RuneScape 2

I have been made fun of for my love of this game for a long time. When I replayed Old School, my friends made fun of the fact that I put so much time into this game. Hell, I made fun of myself for that (I renamed the steam shortcut of it things like “Why/10” and “literal shit”). It’s been a strange, abusive relationship for me to enjoy this game for me all of these years. Not only in those insults that have been thrown at me, but in Jagex’s attempts to drive this game into the ground on more than one occasion, and yet still have me waste 2-3 thousand hours on this fucking thing (if I had to guess.) And I get it. I get why people don't like the game, it’s the posterchild of millennial nostalgia, and is joked about constantly for having that title in various ways. And I will admit that to some extent, it deserves that position. It looks like garbage (at first glance), it’s stupidly grindy even for an MMORPG and things like this were, to some extent, important to the culture of the game. But trust me when I say it is not nostalgia fueling this rating 100%, there is some value in Runescape, even if it’s not noticeable at first glance. When Oldschool Runescape came out, I replayed the game on 2 separate accounts, one of them being an ironman account (which means I didn’t trade or get help in general except for the Shield of Arrav & Heroes Quest quests) and still loved the ~500 - 750 hours I put into to it (And to be totally honest, if the community wasn’t mostly garbage I’d probably still be playing it). Nostalgia doesn’t really fuel that sort of dedication or enjoyment. There is a legitimate reason for me liking this game as much as I have/do.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear that this game is not for everyone for the reasons I mentioned above. Those criticisms are not without their reasons and are mostly not unfair. But for me, Runescape’s flaws add to the experience. The lo-fi graphics, sound and music have a certain indescribable charm to them, the gameplay as mind numbing as it is, gives a sense of achievement to when you finish a goal, and its association with mid-late 00’s culture is more funny than anything else. But I don't think Runescape is a so bad it's good game, because for all the flaws that the game has, there are legitimately well done parts to the game. These things seem to get glossed over when discussing the game, for various reasons.

Let's get this out of the way real fast. Although this argument raged on 10 years ago about which was the better game, Runescape as I know it is NOT WoW. Both games, although amusement park mmorpg’s in high fantasy settings, take very different approaches to gameplay, tone and goals. While WoW has a focus on raiding and combat, Runescape is significantly more about individual character building rather than being part of a group. There are exceptions to this rule such as clan wars, but in general Runescape is about getting a character to be the best that they can be within the guidelines you set. For starters, Runescape doesn’t have inherent classes, it has skills that level individually akin to The Elder Scrolls. Most of these skills have little to do directly with combat and getting a player to max level takes literal thousands of hours to achieve. Outside of two examples, quests are individual experiences that have a story connected to them that puts the player in the position of becoming an important figure, and most bosses are balanced so you can solo them if you are skilled enough at the game. If you are like me you can easily treat Runescape as a single player game with other players you can talk to. Sure there are bosses that you can fight against as a group, but that just increases productivity more or less. PvP also feels like an entirely separate entity from the rest of the game, as it has very little to do with the rest of the game from a lore and world building perspective. All of this makes the game seem like it can be a practice in total anti-social tendencies (and with this community you’d probably want that.) but that’s not a totally bad thing. For one, it makes the game great for relaxing and being passive. Another is if you are skilled enough, you have the ability to do anything when you want and you don’t have to wait for other players if you want to do some Bandos runs, or kill the KBD. Of course the game still rewards you for interacting with other players and killing in groups, but in general you’re not forced to make friends by having large chunks of content being cut off if you don't play within a clan.

It is this focus on individualized character building that ends up being one of Runescape’s biggest strengths, and this is partially reflected in how skills are treated. Where in WoW, you’re expected to have a specific character build based on your class at risk of being outclassed or useless, you can’t really inherently fuck up a build in Runescape (despite how some pures feel about getting 2 defense.) Skills are trained based on preference, and nothing is absolutely required in a lot of cases. You can skill what you want to skill when you want to skill. The only limits are the limits you place on yourself (and maybe if there are too many others training the way you are.). You start as a blank slate, and can level whatever you want. The only exception to this rule being quests that do require specific levels in some skills, but even then, you can argue that no quest is absolutely necessary.

