Today an interview with Andrew Gower (founder of Jagex) was published by Bruce on Games. Aside from discussing mainly general questions about Andrew Gower’s career and opinion on the games industry there also was a question about MechScape. Andrew reveals the current state of the game, which is now in final internal testing. Read the relevant question below.
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.