When We Made... Runescape Mobile
With RuneScape Mobile passing the one year anniversary of its release, Vince Pavey took the opportunity to chat with Matt Casey and Emma Hall at Jagex about their work on the portable version of the ever-popular MMO.
R
Matt Casey product director and Emma Hall lead developer at Jagex
uneScape Mobile has a tempting allure to it, being an easily pocketed version of the first MMO adventure that a lot of gamers of a certain age ever played. A fully featured window into the realm of Gielinor that you can take with you on the bus is likely to inspire more than a handful of lapsed adventurers to return, and as it turns out that was sort of the idea. “RuneScape on mobile, it’s been a great way for a lot of people to reconnect with the game,” says Matt Casey, the venerable MMO’s product director, “Everybody’s since kind of got a bit older, got a good bit busier, got jobs, got families and stuff like that. It’s a game that people tend to drop in and out of, but it’s always kind of there. Part of the reason for bringing it to mobile in the first place was to allow us to reconnect with that kind of lapsed audience and so far it’s been really helpful in bringing people back to the game, just because it’s more convenient.” “If you can remember the password, you’ve still got access to it, then you should have your old character and everything intact.” says Casey.
66 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022
Lead developer Emma Hall adds “It is the same game, you can log in on PC in the morning, mobile at lunchtime, and PC in the evening, and you will be playing the same character in the same game, in the same places.”
SAME GAME, NEW PLACES Conventional wisdom would have perhaps suggested that putting a behemoth like RuneScape on phones may have been too much of a gargantuan challenge to even attempt, but in an era of online games like Fortnite letting players just continue their progress wherever they are on whatever platform they choose to, Jagex spoke to its player base and found that they wanted the same treatment.
“Everybody was saying the same thing, they
didn’t want a cut down version of the game, or like a spin off, or a pocket version, they just want the whole thing in their pocket, like the whole 20 years of RuneScape. All its content and all its complexity and everything, bundled
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
