Brighter Shores is an all new adventure from award winning MMORPG designer Andrew Gower. It is an enchanting point-and-click style RPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay, set in a land of magic and mysteries, with a huge number of professions to try, and something new to find around every corner.
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape... But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
I eventually stopped played RS3 because I was really frustrated with the slow pace of development. They would constantly announce new features only to cancel them years later because they were too hard to implement. Their excuse was always that the engine was too old.
This new game has a completely new engine. It doesn't have 20+ years of tech debt. It (hopefully) isn't held together by rubber bands and paperclips like RuneScape is.
Looks more restrictive even, why can I only see 20 tiles at a time? MMORPG is a hard genre to break into and I don't think just slapping his name on this one is going to attract much of a crowd when they are all busy with OSRS already.
The gower brothers have not been part of Jagex for about 10 years, but are all involved in the development of this game IIRC
Edit: I was slightly worried too but it looks like the handful of tiles is more of a fog of war/view distance type thing. These two screenshots seem to show it the clearest
I've played a lot of runescape and I do not have a good opinion about jagex. They're lucky they struck gold and instead of polishing it they do everything they can to destroy it. I'm sure this game will be pure trash.
Worth noting, this isnt Jagex nor just a random former employee. The Gowers made the OG classic game. I'm tentatively excited for this one. High hopes, low expectations