Jagex is going back to the well that built the company. The studio announced this week that a fourth MMO in the RuneScape franchise is in development, built in Unreal Engine. Alongside it, Jagex is producing a RuneScape animated series with MoistCr1TiKaL attached, which is a sentence I did not expect to type on a Tuesday morning. IGN has the full breakdown.

Let's get the lineage straight, because the numbering gets fuzzy. RuneScape launched in 2001, the browser-based java weirdo that ate an entire generation's after-school hours. Then came RuneScape 2 in 2004, which eventually became what we now call Old School RuneScape after a player vote in 2013 brought the 2007-era version back from the dead. RuneScape 3 followed in 2013 with its own evolution into the current live game. Whether this new project counts as a true fourth entry or a clean reboot depends on who you ask at Jagex, but the company is calling it the fourth MMO in the franchise, so that's the flag we're planting.

The Unreal Engine part is the real news for anyone who's watched Jagex for two decades. RuneScape has always run on tech built in-house, first that java client and later the NXT engine for RuneScape 3. Moving to Unreal means Jagex is admitting that modern players expect a visual baseline and tooling that homegrown engines struggle to deliver. I've watched a lot of studios make this exact jump, and it usually goes one of two ways: the studio finds freedom in offloading engine maintenance, or it drowns trying to relearn everything. Jagex has been quietly staffing up for a while, so this isn't a spur-of-the-moment decision.

No release window, no gameplay, no platforms. This is an announcement of an announcement, and given how early MMO reveals tend to go, temper expectations accordingly. Remember when Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 with a cinematic and it shipped three years later? MMO development cycles make that look brisk.

The animation is its own curiosity. Partnering with MoistCr1TiKaL, the massively popular streamer whose whole brand is deadpan commentary on internet nonsense, signals Jagex knows exactly who still carries the RuneScape torch: millennials and older Gen Z players who grew up on the game and never fully left. Those players don't watch traditional trailers. They watch creators. It's the same math behind every publisher courting streamers for marketing, except here the creator is actually in the production credits.

There's a nostalgic pull here I can't pretend I don't feel. I never went as deep on RuneScape as some of my friends did, the ones with 99 everything and a party hat collection worth more than my car, but I remember the early 2000s internet café energy of it. A java MMO running in a browser window, populated entirely by people scamming each other in Falador. That game had no business being as good as it was, and it lasted because the systems underneath the ugly graphics were genuinely deep in a way a lot of modern MMOs still don't manage.

That's the question hanging over the whole project. Unreal Engine will make a RuneScape that looks modern. Whether it can make one that feels like RuneScape, the grind-heavy, player-driven, gloriously janky sandbox that survived 25 years on charm and systems rather than spectacle, is another matter. Jagex has bet wrong before. This time the company's future probably rides on getting it right.

If you've got an Old School account still gathering dust, now might be the time to remember the password. I have a feeling the next few years of RuneScape news are going to come fast.