Jagex Is Making a Fourth RuneScape MMO — And This One Finally Leaves the Past Behind

Monday, October 5, 2026 — RuneScape is 25 years old, which means somewhere out there is a grown adult who learned to type by negotiating for coal in Varrock. This weekend, at RuneFest in Birmingham, Jagex told that entire generation — and the ones that came after — that there will be a fourth RuneScape MMO. It’s called RS4 for now, and if the name sounds like a placeholder, that’s because it is one. What isn’t a placeholder: it’s being built in Unreal Engine, it’s set in the Sixth Age of Gielinor, and it begins on the continent of Ashenfall, years after the events of RuneScape: Dragonwilds.

Stop and consider what that means. RuneScape has spent a quarter century as a technological palimpsest — Java clients, browser roots, engine upgrades layered on engine upgrades, all in service of a world that never stopped running. An Unreal Engine RuneScape isn’t just a sequel. It’s the franchise finally agreeing to leave the house it grew up in.

What Jagex actually announced

Both RPGamer and VGC confirmed the core facts out of the RuneFest keynote. The game is the fourth title in the series after RuneScape, Old School RuneScape, and RuneScape: Dragonwilds. It has no official title yet — RS4 is strictly a working name, and several outlets are already treating “RuneScape 4” as a nickname Jagex hasn’t signed off on. It’s an independent experience that sits alongside the other games rather than succeeding them: its own dedicated team, its own updates, its own road.

The story opens in Ashenfall, the landmass northeast of the familiar world that players first explored in Dragonwilds — the continent at the heart of that game’s first year of updates. The timeline is set years after Dragonwilds and the fall of the Dragon Queen Kuldra, and Jagex says Ashenfall is only the starting point: the plan is to grow into both familiar parts of Gielinor and new ones over time.

The project’s origin story is telling. According to PC Gamer’s reporting, echoed across the RuneFest coverage, RS4 grew out of a planned Dragonwilds expansion: playtesters kept asking for a more traditional MMO take on Dragonwilds’ setting and look — persistent servers, bigger player counts, social tools, trading hubs — and the idea kept growing until it became a game of its own. That’s a very Jagex way for a game to be born: the players asked, and the studio listened, and the scope refused to stay in the box.

“Not a replacement for any of our games”

This is the sentence that matters most, and Jagex put it in quotes for a reason. Every MMO community has the same scar tissue: the sequel announcement that reads, to veteran ears, as a sunset notice for the game they’ve played for a decade. Jagex went out of its way to say RS4 comes with its own dedicated development team, that each game in the lineup keeps its own team and its own investment, and that the new title is another way to explore Gielinor — not a migration target.

The studio also explained why it’s announcing something that is, by its own admission, still a few years from release. In the RuneFest statement, Jagex said it thought long and hard about revealing the project this early, that it could have kept it behind closed doors much longer — and then chose not to, because early community involvement is the RuneScape way:

“For 25 years, RuneScape has been shaped by its players. We’ve learned that our games are at their best when we build with you, not just for you. So we want to do that from the beginning.”— Jagex, in the RS4 reveal statement at RuneFest, as reported by VGC

It’s a nice line, and it’s also a bet. Announcing years early buys you community input and years of scrutiny in equal measure. But for a franchise whose entire identity is player-shaped development — polls, betas, the endless negotiation between developers and a community that treats patch notes as scripture — secrecy was never really on brand.

Why Unreal Engine is the real headline

The setting and the story are nice, but the engine is the earthquake. RuneScape’s identity has always been bound up with its technology — the game you could run on a school computer in 2005, the client that evolved in public for two decades. Moving the fourth MMO to Unreal Engine is Jagex saying the future of the franchise doesn’t have to be built on the foundation of its past. It’s a modern visual baseline, a modern toolset, and — just as importantly — a signal to a generation of players who bounced off the old tech that the door is open.

There’s a design philosophy attached, too. Jagex says integrity and permanent progression will be central to RS4’s design — language that lands differently in 2026 than it would have in 2016. This is a studio that has watched the MMO genre wrestle with monetization, with seasonal resets, with the slow erosion of player trust, and is planting its flag early: your progress is permanent, the game is built with you. It’s too early for platforms, accounts, membership, combat, or skills — Jagex said as much — but the values are stated upfront, and that’s deliberate.

The rest of the RuneFest haul

RS4 was the headline, but it wasn’t the whole show. The existing games got serious attention, starting with the one that lands soonest: RuneScape Reignited releases December 2, 2026, and it’s a fascinating package. A brand-new character type. A brand-new economy and hi-score tables with no paid progression available — read that again — while still interacting with existing characters and worlds. A remastered early main story and a new Adventure Guide. It’s essentially a fresh-start server with design intent, and the “no paid progression” line is doing a lot of work in a year when players are allergic to monetization schemes.

The 2027 roadmap for the main game brings three update arcs: Hoard of Dragons, The City of Gnomes, and Secrets of Karamja — a mixture of content rolling out across the year. Old School RuneScape and Dragonwilds got their own roadmaps and new content reveals as well. The message of the weekend was unmistakable: the old games aren’t being wound down, they’re being invested in, and the new one is an addition, not a replacement. For a community that has watched too many franchises eat their own young, that framing is the whole ballgame.

You can watch the RS4 teaser trailer — it’s a short concept piece, art direction rather than gameplay, with dragon riders over open valleys. Jagex plans to share more next year, including how players can start getting involved. And if you want a sense of where MMOs are going right now, yesterday’s AION 2 launch is the other side of the same coin: big swings, Unreal engines, and studios betting that the genre’s best days aren’t behind it. October’s Game Pass lineup is there too, for everything that isn’t an MMO.