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Runescape’s creator and Jagex Co-Founder announces “Brighter Shores” MMO Game and Trailer

by zara jarvis, edited & proof read by mason breeding

march 17th 2024

23 years after Co-Founding the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “Runescape”, Andrew Gower took to twitter on March 13th to announce his new game “Brighter Shores” with his new studio Fen Research. Brighter Shores is an upcoming massively multiplayer online game (MMO) that is available to be wishlisted on steam, set to release later this year in Q3. It has been confirmed that the project has been 10 years in the making. After many years, it appears he is still working alongside his brother, Paul Gower, who has announced he is the Narrative Designer.

Brighter Shore’s description on steam reads
“It is an enchanting point-and-click style role playing game (RPG) with hundreds of hours of gameplay, set in a land of magic and mysteries, with a huge number of professions to try”.

Gower’s signature style is present in the game, with similarities to Runescape. In the “About this Game” section, it lists the following character classes:
Cryoknight, Guardian or Hammermage.

Additional features are player trading, character names and a large map and stories to explore.

Fen Research’s YouTube has released a trailer for the game to further describe the activities you can partake in. At the start of the game, you are a new recruit for the Hopeport town guard, looking to make your mark in the fantasy world. The trailer showcases combat with “fire toads”, investigating and helping non-player characters (NPC). Professions listed in the trailer are magic, alchemy, fishing, blacksmithing and even assembling dinosaurs.

On his press release answering questions on Twitter, he has confirmed the following:
-The game will feature Grid based movement, not tick-based
-No microtransactions (MTX), Andrew has proposed a Free to Play and Pay to Play model
-Botting not be able to ruin the economy
-Closed beta out soon, Gower has stated he will post about it on Twitter closer to the date of release

-Ever evolving updates
-You can cut trees for 16 hours, but there are other things to do also!

Image Credit: Fen Research

Grid based movement means your player can walk onto a tile, but not part of a tile; picture a chess board. The game style emphasizes this by making the floor in the game on the trailers and photos shared so far look grid-like. This is a distinct change from Andrew Gowers first predecessor RuneScape, as while it is grid-based, you cannot see the grid. Another distinction is that RuneScape is a tick based system and he has stated that he does not intend on Brighter Shores being tick based. Players that want to check this game out of interest due to Gower’s ties to RuneScape may find this beneficial to their playstyle, as content creators have made their own game modes restricting themselves to tiles (see the many “Tileman” series from players like Rargh and Settled). Moreover, many people utilize popular plugins such as “Ground Markers” on RuneLite (a popular open-source client used to launch RuneScape).

With many players interested in a Runescape 3 with no MTX, maybe this will be the next closest thing graphically and play-style wise. Gower’s decision to keep OSRS (Old School RuneScape) non MTX and now confirming the same for his new game means there will likely be no payment that can be used for “getting ahead” and you’ll have to work for your gains. Having a dedicated F2P (Free-to-Play) area will give new players the choice on whether they would like to commit their money to the game for an expanded map and more game activities.

Botting has been a prevalent issue in all iterations of RuneScape, with some items in the game collapsing in price regularly due to botters mining/woodcutting resources, tanking the price due to the market getting overflowed. We will surely be interested in Gower’s proposals on how the economy will not get impacted by botting.

Ever evolving updates will be key to the games growth and survival, as we can expect to see the map and professions be expanded on after the release.

And lastly, knowing we can all still “afk” (away from keyboard, a term used to describe games you can leave the room while still playing) but the game will have more in it than that, hints to the possibility “professions” may be a more unique player experience. Gower has already confirmed one of the drawings he posted on May 11th, 2022, is a “2 person fishing net”.

“Creating this game has been a real labour of love. At times it has felt like an insurmountably ambitious task, so it’s amazing to finally see it coming together in the way I hoped. I can’t wait to see the world full of players enjoying what we have created”.

- Andrew Gower

Set to release for PC and Mac, we look forward to seeing what is to come from Fen Research. Make sure to wishlist "Brighter Shores" ready for when it officially comes out and to keep an eye on Gower’s Twitter for information about the Beta coming out soon!

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