On October 3, 2026, during RuneFest in Birmingham, Jagex confirmed that it is developing a new RuneScape MMO in **Unreal Engine**, currently called **RS4**, and that it is still a few years away from reaching players. It doesn't replace any of the games the company already keeps online. It is also the first RuneScape designed outside the studio's own in-house engine. If you've never touched a game in the series, this is the moment the name starts showing up in your feed, and you should know what is actually on the table before someone sells you too much excitement. ## What Jagex showed in Birmingham, and what it left out The announcement was more restrained than the noise around it suggests. Jagex showed a teaser, set out a few pillars, and quite deliberately refused to talk about almost everything else. Here is what is confirmed: - **Name:** RS4 is a working title. Jagex itself says it isn't necessarily the final name, just the one that serves for now because it's the fourth next-generation RuneScape. - **Engine:** Unreal Engine, the same one the company used in *RuneScape: Dragonwilds*. RuneTek, the internal technology behind the classic games, is out. - **Setting:** Gielinor, the usual world, in the so-called Sixth Age. The adventure begins in Ashenfall, the landmass introduced in *Dragonwilds*, years after the fall of the Dragon Queen Kuldra. - **Timeline:** "a few years away." There is no release window. - **Team:** dedicated, separate from the teams behind RuneScape 3, Old School RuneScape and *Dragonwilds*. - **Teaser:** a CGI sequence with a village in a green valley, floating islands and a dragon rider being attacked by a three-headed dragon. It is not gameplay. - **Still unannounced:** platforms, accounts, membership, combat, skills and a testing date. Jagex said explicitly that it's too early to talk about any of this. There is also a parallel detail that not everyone noticed: the company announced an **animated series** based on RuneScape, made with Lyrical Animation and the content creator Charlie White, MoistCr1tikal. No dates and no format yet. In practice, this means the announcement is a map without a scale. We know where the starting point is, Ashenfall, and that the destination is a traditional MMO. We don't know what it costs, where it will be played, or how combat works. Jagex opened an interest registration page and said it wants to involve the community from the start. Read that as a request for patience, not as a promise. ## Twenty-five years of RuneScape on one page To understand why this announcement stirs up so many people, you need to know what's behind the name. RuneScape was born in 2001, created by Andrew and Paul Gower in the United Kingdom, as a game that ran in the browser at a time when that was a technical feat. It had no fixed classes. It had dozens of skills, from chopping wood and fishing to combat and magic, and you leveled each one at a pace that demanded a patience that now seems absurd. The charm was in the time: the game rewarded those who stayed, and what we call grinding was the product itself. The version many people recognize as modern RuneScape arrived in 2004, and the third generation, **RuneScape 3**, in 2013. It was a controversial transition. Part of the community felt the game had changed its soul, with a reworked combat system and interface, and the reaction was loud. This is where the story gets interesting for outsiders, because Jagex did something uncommon in the industry. In 2013, after a vote among players, it relaunched a copy of an older version of the game, from 2007. It called it **Old School RuneScape** (OSRS). The experiment was meant to be a nostalgic curiosity. It ended up as an independent game, with updates decided by community vote, and today it lives side by side with RuneScape 3. That is why, when someone says "RuneScape," you have to ask which one. Some people play one and have never touched the other, and some veterans have spent years defending one against the other. Keep that precedent in mind, because it explains the calm with which Jagex talks about coexistence. The company has already shown it can maintain two games with the same name and audiences that don't quite get along. What it is trying to do now is the same thing with four. ## Four games, one word: how not to get lost For newcomers, the map looks like this. **RuneScape 3** is the "main" game, the one that keeps receiving content and, in practice, is the direct heir of the 2013 version. **Old School RuneScape** is the preserved classic, slower, rawer and backed by a very vocal community. ***Dragonwilds*** is something else: a cooperative survival game in Unreal Engine 5, released in early access in 2025, which uses the world of Gielinor but plays like the survival-and-building games you play with friends. And **RS4** would be the fourth, an MMO from the ground up, and the first new number since RuneScape 3. Jagex insists that none of the other three is being replaced. Each has its own team, roadmap and investment, and the company uses a phrase that sums up the strategy: having different RuneScape experiences can make the whole family stronger. It's an elegant commercial argument. It's also a bet, because it forces a mid-sized company