Funny thread : I was talking about it with some friends a few days ago and wanted to see if some people were wondering about a "remastered" version of the game, to summarize my discussion with some friends, from a simple player view and from a developer / project manager PoV :
We can all agree there is a ton of positive aspects and good ideas into the game : runes, add stats to your gear, jewel things, double classes combos and so on which have been destroyed because Runes of Magic have been thought as a simple F2P-cash grab copy of World of Warcraft.
Even if the game wasn't bad (and from my point of view, I think the game was pretty amazing when he has been released), we can also agree on the thing that from let's say.. 65/70 to now, there is barely nothing new that have been added, except bugs and copy/paste of what have been done before.
I wanna say it because a lot of players forgot it : the background beyond the game history is.. really cool? Even with the few last zones they released.
But, the game has not evolved for 8+ years - It was a decent copy of WoW at some point but did not evolved like WoW did - Dungeons are still based on pretty simple mechanics (which are bugged most of the time) and I'm not talking about textures that are still the same today.
So, what is required to make Runes Of Magic great again from a player PoV?
- total textures revamp
- dungeons rework to ensure the game is not an eternal gear-check and to make it challenging aside of "Is my gear good enough ?"
- in-game economy should be also reworked so we're not just playing a cash-grab P2W game
- PvP-wise, the game is/was a terrible mess and would probably require some love
- and I'm not talking about some toxic mechanics of the game that have been adeed and just bored most of people (Proof of Myths, mini-games currency and so on) that would also required to be reworked
And we just talked about what would be needed from THE PLAYER point of view..
I try to spend some time into the code and things related to it and I think anyone who spent sometime into it could agree on this : It just feel like a pile of crappy mess that have been randomly put and is somehow working, god knows why.
There are just so many things that would need some time to be rewritten, changed, refactored etc..
I hope some guys here know the concept of "technical debt" and can understand how insane this debt is concerning this videogame...
Oh and yeah, I did not mention that the tools that have been used to make this game are purely not enough to make a game that would would "Ok" in 2022 so there is also a ton of work and time to put into these tools.
Before giving my personal opinion of what might be the best way to make Runes great again, I also wanna mention that the game still belongs to RW so, as far as I know, any effort put to make Runes better than what he is would be wasted since theorically you're just now allowed to do it and I highly doubt that RW gonna publish the source code and say "our game is dead, we offer this to the community and wish they can keep it alive", I'm almost sure that I've read and heard that several people tried to contact them and nothing was possible.
Yeah, private servers are alive but we all know why are they all destined to die : they are dedicated to the RoM community, which is going smaller and smaller every year and they are barely no new comer in it.
What I think and we all agreed while talking about it is that Runes of Magic is dead and can't be saved even if RW & GF allow people and the community to work on it for all the reasons I mentionned about how crappy anything related to how the game is technicly.
The best way to keep Runes Of Magic universe would probably be a project "inspired" from it but designed from scratch with modern tools - UE4/5 and so on.. But that's also the most expensive option and I don't think a RoM fan got enough money, knowledge and time to make this dream alive..
I'm not familiar with Ragezone but feels free to contact if you wanna talk more about it