Jagex officially announced an indefinite pause on PZ today (trying not to ride the SEO coattails here… shortened form) - somber day for the people waiting patiently on it!
Regardless of where your opinion stands, I’d like to recognize those developer’s efforts they are people too and having your work shelved is never fun.
Based on their screenshots and walkthrough they had a UI with options that hooked into some existing parts already. They weren’t going to release with scripting support and weren’t going to let you replay leagues (no relics), though you could enable some parts from leagues i.e. region locking. You weren’t going to be able to run older versions of the game and there was no monetization to self-fund it or become a new career option (if you are profit driven)
It was similar to Minecraft Realms in this iteration!
Pricing was never announced but I always thought it would have to be $30/mo minimum to rent a world and probably scale up for more player slots/benefits. That’s speculation of course.
What do you think?
Remember - Zanaris was never meant to preserve the game, so it wasn’t suitable for our goals anyways.
Sorry to the devs that got relocated before seeing their effort get into people’s hands. Thanks for working on the current iteration of the game and carrying the torch Andrew lit all those years ago!
We have our differences but I hope for the best for their games, while we work to save lost history.
Sounds like a case of the “too hard basket”. With the feature set planned I don’t think anyone would have been that pleased and it would have been a big lift to get even close to expectations.
I’m surprised it was ever on the cards at all - not really sure what was in it for them (Jagex).
I’ve spoken at length with RSPS devs about moving to Zanaris. Some key takeaways:
If you look at Minecraft servers and the immense impact they have on the game, it’s undeniably positive. Some (very successful) RSPS devs believe Jagex investors are too stupid to see this benefit, so when Project Zanaris was pitched, they only wanted toggles in an attempt to preserve game IP. As a result, nothing you could have built on Project Zanaris would have been interesting
Jagex has shut down private servers over the last 24 months with the explicit call of Zanaris coming (I have seen the litigation docs). This adds a legal defense that RSPS does not compete against OSRS for playerbase, since Jagex’s own litigation docs suggest RSPS a competitor to Project Zanaris rather than Runescape. This is important because for Jagex to pursue financial settlement they have to prove damages, and this is now harder to do.
There is potential for Jagex making Runescape an open engine, fully customizable experience – But if you take away anything from this chapter, just know Project Zanaris was never that.
I would like to have seen what they would have done with it atleast, osrs gmod type servers would be interesting most games have some sort of custom servers now a days anyway I assume they were trying to get into that market. Giving players some sort of map editor and the right tools would be sick.
I thought since they showed some leagues style features they were going to do something for leagues 6 where the community makes it (do a competition etc) given some sort of story/theme.
it is a shame indeed, people could have build some interesting servers regarding what was available to do in the project, still will not have been even close to what lost city is offering
That’s the thing - you couldn’t even do this. There was clearly alignment issues within Jagex about what capabilities they were allowed to give players, because it was clear that people wanted to build private servers, but all Jagex was offering were hundreds of toggles that modify content behavior.
I immediately read this and was disappointed. There’s so many potentially creative projects that could have come from PZ. Hopefully they revisit it at some point.
i do like when jagex explores other gamemodes, thats how we ended up with DMM. but their execution is always terrible so in the end of the day we didn’t lose anything. we will be so much better off once jagex is forgotten and runescape lives on through fans and not a soulless corporation like jagex.
they are people too and having your work shelved is never fun.
