Jagex closed RuneFest in Birmingham on Saturday 3 October with a teaser for a fourth RuneScape MMO. Working title RS4, because it is the studio’s fourth generation of the thing. No name, no platforms, no release window, and an executive producer, Jesse America, describing it as very early. A few years away, in Jagex’s own wording.
The line that travelled was “built in Unreal Engine”, and it travelled as if RuneScape had just abandoned its own tech. That already happened. RuneScape: Dragonwilds shipped 1.0 on 15 September this year, after a year and a half in early access, and it was an Unreal Engine 5 game from the start — in development since 2022. So the engine is not a new decision at Jagex. It is a decision with a shipped game behind it.
How it became an MMO
The better detail in the reporting is where RS4 came from. It started as an expansion for Dragonwilds, pencilled in for 2027, and became a full MMO after playtesters kept asking for something closer to a traditional RuneScape.
That is a sequence worth sitting with, because it explains the engine choice backwards. A team does not pick Unreal for RS4 and then build Dragonwilds to practise. They built a co-op survival game in Unreal, found the appetite was for a persistent world in the same place, and kept the tooling. The story begins in Ashenfall — Dragonwilds’ continent — during the Sixth Age, years after that game’s events.
Jagex has also said RS4 replaces nothing. RuneScape, Old School RuneScape and Dragonwilds all keep running. For a studio whose last mainline game is over a decade old, that is four live products on three different technology stacks, which is a staffing problem long before it is a rendering one.
Co-op survival and an MMO are different engineering
The Dragonwilds precedent is thinner than the headlines made it sound. Dragonwilds is one to four players, or solo. Dedicated servers exist, and the session is small and private. An MMO is hundreds of clients sharing one authoritative world, with replication, interest management and persistence that has to survive a decade of players digging at it.
Unreal does ship networking, and people have made it do large-world work. It is also the part of Unreal that studios building MMOs have historically had to tear into and rewrite, because the default replication model was designed around shooter-sized sessions. Which is why “built in Unreal” tells you much less about an MMO than it does about a single-player game. It describes the tooling. The scaling work is its own project.
The art side inherits a related problem. RuneScape’s visual language survives because it reads at small sizes and at distance: strong silhouettes, flat colour separation, a world you can parse while watching a skill bar instead of the scenery. Unreal’s defaults pull the other way, toward a photographic surface response. Dragonwilds suggests Jagex can hold a stylised look on this engine. Doing it with forty other players on screen, each with their own gear, is a different test.
And then lighting. At MMO scale you are not lighting a level, you are lighting a region that has to look right at every hour of a day cycle with an unpredictable number of moving light sources in it. The Coalition only just got to hundreds of shadow casters on screen while holding 60fps with MegaLights, in a corridor shooter on fixed hardware. An MMO has none of those advantages — no fixed hardware, no fixed population, no corridor.
Timing against Epic’s roadmap
A project a few years out that starts in Unreal Engine 5 is a project that lands near Unreal Engine 6. Epic has shown UE6, Verse is being positioned as the gameplay language, and the migration will not be free. The useful read on that is still that UE5 skills are the ones worth having now — engine transitions arrive slowly and in pieces, and a studio mid-production takes them on its own schedule. Jagex will likely ship on whatever UE5 has become by then, with bits of 6 pulled in where they pay.
The honest state of it
Confirmed: a fourth RuneScape MMO, working title RS4, Unreal Engine, set in Gielinor beginning in Ashenfall in the Sixth Age, the whole studio on it, early development, a few years out, and the three existing games continuing.
Not confirmed: the name, the platforms, any release window, business model, subscription or otherwise, and anything at all about how it plays. The footage shown is concept work. Nobody outside Jagex has seen the renderer.
Announcement details, the RuneFest date and the Dragonwilds-expansion origin from PC Gamer’s and TechSpot’s reporting on the reveal. Dragonwilds’ 1.0 date and its Unreal Engine 5 basis from Jagex’s own store listing and the coverage of that launch. Runtime of the teaser is as described in reporting; it had not been possible to verify it directly from here.