Jagex Hires Three, Including Creative Director For Unannounced Action RPG

Jagex has some new high-level hires, and they're be set to work on RuneScape, as well as other projects. For starters, both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape have new executive producers. Ryan Ward arrives from Blizzard Entertainment, where he was the product director for Overwatch, following stints at Epic Games, Nexon, LucasArts, CCP, and BioWare. Old School Runescape's new executive producer is Rob Hendry, who was most recently the head of studio at NaturalMotion. In his 20 years in the gaming industry, he also spent time at Warthog Studios UK and Ideaworks.

Jagex's third hire is Gavin Irby, who has a wide range of MMO experience, having served as design lead for Destiny 2 and lead content designer for Rift, as well as spending time at Carbine Studios and Flying Lab Software. While he was quoted as saying that he was happy "to have the opportunity to help bring RuneScape to a new audience," he's also listed in the press release as being the "Creative Director working on the company’s unannounced online action role-playing game." This is likely the same game CCP veteran Nathan Richardsson is heading up at Jagex, and when we reached out to Jagex to confirm Irby's role(s), they confirmed that he will be working on the new game but it was also "possible that he'll do some work on RuneScape."

We first learned about Jagex's plans for a new game over two years ago, but it looks like we'll have to wait a little longer to find out exactly what the company has in store. Only 11 1/2 more months or so until the next RuneFest!