Jagex Is Building a Fourth RuneScape Game in Unreal Engine
Jagex is developing a fourth major RuneScape game using Unreal Engine under the working title RS4. The company announced the project during RuneFest, its annual RuneScape convention, with a plan to reveal more details next year Engadget.
The timeline is long. RS4 is still a few years away from release. It is in early development and is being built by its own dedicated team at Jagex TechPowerUp.
Jagex says RS4 is designed to sit alongside the existing RuneScape titles, not replace them. The existing games have persistent characters, player economies and regular update schedules.
The setting is Gielinor in the Sixth Age, years after the events of RuneScape: Dragonwilds. Players will start in the Ashenfall area first revealed in RuneScape: Dragonwilds. The project was originally conceived as a RuneScape: Dragonwilds expansion called Shadows of Ashenfall before becoming a standalone game.
Jagex is pointing players to an official page for the new RuneScape MMO at play.runescape.com/4. The page is titled "A new RuneScape age is coming".
The broader context here is architectural as much as creative. Unreal Engine, a widely used engine for building games, changes the tools Jagex uses, how art and levels move into the game, and how the game runs across PCs. The practical questions are how to produce enough content at MMO scale, how servers control game state, how patching and PC compatibility are handled, and how much account and backend infrastructure can be shared without linking the live games.
In my view, the expansion-to-standalone origin and the dedicated team go together. Content usually outgrows an expansion when systems, maps or story no longer fit without compromise. Making Shadows of Ashenfall into RS4 preserves Dragonwilds while giving Ashenfall its own progression, onboarding and rules. A separate team avoids competition for build and release time, like separate workshops in the same company, but it means parallel work on engine tweaks, editors and testing for years. The risk is unchecked scope, so the multi-year timeline is sensible.
Worth flagging is what coexistence allows if done well. Parallel titles can fit different session lengths, play patterns and hardware needs while sharing Gielinor. That supports gradual adoption based on capability and preference rather than a cutoff, and gives each version room to develop.
