'Next Gen' Runescape Project Accidentally Leaked by the Developer

The Runescape community is in a tizzy trying to figure out the meaning behind a logo that was accidentally revealed during a developer livestream on Friday. Runescape's community manager, 'Mod Shauny,' was hosting a walkthrough of the game's latest patch notes when, as the stream wound to a close, he apparently misclicked and displayed the logo for a few seconds. Once he realized his mistake, he faded the screen to black but forgot to mute his microphone and began panicking and saying that he was "about to lose [his] job." Another Runescape employee who was hosting the stream alongside him began to comfort him, explaining it was a simple mistake. All of this was being relayed live to an audience of hundreds.

Aside from that single image, there are no details on what this "Next Gen" project is or whether it's even related to Runescape at all. Jagex has apparently been working on something related for quite some time, according to a Reddit thread from 2015 linking to a now deleted job listing that was for a "next gen" MMO.

Runescape has received some massive updates in its time, bringing it from a game that used to look like this and now looks rather gorgeous. That said, the most recent overhaul, called NXT, happened only last year. It might be a stretch to think Next Gen is any kind of sequel to Runescape, but could either be another overhaul or something else entirely. 

It'll likely be some time before we find out for sure, according to David Osborne, Runescape's lead designer. "This was a slide from an internal company livestream, so there must have been something leftover from that," he wrote, before adding in another comment that people shouldn't "expect any further information any time soon."

Runescape is a classic MMO released in January 2001. The game has been changed a lot in the past 16 years. Whether "Next-Gen" is a completely new game or just a remastered version of Runescape is unknown. Which one do you prefer?