Jagex are a bit of an enigma. They have quietly become one of the biggest players in the MMO market with Runescape boasting figures only bested by World of Warcraft. Interestingly, all of their success has come without the slightest bit of marketing and with a minimal amount of press exposure. Still, they have become one of the finest purveyors of MMO games. Now, with Runscape nearing its ninth birthday, they have decided to tackle something new. Today (Tuesday 19th January, 2010) marks the launch of Jagex’s newest endeavour the massively multiplayer browser based real-time strategy game War of Legend.
Not only does this mark Jagex’s first time out as a third party publisher but it also is one of the first times anyone has attempted to make a massively multiplayer RTS, a genre that has traditionally difficult to build into a multiplayer model.
We spoke to Jagex’s Adam Tuckwell to find out about their bold new experiment and what it took to bring the game to market.
“With War of Legends, we have been working with a partner in Shanghai who did some work on Runescape HD for us. They had this RTS game in development. We played it and fell in love with it. The game is browser-based and coded in Flash rather than Java, but it’s instantly accessible on almost any PC and we felt that it shares the values that are common across all of our catalogue,” said Tuckwell, evidently very enthusiastic about the new title.
War of Legends is a persistent world free-to-play game, as with all of Jagex’s other titles. It is the first time where they have ditched the ‘free to play, but premium subscription’ model in favour of micro-transactions. The micro-transactions serve to speed up the game for the more casual players rather than adding any exclusive content over and above what is available to play for free.
As with standard RTS games, the aim of the game is to build up your castle and armies in order to conquer the whole map. With War of Legends, players can also build alliances and trade goods with other players and help defend their allies when they are offline and co-ordinate attacks together.
War of Legends varies from the usual swords and sorcery approach of traditional fantasy RTS games by adopting a storyline based in Chinese mythology.
“The storyline is something that’s relatively new to Western markets,” explains Tuckwell. “It’s set about 1000 years BC and tells the story of the end of a Chinese dynasty. You’ve got an unscrupulous king who rules in a very malicious dictatorial manner and opposed to him is a righteous but unproven contender.”
Jagex are very conscious of how poorly MMOs with a similar theme have been translated for western markets. Tuckwell stresses their desire to avoid a culture shock: “The story is based pretty accurately in the Chinese myth. We have tried to adapt the storyline as much as possible to Western culture while staying true to the story. We are very cautious of the number of people who have translated games with similar themes without culturalising them first. It is quite a shock for people when they enter the game and see what happens.”
“We have tried to break the game down to make it exciting but accessible for people,” he adds. “When players enter the game they are encouraged to enter into multiplayer alliances either by joining an existing alliance or to form a new one. Their alliances then automatically side themselves either with the incumbent king or the contender.”
“There’s basically two sides but inside each side there are different factions that are based on different things. Some will be based on mutual trade, others on empire building and others just of a love of PVP. There is the overall story to it as well but it is something that players can dip in and out of whenever they want.”
It is clear that Jagex have taken on a massive task in creating a persistent world MMO RTS – Tuckwell thinks that Jagex have the experience to handle the task. He continues: “I guess traditional RTS games have been pretty single-player focussed. For us, we have a lot of experience of multiplayer environments. Across all of our games we have developed wide community of multiplayer facilities and as a community-conscious developer that is something that our users have come to expect. On War of Legends, we have worked very closely with the developer to make sure that players aren’t playing alone.
“They can if they want to but players have all of the traditional MMO facilities at their disposal. They have chat, building clans and alliances and having communities. The servers will allow up to 2000 player at one time and so it’s going to be busy world in terms having a number of people there,” he says.
“The alliance factor is going to be a big part of getting people to play together. We encourage people to do that through the way the game is built, through the introduction to the game. We also doing it through the community support and the clan and alliance support that we are building into the game to really make it a true multiplayer experience.”
Despite being new to creating RTS games, Tuckwell is pretty confident about how well War of Legends will compare to other RTS titles on the market. Although he does admit that there is a lot to learn from their competitors.
“We have looked at other people’s games and tried to merge the best of all worlds within the game and hopefully players will enjoy that when they see it.”
“I think a lot of our competitors look at Runescape and the other games in our catalogue and try to emulate them but miss the point somewhat in trying to do so by misunderstanding what it is to be a free game or the importance of quality.”
“War of Legends is graphically superior to a vast majority of RTS games out there.”
“We plan to support and update it in a way that other people certainly don’t do. I think it’s just more polished.”
On the point of how the game will play, Tuckwell was very quick to stress that the game would strike a very even balance so that the game could engage RTS veterans as well as those who have never played a strategy game before.
“People entering it who are traditional RTS fans will find it a real tactical experience and will be challenged really pushed on how to advance and develop in the game. Also people new to RTS games will also gain a lot of enjoyment from the way we introduce it and protect new players for the first seven days so that they are not totally owned by older players when they start their gaming experience.”
One way of making the RTS experience more accessible to those who may not normally be interested in playing strategy game is the introduction of micro-transactions. Tuckwell explains: “This is the first time that we’ve used a micro-transactions in a Jagex game and we’ve tried to approach this with the same ethical approach that we’ve adopted towards the free-to-play aspects of our other games. These essentially assist time-pressured gamers. When you build things or develop your towns or soldiers these take time. Building a level one building takes five minutes for instance and as you level up this time increases. What we allow people to do if they are time pressured or don’t want to drop in and out of the game, they can buy time credits through micro-transactions to speed up these processes.”
“Because War of Legends is a fantasy game there are also magical items like spells, weapons and potions that can be found through out the game,” he continues. “These can also be bought by micro-transaction but there is nothing for sale this way that cannot be found by playing the game either by raiding other regions or resource gathering and trading. [Micro-transactions] are essentially a way of speeding up the game playing process for people who can only log in for a limited time every day.”
War of Legends will also depart from Runescape in that, initially, it will not have servers dedicated to one style of play. Empire builders, traders and PvP fans will all be playing alongside one another on each of the game’s ten launch servers.
“We don’t have any plans to have separate servers for PvP and the like,” elaborates Tuckwell. “We believe that all elements of the game are strong in any one world. We believe that there will be alliances that will focus on one type of gameplay but for the alliances and indeed the gameplay to be successful we believe it will need a healthy mixture of different play types. If everyone is concentrating on one style of play like PvP and no-one is empire–building or gathering and trading resources then we think the gameplay will feel flat.”
All in all it seems that Jagex have seen the a gargantuan task of publishing an MMO RTS game as a challenge. Indeed, if War of Legends succeeds it could light the way for franchises such as Command & Conquer and Starcraft make the jump from single player to MMO.
In 2001, it might have been considered risky to produce a free-to-play MMORPG but, almost nine years on, Runescape has been an unmitigated success. With Jagex at the helm there is every possibility that we will be reporting the resounding success or War of Legends at the end of the next decade.
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