MMG October 23 2009 at MechScapeWorld

Yes you can expect more regular info on Stellar Dawn from us in the future, I’m not 100% sure it is going to be released in 2010 although I certainly do hope so, I am however 100% sure that it won’t be this year as initially thought.
I suppose it is important to also add that when I was initially saying “soon”, I really did believe that from everything we were being told and naturally gave that feedback in good faith. That is no longer the case and whilst I can understand news of a delay is frustrating to you all as much as it is to myself, I can assure you all that everyone involved in this project is doing their best to ensure we get a great game in the best possible time frame.

It seems it’s now really official the game is not called MechScape anymore but is now called Stellar Dawn. Of course it was known that MechScape was the codename but Jagex had not used Stellar Dawn in their official communication. There is an official press release coming by the Stellar Dawn team.

MMG October 23 2009 at MechScapeWorld
I suppose I’m going to upset a few people because I can’t say too much about the game in development and I don’t want to steal the teams thunder with regards to their upcoming press release but I can talk a little about where we are today and how we got here.

Make sure to ask your questions at the MechScape World forums, and if you find any new information post in our comments.

Below is a video which provides proof of the method used to create this image.

Henrique Olifiers: Oh, OK, let me see: one of the things that was very successful in RuneScape were player-owned houses and creating them. That was very big for RuneScape. And so that’s something we need to start with. So all the players start with their own bases [in MechScape].

Also in reply to the question “So is there any date for a beta?”. It seems the beta is still a year away not as soon as most of us expected.

Henrique Olifiers: No, no no. We constantly playtest the game, invite people to help and run focus tests to find out what they like so we can adjust. By the time we feel it’s ready to go we’re suddenly going to open it and avoid the pitfalls we see so many other MMOs going through by releasing a product they can only get right a year afterwards.

Read the full interview->

Q: Finally, it is an open secret that Jagex has the working title MechScape under development, aimed at different demographics and introducing new state of the art technology. Is there any specific direction you are going in with this game? And when are we likely to see it ready?

A: We’re deliberately keeping pretty quiet about MechScape, because we want to surprise people, and also want people to enjoy exploring it for themselves and seeing what we have created without lots of spoilers. It’s very much a game of exploration and discovery and has beautiful art direction and back-story which I’m not going to give away The original rational for creating it was very much ‘if we made a new MMO we could do it so much better given everything we have learned doing RuneScape’. So we did! RuneScape grew very organically, whereas MechScape was created with the benefit of years of experience so is much more cohesive. In terms of when it’s ready…, the version in the office is now pretty much feature complete, it’s fully playable and is due to enter the final internal testing and polishing shortly, which is massive milestone for us. How long the testing takes depends on how much we decide we still want to improve, it could be a little while longer because we’re not going to rush it, and aren’t going to launch it until it’s awesome.

Read the full interview at Bruce on Games ->

Jagex has registered the trademark for the name Stellar Dawn, but their logo is not yet registered. Maybe they’ll wait until their logo is registered before they come with the game, it’s not actually required to register the trademark before use (as far as I know) but they might want to make sure their logo is ok. The Stellar Dawn logo is currently being advertised in the 6792nd trade mark journal, published on 03 July 2009. It takes about 2 months to register a trademark. So maybe we will see Stellar Dawn in about 1 month.

If Jagex decided to use another name for the game, that would be interesting. They haven’t registered any trademarks since Stellar Dawn that could qualify as a good space MMO name. Their last trademarks have been Bachelor Fridge, Infinite Dungeon, Never Ending Dungeon and Steel Sentinels. Note that they don’t have to own a trademark before they start using it. However the risk of using a trademark that’s already registered is present. It would sure be interesting to see another name pop up on the RuneScape homepage saying something like “Stellarscape beta for all RuneScape members!”. Stellarscape… yea right..

I don’t expect Jagex to come up with another name, especially since they’ve spend resources in both the names MechScape and Stellar Dawn. The only thing we can do now is wait for the beta to be released.

So what do you think will it be MechScape or Stellar Dawn, please comment below. - What name do you think it’s going to be and what name would you prefere?

And it will be exciting to watch as the company’s latest MMO tears up the internet later in 2009 (on which note, watch out for news on the forthcoming closed beta test for Jagex’s ‘codename Mechscape‘ right here on TechRadar very soon indeed).

For the tech savvie people this is an interesting quote:

“Runescape has the second biggest public forum on the internet, with around 2.8 million posts a week,” explains Gerhard. “Yet we host that [forum] on a machine with around 1GB of RAM which you probably couldn’t even sell for £50.. because our technology is that good.”

Some nice RuneScape concept art

A desert scene with space ships flying over.

For all intents and purposes the game is done. It’s finished, in testing, and working. But we’re in testing and going, “What if we change this…” I suppose we’re so excited about what the end result can be that we’re tolerating all these changes in 11th hour so to speak. There’s nothing really arbitrary, ti’s all things we think will really help gameplay or make it more fun. I do expect it to be released in 2009, but it’s hard to guarantee these as I’m sure you know. The Studio is however doing a fantastic job and working tirelessly to get the game awesome and ready for Beta.

Read the full interview ->

There’s also things we’ve done while building our other MMO “MechScape,” like particle effects and specula lighting, and it’s like “Well now that we have those why not put them into magic effects [in RuneScape]?” So I do expect in the next year a lot of things will be re-prioritized to focus on the players and improving the game. They tell us what they enjoy, and we’ll make more of it.

Read the full interview ->