The Jagex Factor

Tens of millions. A large sum: an eye-watering amount. We weren't cavalier about it. That really focused our minds. There's years of salary in there. Nevertheless, would we put our reputation at stake for tens of millions? Never.

Absolutely. Whether we can afford it or not is academic. If it's not right, we won't launch it, simple as that. And again, that's not a decision we take lightly. We're not trivialising it nor are we being arrogant about our success, but our community has come to fondly regard us and respect us as a purveyor of high quality games. You can take on board that we haven't done a traditional new release now for 10 years. We rely on that good will, that trust, so they can play, take, buy our next product. It's crucial. Finances won't rule that decision.

No, no. The team size is as significant as previously. 75? Yep, 75 people.

Look, we are being more cautious. We're certainly not being more sparing. What we did this time is we had the wisdom of hindsight. We could look at MechScape and go, "What went wrong?" And on a lot of things we didn't ask the difficult questions first. "What is combat? How does the economy work? How will trade work?" These are very boring questions, but until you know exactly makes the game fun, raw fun, you can't actually put the game around it.

When we went back to the drawing board on this one, the design team spent literally months saying, "Ignore what we've got, ignore how we want to play, let's answer these difficult questions. Let's talk about balance." Infinitely balancing components of a game you've yet to build when everyone tends to do it the other way round. As a result of locking down that game design Bible, the team has been able to develop really, really rapidly. And crucially it's now fun. We've now got a game we're all enormously proud of.

We're not finished, but we feel confident enough that it's coming together that actually we are going to be able to go into beta... We'll be able to go live when we think we will.

Can't say. Internally, of course we have deadlines and everything else, but I wouldn't want to hamstring the team to that.

Can't say much about it without giving away the game itself.

It does have multiple facets of gameplay. [The PR interjects: "We'll happily tell Eurogamer everything in due course."]

Yeah... That wasn't true. That was an ambition, it wasn't a reality.