Why RuneScape creator Andrew Gower has returned to MMORPGs with Brighter Shores
A new game from Andrew Gower has been a long time coming.
The British development veteran is best known for creating the hit 2001 MMORPG RuneScape – a title that is still very running today – and co-founding Jagex. In 2010, he departed the studio and, that same year, set up a new outfit, Fen Research, with the aim of creating a brand-new game engine.
This tech would become known as FenForge.
"I love making engines, even more than I love making games, believe it or not," Gower laughs. "I saw that the computer game space was very, very competitive. I thought: 'Well, there's only two or three big engines. Maybe I can find a niche there'. I felt there was a lot that I could do to raise the bar in the quality of game engines." There was one small obstacle in Gower's mind: in order to sell and market a game engine, you usually need to have a project that showed off exactly what it was capable of.
"It's a bit chicken and egg, really," he explains. "The only way to promote an engine is to make a game to prove that it works because making games now requires a huge investment. No one is going to make that kind of investment on an unproven engine."
As a result, Fen started work on making games that used the FenForge tech as it was being created. Work on one such project began in 2013; 'Chasm game' was a real-time strategy settlement building title with simulation elements.
"You had people that you could give orders to go do different things. It was a very, very different game," Gower explains.
Over the course of three years, two staff at Fen created assets for Chasm, though no code was ever written for the project. But the game came to an end when it became apparent that there were a lot of people out there who wanted Andrew to return to his roots. As such, many of the assets built for Chasm were ultimately repurposed for Brighter Shores, an MMORPG.
"[While we were working on Chasm] every single person I spoke to asked whether I was working on another MMO," Gower says. "After however
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