World of Warcraft Was the Past. RuneScape Was the Future.
In 2004, Blizzard launched a premium, high-fidelity MMO in World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, RuneScape quietly ran a mass-market multiplayer RPG on 56k dial-up. Two decades later, modern tech is just catching up to RuneScape’s early edge computing and behavioral analytics. Here’s why chasing fidelity is a trap.