to keep four operations alive at the same time. ## From expansion to game: how *Dragonwilds* produced RS4 The origin of RS4 is the most revealing part, and the least discussed outside the specialist press. The game wasn't born as a standalone project. It started as an expansion for *Dragonwilds* called **Shadows of Ashenfall**, which was already on the survival game's post-launch roadmap and which, according to reports, was planned for 2027. It was Jesse America, executive producer of *Dragonwilds*, who explained the detour to journalists before RuneFest. The expansion grew so ambitious that the team realized it no longer fit inside DLC. Added to this is a piece that Jagex didn't turn into a headline, but which several outlets report: players who tested the content asked for a version closer to a classic MMO set in that world. In other words, the audience didn't ask for a new RuneScape. It asked for more of the same world, with more people in it, and the company realized that was worth a game of its own. This changes how the project reads. RS4 isn't the result of a ten-year plan drawn up in a meeting room. It's a development that grew by accumulation, with technology already tested in production and a storyline that continues from a recent game instead of starting from zero. ## What changes, and what doesn't, with Unreal Engine The change of engine is the part that most excites tech fans, and the one that deserves the most caution. RuneTek, the in-house engine, spent years evolving to serve games that run on modest computers and, later, on phones. Unreal Engine 5 opens a different door: next-generation graphics, dynamic lighting, bigger worlds and fewer limits on look. The CGI teaser, with its floating islands, serves to suggest that leap, but it has to be said plainly that **a CGI teaser is not in-game footage**. Every studio knows this, and so does every player who has ever watched a trailer that looked too good. The less obvious point is that Unreal Engine wasn't designed from the ground up for hundreds or thousands of players in the same space. Studios that build MMOs with it usually rewrite substantial parts of the networking and server layers. Jagex has the advantage of having already shipped a game in UE5, *Dragonwilds*, but a cooperative game for a handful of friends is one thing and a persistent world with a large crowd is another. It's the difference between throwing a party at home and opening a stadium. There is also a broader movement. Riot Games is working on an MMO set in the *League of Legends* universe, also in Unreal Engine, with a release pointed, according to the Wikipedia page, at 2028 or 2029. When two of the best-known houses in the genre pick the same tool, the choice stops being purely technical and starts to say something about hiring, artist tooling and where the available talent is. ## What nobody is saying about RS4 ### The pattern: Jagex announces early because it suits them There is a practical reason for a studio to announce a game "a few years away": the Jagex community is part of the product. Old School RuneScape lives on votes. RuneScape 3 learned at its own expense what happens when you change too much without listening. By revealing RS4 at an embryonic stage, the company buys time and goodwill, and turns players into free consultants. I'm not saying this as criticism. It's a legitimate method, as long as the company can handle what comes with it, which is a community with strong opinions about every detail of a game that doesn't exist yet. ### A personal reading: "permanent progression" means something Jagex chose three ideas to define the spirit of RS4: integrity, permanent progression and community feedback. In my reading, the first two are a response to known problems in the genre, such as bots, account trading and economies that fall apart when effort stops counting. Anyone who knows OSRS knows the company spends a large part of its time fighting this. Promising integrity and progression that doesn't get wiped is promising a world in which your time is worth something. It's an easy promise to make on a stage and a hard one to keep on a server. What nobody is saying out loud is that this is also an audience problem. The most loyal fans have accounts with fifteen or twenty years of progression. An RS4 with permanent progression asks them to start over somewhere else, and Jagex hasn't yet said whether there is a bridge between the worlds, whether there will be a shared account, or whether a decade of investment stays where it is. The company says it's too early to talk about accounts. I understand, but it is probably the question that will weigh the most. If you want to try RuneScape before RS4 arrives, the way in is to play RuneScape 3 or Old School RuneScape, both of which have a free version and optional membership. Do it without rushing and without expecting RS4 to be a direct continuation of either. ## Closing note Jagex has four games, an animated series and an interest registration page. What it still has to say is which platforms it will run on, how much it will cost, and whether your 2009 character is worth anything. When, a few years from now, there is a date, will there still be players willing to start over in Ashenfall?