Twenty-three years after developing RuneScape, Andrew and Paul Gower have announced a new MMO, Brighter Shores, which has been in development at the Gowers' studio Fen Research for 10 years and appears to be an attempt to reimagine RuneScape for the year 2024. Brighter Shores seems to be an attempt to rebuild RuneScape for 2024. Take, for example, the bots that have long been prevalent in RuneScape.

"Obviously, you can't get rid of bots completely," Andrew Gower told PCG in a recent interview. Of course, that means a lot of things: according to Gower, studios "design the economy of the game so that a lot of people botting won't break it," and "the whole way instantiation works is that you're not standing in a lump and there's tons of bots around you. It's not (that) there are no bots".

But it also means something a bit more unorthodox: a "legitimate way" to bot the game.

According to Gower, one of the ways Bright Shores tries to minimize "tedious gameplay" is through the ability to "set your character to continue [activities] while you log out." This means you don't have to "spend hours and hours leveling up." Instead, you can set your character to get on with grinding while you are away. While [your character] is fishing every night, you might be fighting," or vice versa."

"I think most of the reason people use things like bots," he says, "is frustration with the ground. That makes some sense: RuneScape is so well-known for its hard work that there is a story on this site that it took eight months (or 2,500 hours) to beat a particular boss and get a rare drop.

At some point, players will think, "I can't stand another 10 hours of chopping down this tree," and out of desperation will resort to bots. By offering such players a legal alternative in the game, Bright Shores hopes to get to the root of the problem." We want to discourage people from breaking the rules on a massive scale."

There are safe ways to avoid being banned.

I am intrigued by how this theory could be implemented in practice. To keep things fair, and to avoid accidentally creating games that don't actually need to be played, Gower said that Bright Shores' automated system "doesn't give you XP as fast as if you did it yourself."

Similarly, while there are no doubt many people who play RuneScape with bots to get away from playing RuneScape personally, many bots are run by shady players who make money in the real world by selling their ill-gotten gains online The Bright Shores is on track. Once Bright Shores gets off the ground, it is unlikely that legitimate bot methods will have much of an impact, but only after the game hits Steam in the third quarter of this year will we know for sure.