For those that don’t know, Andrew Gower sold his shares in Jagex back in ~2010 and started a research company. That research company was to come up with a new game engine and accompanying programming language to make it easy to build multiplayer games. They released a smaller game and up until this point we knew there was a big game coming built on this tech but it was only speculation what that would actually be.
It looks like he did what I was hoping he would and made a nearly direct competitor with his previous work, RuneScape. It will be very interesting to see how this affects RuneScape and how this game itself plays.
I wasn’t aware they did a smaller game as a test. What was it called?
Solstrike was their prototype/test game
Ah I’d actually seen that before. Didn’t realize back then that is was by the Gower’s. They’ve put quite the effort into all this. I’m looking forward to trying it out when it launches.
Yeah, I don’t know if this was originally the goal or just where they ended up.
I think the Gowers kind of hate what RuneScape became after they left. There’s even an interview where Andrew says he regrets letting go of Jagex. This is the only place I could find the clip relatively quickly …
https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1ak9574/andrew_gower_always_regretted_selling_runescape/
It would not surprise me if this is kind of … “let’s try again, do RuneScape again with some lessons learned.”
Even the name, brighter shores… It’s just a bit cheeky, a bit “let’s turn a new page.”
I agree on the name. My first thought was ‘greener grass’. It also doesn’t surprise me they would have regret both in the short and long term after they faded away.
The desire to not have to ‘manage’ a growing company is understandable. It’s a shame they had to watch as the direction of the game they loved veered away from their vision.
Yeah, it’s also interesting… I rewatched an interview they did for RuneScape’s 15th birthday about well, RuneScape.
Andrew Gower mentioned how RuneScape was more built off of board game inspired mechanics vs being an action game (and basically goes on to imply the engine was not built for EoC).
If you look at Brighter Shores it’s really making that connection to board games much more obvious in its art style.
definitely looks more like an RS3 competitor than an OSRS. either way following with interest.
I’ve always wanted to get into osrs. I watch a lot of settled. But still I find myself not really having goals and drop out pretty early. What do I do? So I’m excited for this to try once more lol
well, that didnt take long!
I’ll keep my fingers crossed for this. I love OSRS, and still have an RS3 account that started as a Runescape Classic account!
I’m in!
