Interview: Jagex’s Henrique Olifiers Discusses the Past, Present and Future of RuneScape

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As I sat down to discuss RuneScape HD with Jagex’s “Head of MechScape,” Henrique Olifiers, we found ourselves drifting off into a conversation about the online games each of us had played in the past.

Not surprisingly for someone who used to be in gaming journalism himself, many of the titles we’d played over the years overlapped each other as I rattled mine off:

“Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online, DAoC….” then, on reaching the end of my list, I arrived at a somewhat embarrassing realization: “You know, come to think of it, I’ve played pretty much everything… except RuneScape.”

Henrique didn’t seem to take too great an offense at this, as he smiled and said, “Was it because of the graphics?”

I nodded, “Pretty much.”

“That’s what RuneScape HD is here to solve!” he assured me.

I did have to admit, on watching a demo the game did look remarkably better than the last time I had seen it. Gone were the jagged edges and sprites that seemed to be made up of five polygons a piece; in their place were graphics I found very much reminiscent of the original Neverwinter Nights.

But, having solved the graphical issues (for the most part), was the game yet robust enough to appeal to a broader audience than it had in the past? Read on to find out.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us, and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Jagex.

Henrique Olifiers: I am Henrique Olifiers, I’m the head of game development at Jagex. I’m responsible for the teams running and developing the games that we have. One of them is RuneScape, the other one is Fun Orb, and we have a third game in development right now called NextScape which is scheduled to be released in March, 2009.

The MMO Gamer: All of the charts you look at indicate that RuneScape is quite possibly the number two MMO in the world, after WoW. Yet, at the same time, not many gamers in the world seem to be aware of what it is.

What do you attribute that to?

Henrique Olifiers: It’s the kind of people we’re looking at. The typical RuneScape player is younger than the typical hardcore MMO player. If you look at the typical RuneScape player, it would be thirteen years old, probably doesn’t have access to a high end PC. Probably got a low-end PC from his older brother, or an old laptop that his father gave him, so those machines are probably not able to run bigger MMOs.

RuneScape is an option for them. The other thing is RuneScape, we consider it to be the “entry-level” MMO. We see a lot of our players, RuneScape is their first contact with MMOs.

So, that’s why you don’t hear a lot of hardcore gamers talking about RuneScape. The third factor that we say is up to now the graphics were not comparable to other MMOs, packaged MMOs, they were letting us down in terms of appeal. We’ve corrected this now, with RuneScape HD.

The MMO Gamer: Would you say that RuneScape’s success to date is due to its low system requirements, or in spite of them?

Henrique Olifiers: That’s a tricky one. I would say it’s two-fold. It’s not just because of it, right? Even if it was the low-system requirements only, if the content wasn’t there, people wouldn’t keep on playing.

You can not make a six million strong game with a user base that big out of just accessibility. There has to be something to it. It has to be a good game for those people to keep on playing it. That’s pure fact.

I would say that accessibility is a very strong key for the success of the game. Being able to play it with the small hardware requirements anywhere you want, in Linux, Mac, PC, a school machine, your grandmother’s computer—anywhere you want is a big thing, yes.

But, the gameplay behind it is solid. If we didn’t have solid gameplay, the churn rate would just be massive. People would get into the game and after one or two months—or even one or two weeks—they would leave. That wouldn’t pay our bills. We wouldn’t be able to attain this massive user base that we have.