RuneScape creator and Jagex founder Andrew Gower recently revealed his next MMO, Brighter Shores, which has been in the works at his new studio, Fen Research, for about 10 years. That said, it's technically seven years if you separate engine time, prototyping, and "earnest" game development.
I sat down with Gower to discuss the nature of the game, which is due Q3 2024, and readily admitted to him that I can't help but see RuneScape in Brighter Shores since it's a game I grew up with. The more details he shares, the clearer it becomes that, like RuneScape did some 23 years ago, Brighter Shores expresses Gower's core style and interests, from old-school text adventures to multi-user dungeons (MUDs) to tabletop RPGs. But the overriding theme is making "a nice, relaxing escape from reality" that doesn't overtax your brain.
"I've always liked grid-based games," Gower says of Brighter Shores' recognizable world layout. "I've always loved point-and-click and I've always loved grid-based. So if you take those two things, they're the two things I've kept, the things I've liked in everything I've ever done. But the engine is completely different."
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One key difference compared to RuneScape "is that it's not tick-based," he continues. "So everything happens much more responsively. One thing I had to build in from the absolute get-go is proper client-side prediction. So the client can predict what's going to happen without needing to wait for a response back from the server, which again just makes the whole thing a lot more responsive. That greatly increases the types of gameplay we can do.
"There were an awful lot of things that frustrated me with previous things I've made, and I was determined this time around, starting from scratch, to solve difficult problems that can't be solved unless you do them from the very, very get-go. So that started with the hardest bits, if you see what I mean, that I knew had to be built from the ground up."
The MMO market is notoriously hard to break into – though Gower has quite some pedigree and experience behind him – so I wonder how Brighter Shores hopes to stand out and bring people in. Gower reasons that variety remains essential to the genre, and reckons that a mix of his MMO knowledge and today's technology can yield a polished and compelling experience.
"One of the things that I've really focused on, again, which is totally new for me, is really thinking about how the balancing works," he says. "Vast numbers of spreadsheets. Everything has got – it sounds very dry – but everything internally has got a sort of mathematical basis as to why it is. And you can't tell when you're playing, obviously, it just feels right. But every single bit of it, we've gone, why does this work this way? How does this user experience this? How is this not going to break the economy? A lot of things I'm aware of. For example, you can make a bit of content obsolete when you're updating these things. We've sort of sat down from the get-go and gone, how can we avoid these problems that the genre typically suffers from?"
"It's a lovely game," he says excitedly. "I've been playing it a lot myself in the evening, and it's beautifully easy to get sidetracked. And it's fun to get sidetracked. You're doing one thing and you set yourself a goal. I'm going to do this. And then because of the way everything's linked together, you think, actually I'm just gonna go off and get some fish first, because it's gonna make this other thing that bit easier. So I'll do that. So you're off and you start getting some fish, and you think, oh, actually, I've got these fish, so maybe I should just cook them here and do this thing. And before you know it, you've got four or five different goals all on the go at once."
This type of cascading goal-setting will sound familiar to RuneScape fans, and it also smacks of the secret sauce behind many of the best open-world games. But it's the name, Brighter Shores, that's maybe the best reflection of Gower's aim here.
"We wanted this, or I wanted this, to be a nice, relaxing escape from reality," he says. "Something you can do when you've had a long day at work, or a long day at school, you just want to sit down and not engage your brain too hard and just enjoy playing a nice, fun game. The title of the game very much reflects that."
Gower says his new MMO doesn't have to worry about investors: "There's no publishers, no one breathing down my neck ... I want people to enjoy my game."
