RuneScape Reaches 250M Accounts, Multiple Expansions Planned

Jagex's yearly celebration of RuneScape, RuneFest, has come and gone, having taken place last Saturday. During the event, Jagex made several major announcements, the first of which is that, perhaps fittingly, the game reached the 250 million accounts registered milestone earlier this month, putting the momentous occasion squarely within the year of its 15th anniversary.

Starting in June 2017, RuneScape will receive new expansions every three months. Dubbed "RuneScape Expansions," and referred to as "a series of major extensions to the game world," each expansion will add a new area or region that contains content that promotes exploration.

The first of these expansions will give players access to "the Golden City of Menaphos," which you can see in the trailer below. According to Jagex, the city "has been hiding in the game for the past 10 years." It is described as follows.

Menaphos is a vast, sandbox of an open city, that is full of hanging gardens, streams and buildings trimmed with gold. A huge pyramid, a mastaba, looms over the city. The people of Menaphos are uniformly wealthy but eye new arrivals with suspicion. However, underneath their arrogance is fear. Their ruler, the Pharaoh, is a puppet for Amascut, the devourer god and he makes cruel demands of them…

RuneScape Lead Designer David Osborne had the following to say about the announcement of RuneScape Expansions.

Like so much of our game content, the concept of regular RuneScape Expansions came from player feedback. They told us they were overwhelmingly interested in bigger, more significant updates that would make massive additions to the game. Other games may offer these once per year or less, but RuneScape has always done things differently. RuneScape Expansions will deliver a new sense of discovery and exploration more frequently with each expansion as big as 2014’s Lost City of the Elves, arriving on a single day, four times a year. It’s like Christmas coming every three months and it begins in June 2017 as the city gates of Menaphos are finally opened.

The core RuneScape game will also be receiving "dynamic, gameplay-affecting weather." All current "major storylines" will be ending by the end of the year and "the second part of the Eastern Lands archipelago" should be released around the same time.

Old School RuneScape hasn't been forgotten; raids will be introduced to the older edition of RuneScape by the end of the month.

Additionally, the SpecialEffect charity awarded the entire playerbase a Golden Gnome for raising "around £200,000" for it since 2014. A virtual version of the Gnome is now an in-game statue that can be viewed by everyone.