RuneScape has wound its way through many revisions and editions over the years, but Jagex usually left the original versions standing – or in the case of Old School RuneScape, brought it back and injected it with new life. Unfortunately, the company has decided it’s time to pull the plug on RuneScape Classic, which is the version of the game that launched way back in 2001 (and looks the part).
“It is with great sadness that we have taken the difficult decision to say goodbye to RuneScape Classic, which we will be winding down over the next 3 months,” the studio says. “With advancements in technology helping to further support both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, our tools are no longer compatible with Classic. This is particularly a problem with our community safety and macro detection tools. The game is now easily abused with the use of 3rd party macro tools, and botting has become an increasing issue. […] The truth is that bots and lack of community safety tools are serious problems, however, we also feel that we can no longer offer long term service reliability due to the growing risk of unrecoverable game breaking bugs. The number of bugs is getting worse, and we’re gradually seeing the game breaking. It’s important to highlight that these are bugs which we can’t fix due to the unsupported nature of the game.”
Eventually, Jagex says, the game would have broken “indefinitely without any warning,” and so a graceful shutdown was in order. The game will stay up until August 6th. Regular flavor RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, to be clear, will keep on truckin’.
