If you pause for a moment and tilt your head to the side, you may hear the subtle but distinct distant boom of a major impact hitting RuneScape. Jagex just launched a new seasonal “Hero Pass” for the long-running fantasy MMO, promising that this will “refine how players engage RuneScape for a more rewarding experience.”
Despite how Jagex makes it sound as if it invented the concept, this is indeed a seasonal battle pass the like you see in many other MMOs and online games. The first Hero Pass, which launched on the holiday yesterday, is called Underworld and has 120 levels that contain 54 cosmetics that can be obtained for free and 94 for “premier members” – i.e., subbers.
This isn’t the studio’s first trip to the battle pass rodeo, but Hero Passes do represent a major improvement from what’s come before: “With RuneScape’s prior attempts in this space, we haven’t achieved the bar set by other battle pass systems — so we wanted to go back to the drawing board and introduce something much more complementary to the game that’s integrated with its core experience.” Jagex further claims that the Hero Pass’ rewards are “earnable for the majority of players” and are “worth the players’ time.” You can move along the reward track by participating in daily, weekly, and special missions.
The RuneScape community is still not at all happy about the game’s ongoing monetization efforts; in fact, they’re currently tanking the game’s Steam reviews, arguing that the game’s monetization is completely over the top given the ever-increasing subscription fee, microtransaction store, lockboxes, token currency, and now, the arguably pay-to-win battlepass. The game’s subreddit has been completely taken over by complaints and quitting threads.
“We’ve spent all day discussing your feedback at length and there’s been plenty of design discussions throughout today,” a mod told players this afternoon (well into the uproar, which has already been going on for days). “We are going to be sharing our plans to address key feedback points as soon as we can, ideally tomorrow.” However, the mods have also made clear that players asking for the company to remove the pass are being and will continue to be “ignored.”
