RuneScape: Idle Adventures is a game with a pretty self-explanatory title. It’s not something with a competitive edge, or a need to overcome great hardship in a tumultuous story, but rather something altogether more relaxed and, well, idle.
When Jagex started talking about one of the fastest growing new genres of gaming in recent years, I was a little confused. Though I’ve played a handful of what they call “idle games”, I’d never really pondered the genre into which they fit. Cookie Clicker is almost certainly the best known of these, as you initially start off clicking to make cookies, using the points earned to hire people, machines and much, much more to make cookies faster than you could possibly manage yourself.
The key aspect is that you can simply walk away and let the game keep playing by itself. Once you’ve set up the early apparatus, your role is more about creating a more and more expansive machine that will simply continue to succeed on your behalf. There is no stopping these games – other than to close them down – and they will simply continue to progress and reward you. It can border on being a zero-player game.
The genre started as a pastiche of the kind of reward heavy free-to-play Facebook games. Hyper Hippo’s Cody Vigue explained that “Other games will do stuff like give you daily reward bonuses, where you log back in and it’s like, ‘Hey! You did it! You’re great!’ Idle games are a little bit better, because all of those great choices that you made? They made you even more than you would have made if you’d logged out without setting things up.”
Idle Adventures comes from a happy marriage between Jagex and Hyper Hippo. Jagex have the popular fantasy world of RuneScape and are looking to expand into new areas to celebrate their 15th anniversary, with the growth of idle games an avenue they wanted to explore, but instead of going after it by themselves – as they have done for their interesting card game, Chronicle: RuneScape Legends – they turned to the creators of one of the most popular idle games in the Jagex offices. The creators of AdVenture Capitalist, Hyper Hippo just so happened to be RuneScape fans from way back when.
AdVenture Capitalist starts off with squeezing lemons, opening pizza chains, and so on, tapping or clicking away until you can afford someone to do it for you. Idle Adventures, however, will benefit from being stepped in the lore of the RuneScape world, leading to something that should hopefully feel more like an RPG, just one that’s been simplified and boiled down to the barest of basics.
It starts with creating your character, the gigantic World Guardian, before setting them off to go and look after the world of Gielinor. Your job is quite simply to set them off and complete various tasks in the background of the rest of your day to day life, whether it’s training, fighting or questing.
“It’s a multi-tiered system,” Cody said. “Where Sally goes matters, because not every town is made the same. Some towns will have skills that other towns down, and every skill has something that it does for the character and also how much currency it generates. That’s choice number one.
“Choice number two is what Sally herself is doing. She can only do one thing at a time by herself, so where you put her will give her a bonus to whatever she’s doing and that’s also the skill that she’s practicing. So before you log out, you might see that you fire making is low, set her on fire making, log out, and when you come back the next day, she’s levelled up three times.
“Then the third thing is all the story that we’re doing. There are going to be factions in the game which vie to get you to work for them, and as the player you can play friends with everyone, or you can say that a god is the best, a faction is the best, this land is the best, and you want to really back them up.”
And, of course, having that world and that lore to draw upon is what could potentially elevate this game above other idle game efforts. Though it will boil down to making a few decisions and then getting on with other things, your character wields a newly revealed Elder Artefact – mythical and powerful items at the heart of RuneScape’s world. However, they’re aiming for something light-hearted and comedic along the way.
This is very much a separate entity – though Jagex hope complimentary – to the main RuneScape world. Nothing that happens here has an impact on a character in the MMO, but as Cody said, that was something that was considered.
“The short answer to that is that, when we were talking about how you’re chopping down trees, you’re making money, you’re blacksmithing, our first thoughts were, ‘Can we have that feed back into the game?’
“The problem with that is that I think one of the secrets the the appeal of idle games, or at least for Ad Cap, is that you have these explosive numbers, and you don’t really care that they get kind of out of control. I mean, the top purchase in Ad Cap is, like, $10283, and that’s hilarious! We kind of knew that it would be impossible to balance an economy in the idle game with the economy of RuneScape, which is really balanced and it’s really important that it’s balanced.
“So we’ve talked about other ways that you can connect. Maybe there’s something you can earn in the idle game that you can transfer to the MMO, or vice versa Those are still very much in the earliest stages, but we quickly said that it wouldn’t work to have a direct correlation.”
Idle games are still an unusual concept to me, like a joke where I can see why people would find it funny, but where I don’t have the cultural touchstone. I’ll dabble with them very occasionally for a short amount of time, but it’s that one decision to have this be a separate entity alongside RuneScape’s main world which means that anyone will be able to jump in and get the most out of Idle Adventures.
Idle Adventures is coming to PC in spring, with an iOS and Android release planned for later this year.