One of the big MMO stories in 2016 was the debate and drama over the demand for certain vanilla servers in popular games. Even as World of Warcraft has waffled on the notion of legacy servers, RuneScape has been quietly supporting not one, but two retro servers (classic and old school) for players who prefer those time periods.
In an interview with Waypoint, Jagex Game Director Mark Ogilvie discusses why the studio embraces legacy servers, even though it means a lot of extra work running three versions of the fantasy MMORPG. “We are very much driven by the desires of our community,” he said. “They decide the fundamental direction of the content we add, and also the way we spend most of our development time. They told us that’s what they wanted, so we did it.”
While there are less than 1,000 players who log into RuneScape Classic (which is an intentional cap), Jagex said that Old School RuneScape actually rivals, if not surpasses, RuneScape 3 for popularity.
The studio said that it’s exploring mobile, VR, and short-duration quests as possible future projects for the game.
