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RuneScape Mobile is set to celebrate its one year anniversary later this week. In between creating new content and keeping the lands of Gielinor ready for the players that want to throw their street parties in places like Varrock in Mos Le’Harmless, Matt Casey and Emma Hall took the time out to talk to me about why the game is a perfect fit for gamers that want to do quests on the go.
As a long-term (but lapsed) RuneScape player, I was keen to learn as much about the game in its current state as possible. Matt, after learning this, was eager to point out that the mobile version was at least partially designed to appeal to semi-retired adventurers like myself, saying that “Runescape on mobile, it’s been a great way for a lot of people to reconnect with the game.” he went on to explain that RuneScape has always been “… a game that people tend to sort of drop in and out of, but it’s always kind of there. Part of the reason y’know, for bringing it to mobile in the first place was to allow us to reconnect with that, kind of lapsed audience and so far — a year in and it’s been really helpful during that time in bringing people back to the game, just because it’s a more convenient sort of format.”
I must’ve been sounding wistful for the old days, because Matt acutely followed up with “Hopefully, when you try it, you’ll find it stunning. It rekindles the sort of, you know, the old feelings from you that you had before, but in a more pocket-sized way, I guess.”
Emma then explained that unlike a lot of online games these days, RuneScape isn’t really attempting to be one of those Games as a Service that intends to be an all-consuming factor in a person’s life, by saying “It was always the kind of game that you would play alongside doing something else. So you’d be watching Netflix or you know, playing maybe a different game? I don’t know. But you’d always have Runescape on like your second screen? … and you’d always come back to it, you know, and I think bringing it to mobile, just kind of enhances that. Now you could do that literally anywhere that you wanted to.”
Matt also shared a tidbit with me that may encourage an influx of both new and returning users like myself to pay Gielinor a visit in the near-future, revealing that “Next week, because it is the anniversary of the mobile launch, there’ll be a bit of a present for players who log in for the next couple of weeks, I think. There’ll be some goodies and nice free stuff in the store that they can get hold of as a birthday gift from us.”
I personally hope that they’re bringing back the party hat and the rubber chicken weapon.
RuneScape Mobile’s one year anniversary is on June 17, 2022.
If you’d like to read my full chat with Matt Casey and Emma Hall about the development of RuneScape Mobile, it’ll be in MCV/DEVELOP #980, which arrives in July.
