RuneScape developer Jagex is making an open world survival game, and it's looking for testers

Jagex is working on a new survival game set in the RuneScape universe, and it's looking for some help with an upcoming closed alpha test.

"Jagex is developing a new Survival game set in the RuneScape universe using Unreal Engine 5," today's message states. "We know Jagex is at its best when we're working with players, so we're looking to recruit playtesters for our Closed Alpha."

The RuneScape survival game was actually announced back in June 2022—alas, despite the passage of more than two years, the studio still hasn't revealed anything more about it. The new game is being built in Unreal Engine 5 and, well, it's RuneScape. Job listings on the Jagex website describe it very vaguely as taking place in "a rich immersive world" filled with "large and complex areas," which isn't really much to go on.

But with an alpha test incoming, it's reasonable to assume we'll be learning more about the game soon. To get into the test, if you're so inclined, you'll need to fill out a survey: It begins with basics like age, language, and location, before moving into more specific questions about whether you're familiar with RuneScape, what survival games you've played in the past, and whether you're willing to actually play like a tester (sinking lots of hours into it, providing feedback via other surveys and Discord) and sign an NDA. Assuming you give a green light to all of the above, you'll also need to provide your Steam and Discord account info, and your PC specs.

I do reflexively wonder whether the world needs yet another survival game, but one based on RuneScape could have, as colleague Harvey Randall might put it, the juice. RuneScape has been around in one form or another since 2001, while Old School RuneScape (which, ironically, is not as old as RuneScape, although RuneScape has evolved well beyond its original roots, it's complicated) appeared in 2013.

Both games have maintained dedicated followings, and when I say "dedicated" I mean they do things like spending thousands of hours catching a million crappy fish for no particular reason, or grinding an irritating minigame for 149 hours so they could get a pet raccoon without committing a crime (which is also ironic because, as we all know, raccoons are the most infamous criminals of the animal kingdom). So who knows? With a crowd like that behind it, a RuneScape survival game might just be the next big thing.

First things first, though: The alpha test. Once the signup survey is completed, you'll get a "registration successful" message and a reminder to keep an eye on your email for further updates. There's no indication as to how many players Jagex is looking for right now, and as for when those updates will start flowing? Like everything else about Jagex's new survival game at this point, that too is a mystery.