DarkScape

» see darkscape.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

darkscape launched on 16 september 2015 as a separate server world from runescape 3, forked off the same content but with a different rule set. the pitch was open-world player-versus-player: outside of a few safe zones, anyone could attack anyone. jagex had spent years listening to the veteran runescape audience ask for a harder, riskier variant, and darkscape was the answer to that ask.

the answer came out awkwardly. most of runescape's daily loop is skill grinding at fixed nodes: mining a rock, chopping a tree, fishing a spot, standing still at an anvil. those loops assume you can leave the screen for a moment. in darkscape you could not, because a level-fifty stranger might drop out of the sky and end your session. within a few weeks the population had thinned out to the true pvp-hunters, who then discovered there were fewer skill-grinders to hunt than they had hoped.

i was not a runescape player. by 2015 i was thirty-one, working as an engineer in ankara, and my mmo memory was uo private servers from the university years, not the jagex world. darkscape sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. what got the game onto the rip.so queue is the shutdown itself: on 28 march 2016 jagex closed the servers with a notice that literally used the phrase "lack of interest." that is unusually direct language for a mmo obituary, and it earned its own paragraph in wikipedia.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the design problem ~

runescape has a very specific shape as an economy. players grind low-tier skills to make basic goods, feed those goods to higher-tier crafters, and slowly move up the tech tree. that whole shape depends on a large peaceful base of grinders. take the peaceful base away, and the higher tiers have nothing to buy from and nothing to sell to.

darkscape kept the runescape crafting tree intact but added the pvp layer over it, and the two systems worked against each other. the pvp side wanted targets. the crafting side wanted uninterrupted afk time. by month two the crafting side had mostly left, which meant the pvp side ran out of prey. jagex tried tuning the safe zones and the risk-versus-reward math on drops, but the underlying structural conflict did not resolve.

~ how it ended ~

on 26 february 2016 jagex announced the closure. the servers ran for another month while players logged in for last runs and screenshots. on 28 march 2016 darkscape shut down. the reason given was lack of interest, which is one of the more honest phrasings a big publisher has used at the end of a live game.

jagex did the right cleanup afterward. items that had been unique to darkscape were folded back into runescape via events and rewards, so the six months of grinding people had done were not wholly lost. the darkscape brand itself was retired and did not resurface.

~ what it was really testing ~

darkscape reads best as jagex running a live experiment on whether the vocal segment of the runescape community asking for hardcore pvp actually matched a large enough population to sustain a separate server world. the answer was no. that is a useful piece of data to have, and running the experiment openly under a labeled brand for six months is a cleaner way to get it than tacking a hardcore mode onto the main game and finding out the hard way.

the runescape audience got a series of pvp-focused world events and mini-modes on the main game in the years after, calibrated to what darkscape had shown was actually wanted: pvp as an occasional flavor, not as the default rule. that inheritance is subtle but real. darkscape's six-month life is the paid version of a market survey jagex now runs cheaper.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »