Brighter Shores, the upcoming MMO from original RuneScape creator and Jagex founder Andrew Gower, loosely channels RuneScape in its focus on relaxing grinds, a mix of idle gameplay, and branching professions. In an interview with 12DOVE, Gower touched on another similarity with Old School RuneScape especially: "It is more about the journey than it is about the endgame."
"It is not a traditional MMO where you play, get to the endgame, and that's where the game actually starts," Gower says. "It is very much, we keep releasing episodes, we keep introducing more and more different things to do. We haven't really got a lot yet, but we will obviously want to put in the stuff that appeals to big epic content. The streamers like this big difficult content that they can do. We will put in stuff for that sort of audience, but it's more about the journey."
I asked Gower for more details on how that journey starts off and what players are aspiring to. "To start with, you're a guard in Hopeport," he begins. "There's lots of point-and-click style quests in this game, because I've always loved this sort of LucasArts graphical adventure and that point-and-click style gameplay. So initially you're guided with some particular goal, but you can deviate off that path fairly quickly if you want, or you can carry on the path that we've set.
"So you'll be setting a goal, for example, early on to get your combat level to 15, which is pretty easy. Because at that point, you can do your bow training and you can start using bows, which gives you a big advantage in combat, and then you're sort of working towards being trained up enough to be able to venture out into the forest."
"Setting a goal" perked my ears right up, not just because it's a key long-term motivator for big games and particularly MMOs, but because it's extra pivotal in RuneScape. It also helps frame what Brighter Shores' endgame may look like outside the planned hardcore content Gower alludes to – namely, what you want it to be for your account.
"It's very much about setting your own goals," he affirms. "There are things in the game that will encourage you. In fact there's loads of things in the game to encourage you to set your own goals. But one thing we've been very, very keen on when making this game is not to make it feel handhold-y. We keep talking about empowering the player and letting them feel like they're making their own decisions. That's very important to us."
Separately, Gower expressed relief that "there's no publishers, no one breathing down my neck" with Brighter Shores, meaning his small team only has to answer to themselves and can focus on the player experience.
Brighter Shores is due Q3 2024 on PC and Mac via Steam. It will be free-to-play with a paid premium pass that unlocks all available content.
Ahead of his new MMO, Gower says games have gotten too microtransaction-heavy: "Our number one aim is not monetization, it's players."
