Interview: Runes of Magic

How did the idea for Runes of Magic come about?

John and Tony Tang, the founders of RuneWaker, are

passionate players themselves and especially enjoyed many of the MMOGs out there. And in everyone of these they discovered features they liked but that were never part of a single game. So they thought: why not create our own MMORPG with all the features we know players love so much and add our own ideas? A high-fantasy setting with a fascinating background story, widely enjoyed by players, combined with a huge amount of features make Runes of Magic so great and different from other products out there. Many of our features are unique and have never been seen in other games.

So you can say, Runes of Magic is a game developed by passionate gamers who wanted their dream of a MMORPG with all the features they love to come true.

How long did the game take to make?

Development began several years ago and never stands still: we are continuously adding new features, new zones and new content in general. So the development has been ongoing for four years and we will be adding new, interesting content for our players in the near coming future.

Not long ago we released Chapter II: The Elven Prophecy and the game became an even greater success. With it we added a new playable race, the elves, two new classes, the Druid and the Warden, new zones and new dungeons and more.

As you can see the world of Runes of Magic is continuously growing. The new chapter attracted many new players and is widely enjoyed by our new and long-time players alike. So we feel very encouraged to go on.

  Are you happy with how popular the game

  has become?

  Of course we are! The level of popularity

  Runes of Magic has reached amongst MMOG

  players assures us that we’re doing

  something pretty right. Our latest coup is the

  push into Web2.0, meaning we're going to

  those users not active on the forums and give

  those following our twitter feed, our Facebook

  updates and videos on YouTube a voice.

  The fantastic thing is, these new community

  platforms are bi-directional and so we’re not

  just feeding the outside world with information,

  new screenshots and so on, but we’re also

getting a lot of suggestions and feedback from our users. In addition to that we have a great and supportive community on our forums that loves to discuss new features and game mechanics. Their opinion about existing and new features alike is very helpful and we are getting a lot of valuable new ideas and impressions from them. Many of our players there are so dedicated to this game they almost know it as well as we do.

How did you choose the name for the game?

Runes play an important role in the background story of Runes of Magic, they are powerful magical artifacts created by the god Ayvenas. The runes are the very manifestation of all power within Taborea and its inhabitants. In fact they are the reason the world Taborea even exists.

He once created a world in his mind, watched it, manipulated it and finally tried to destroy it - but he only managed to destroy the book, containing the story of this world. As you can see from this brief snippet of the rather complex background story, runes are pretty

important for the players. Much of the magic in the world....