The Next Generation of RuneScape is here. NXT arrived faster than I would have expected. I suppose that getting the game out sooner will really help push the sales for the summer and the projects lined up down the pipe in the future. I am falling in love with RuneScape once more. Never have I left so immersed with this game.

To begin, the new client runs extremely smooth in populated areas which goes a long way to helping framerates when there are many things going on at the same time. This is something that was pushed to the limits with Java, but just could not be improved upon much more.
The lighting is better than I remembered from the beta, I’m not sure if anything was actually done to improve it but I see areas of growth like weather patterns and night and day cycles in the future when the java client is ditched.

This brings me to the main point of this Informer article. When will Jagex drop the Java client? What does that mean for the players?
Like many things I expect the Java client to be a nasty growth on Jagex’s back that they look at every day in the mirror but refuse to do anything about. I understand that they have intentions to remove the Java client as soon as possible, but they have been needing to do that for a lot of updates to the game that take literal years to address. Jagex like any big company is slow to move on making changes and assuming that the Java client will disappear by the end of this year would be getting one’s hopes up.

At the end of the day, the player base will be the ones that dictate when Jagex can even consider switching over to the new client and closing up shop with java. If there are still a large majority of players using the java client by the end of the year, then there could be some financial issues again for Jagex. I don’t think that Jagex won’t push the new client though. They push membership to non members pretty hard. They have a knack of really overdoing things, but right now I don’t see much of that regardless of which version of the client I am playing on.

If I had to throw my best guess out as to when the Java client will go away, would be in 10 to 12 months. This is the not so busy time at Jagex, it’s not too far out in the future and would give a solid summer and winter for new players to join in only using the new client. Along the way, Jagex would push harder and harder to run on the new client until a message would just sit on the top of the Java client window.

So what benefits would go into the new client being the only supported client? Well I can start by saying the dev time to create new content will decrease. This means more complex things can be done. I would also say slightly more advanced boss mechanics and size would be a thing that might be one of the first major releases at the time of the drop.

I think the biggest noticeable difference will be what Jagex is able to do for both map size and model quality. I am not saying that they will change the style of the game, but that Jagex will continue to do more advanced stuff to the models in the game.

I hope that Jagex does not forget the areas of the game in need of a major update graphics wise as it becomes more and more apparent every day. I also hope that the map does not continue to become an overcrowded mess of content that is half dead. They have the opportunity to really expand the world map and create a sense of adventure and wonder. I am sure that this is the plan with the eastern lands. But that is a topic for another time.

Overall I a really happy with how smooth the release for the NXT actually was. I was surprised that there seemed to be a quality difference to the beta that really pushed the game to the next level. It has recharged by love for the game and I commend everyone that worked on it. I hope that this will mean many more years of Runescape to come. I hope this means the continued increase in quality to the game. In my opinion, Runescape 3 has finally arrived as it was intended.

What do you all think of the NXT now that it’s released and what are you hoping for in the future? I am extremely curious so let me know! And as always Happy Gaming!