I tried to fight for RuneScape's sharksuit, but Jagex were having none of it – "it's for the greater good"

“We want to put Runescape back on the map,” associate director of design Ryan Philpott says. But, reader, I need you to know the cost of this metaphorical cartography. Over the years, the Monty Python-infused medieval world of RuneScape has expanded in many directions. It’s gained new landmasses, professions, raids, and characters, but also many many many odder cosmetics. Some of them, like the delightful sharksuit, walk a distinctly non-medieval path.

Philpott says these are a problem. The meanie.

For the first ten years, Philpott explains, RuneScape had a clear style, “you could see it’s very medieval fantasy”. However, as Jagex leaned into monetisation, they introduced a lot of features that muddied those waters. Philpott points to the sharksuit, a cosmetic added in 2015 that could initially only be acquired through Treasure Hunter, a microtransaction-funded event.

Now, I like the Shark outfit, I think any cosmetic that turns your fishing animation into a shark with legs scoffing down fish is a good thing. But I don’t play RuneScape, so my opinion on this matter counts for nought. Philpott takes a different line, saying the team should have asked “Does this fit in the game?” before messing with its more straight medieval fantasy theme.

“Maybe in the market at the time, the idea of dressing up as a shark sounds cool in concept, but is it cool for RuneScape?,” Philpott continues, shaming my love for the sharksuit with every passing word. “And over the last 10 years there’s loads of those little things. There are character cosmetics in the world that don’t match the world anymore. We want to ground everything again.”

There are players telling Jagex that the game “‘doesn’t feel like my RuneScape anymore'”, Philpott says. “We want to be the RuneScape we always were. Getting this game back to exactly what we feel in our heart, is exactly where I want to go.”

It’s an odd problem for Jagex, considering the developer already has a version of its MMO that appeals exactly to the player who wants the older game flavour: Old School RuneScape. “It’s often spoken about as ‘You shouldn’t play RuneScape because of X, Y, and Z, you should play Old School,” Philpott says. “But Runescape is an amazing game.”

If Jagex can ‘declutter’ RuneScape, as the recently published roadmap calls it, Philpott thinks the benefits of the classic MMO will shine through. “You don’t have an amazing garden if it’s full of weeds. But if you remove the weeds, it’s like ‘Damn, look at this’,” Philpott says. “Making an MMO today is nigh on impossible. You release an MMO, even if you spent five years making it, players want to play 16 hours a day, right? They want to complete the content within the first few weeks. We have 25 years of content. This is a whole package that no one else in the industry is offering.”

This world decluttering is just one of many changes Jagex are planning for the coming year. The team are also modernising combat, updating the UI, overhauling the art assets of different regions on the world map, and beginning the process of balancing the game to bring everything back into kilter after 25 years of expansion. It’s an ambitious plan, especially as they intend to release new content alongside all of these updates to older material.

I did ask how they’ve landed on what time period fans mean by ‘My RuneScape’. After all, surely it’s different for every player. A player who first started playing and enjoying RuneScape 25 years ago will have a very different version of the game they’re missing compared to someone 15 years ago, or even five years ago. A player might love the disparate clash of medieval fantasy and fantastical fantasy that comes from a character in a sharksuit talking to someone dressed as a knight. In cutting that material out of the game, could they risk alienating players?

“It’s tricky to determine,” Philpott says. “We’ve been RuneScape 3 since 2013. We’ve been RuneScape 3 longer than we haven’t. Finding the right time period is difficult and we might get it wrong to some degree, but we want to give it a bloody good shot.” He goes on to point out that when the team floated the possibility of removing Treasure Hunter, the microtransactions system added to RuneScape in 2014, the video positing the change reached further and was received more positively than anything the team has put out before. Jagex believe there are people who want to rejoin RuneScape or could discover it but only if they make those changes.

And, to people like me, who think a sharksuit is pretty nifty, Philpott has some hard words: “Some of the changes we’re going to make might make some of our current players less than happy, but it’s for the greater good of the game long term. It’s just the nature of change. We’ve shied away from that in recent years, but long term [it hurts the game] and we want RuneScape to last another 25 years. We want to have that 50th year anniversary.”

Sorry, shark lovers, I tried. I really did.