new Bank Bidders activity allows players to participate in a blind auction for the contents of a banned player’s bank account. The inventory is kept secret from the participants. But they’re informed of how old the account was, and why it was banned. All in all, it sounds like it’ll be sweet karma revenge for people trying to cheat in the game.
You can hear a fuller explanation from this YouTube video below, that explores the effects this could have on the in-game economy.
Bank Bidders is a nice, modest add-on. But for people tuning into the first time for the past decade, your jaw will drop at how much this game has evolved. Their new NXT game client really kicked things up a notch when it was launched this past April. RuneScape Expansions lays out a road-map of regular content updates every three months, starting with the Golden City of Menaphos in June 2017. This new addition to the map won’t be tiny either – Menaphos is promised to be a sprawling desert metropolis with quests and mysteries within. On top of that, dynamic weather is also planned to be introduced to the land of Gielinor sometime next year.
“Like so much of our game content, the concept of regular RuneScape Expansions came from player feedback. They told us they were overwhelmingly interested in bigger, more significant updates that would make massive additions to the game. Other games may offer these once per year or less, but RuneScape has always done things differently,” explained one of the Lead Designers of RuneScape, David Osborne. “RuneScape Expansions will deliver a new sense of discovery and exploration more frequently with each expansion as big as 2014’s Lost City of the Elves, arriving on a single day, four times a year. It’s like Christmas coming every three months and it begins in June 2017 as the city gates of Menaphos are finally opened.”
Runescape has been available to play on PC (Mac/Linux) for a very long time now. You can jump in for free or pay $10 a month to be a member. To learn more about the game, check out their website, Twitter, and Facebook.