As a result of this personalizable skilling, mini communities based under leveling specific skills have emerged. For example, skillers are players who do not level combat at all. This is made even more interesting, as some skillers have still found out ways to level Slayer without getting past level 3 (the lowest player level). Pures and Hybrids are another example. For PVP, pures do not level defense and hybrids level it sparingly in order to take advantage of the games meta for PVP. They stay a lower level, but have super high strength in order to kill other lower level players more easily. There are also some players who don't trade (ironmen) ironmen that don't bank, limit themselves to one area on the map, etc. The way player skills are open to interpretation at the player’s own will allows for these borderline novelty accounts to exist and thrive in a way that makes the game more personal to them. The game may still fall within the definition of an amusement park MMORPG, but there are some extra sandbox elements thrown in by way of being more customizable.

Quests are treated more personal as well. The abundance of chosen ones problem is a major problem within MMORPG writing. The problem is where youre the chosen one within a game’s writing along with every other player in the game. This makes it more difficult to suspend your disbelief for a game, as having thousands of chosen ones kind of defeats the point of having chosen ones in the first place. Although this problem does exist within the game, most of the time the quests are just tasks that don't exist so you can save the world, they exist so you can help small groups of people (or, in the case of the Elemental Workshop series, it exists as puzzles with no NPC interaction). Although there are some cases where it does feel like there is an abundance of chosen ones, it is not nearly as common compared to other MMORPGs. For starters, there are plenty of quests that happen just because your character happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it’s more of a small scale, personal journey more so than a save the world type deal. Take the quest Recipe for Disaster, one of the biggest quests and grandest achievements within the questing side of the game. It was the 100th quest released, so they made it a kind of anthology quest, where you have to complete 11 miniquests and it was the meeting point of all of those quest lines. The way it is set up is you’re invited to a banquet with the king of Lumbridge, as you’ve helped him on more than one occasion. The Culinaromancer, a food based mage, shows up and fucks everything up. The fortune teller, someone you have already met in one of the quest lines, pauses time and tells you that in order to defeat him you have to go to the future (where you have already saved everyone) and make all of the leaders favourite food, and finally defeat bosses you have killed in the past as food puns. There’s no chosen one, there’s no prophecy, it's just you trying to save the major leaders of Gielinor through a weird time travel paradox. Because you were already a hero from your own achievements, they wanted you there and you were the right person for the job all along. It’s a really creative and different way of making a quest story while also mostly subduing this trope.

And it’s a shame that nobody else talks about the writing when discussing Runescape, because it has super underrated writing. Although it is likely that most of your time will not be spent questing, it is worth mentioning how great Runescape’s writing is. Replaying Runescape, I was incredibly surprised to see how many of the quests had writing that came off as interesting or funny, along with how well the cultures within the game were fleshed out. It's just a shame that a lot of this writing goes to waste due to the gameplay. The community is both jokingly and seriously obsessed with getting the sikist gainz when it comes to XP, so a lot of the dialogue in quests is just totally skipped over as fast as possible for a good number of players. Its also only able to be seen once assuming you're playing on only 1 account, as there is no other way to replay quests you like. The writing may not be the most experimental or different within the medium, but there was some legitimate skill and care put into the writing of a lot of quests and making Gielinor a somewhat believable world.

Runescape, on its surface, does look like your generic high fantasy RPG fare. But if you start to look at the details of a culture, it comes off as believable ideas for a culture. Take trolls for example, there are 2 major types of trolls in this game, mountain trolls and ice trolls. The first thing you will likely notice is the names of important trolls. Names like “My Arm” and “Dad” seem like strange things to name any character, but you look further into the quests involving these trolls, and you will notice there is a tradition where trolls are named after the first thing they try to eat, or the first sound they make while eating. This provides some character to the entire tribe, as they seem more like an actual group with their own set of traditions and beliefs instead of faceless monsters. MrBTounge, a video essayist says that when he looks to see how a fictional world feels, he asks what a culture in that world eats. This is answered both by the first 2 quests needed to get to the Troll village (Troll Stronghold and Death Plateau) by making that the main issue of the quest. The trolls are killing and eating humans. As big of a surprise as this may come to you, the troll condition turns out to be more complicated and multifaceted than it appears on the surface. As you go further down this quest line and start completing harder quests, this question is answered further once you see the basic farming layout outside of the village, along with the quest My Arm’s Big Adventure. This quest sees the player actually helping a troll make a farmable patch of land in order to grow Goutweed for the village. Their manners of speaking are all similar which is achieved by writing in accents into the game. Trolls have mannerisms are similar with their movements, attacks, traditions and drops, (they all tend towards throwing rocks and using hammers; things that are found in excess in Trollheim) while the Troll Romance quest lets you see into their dating traditions. Every culture in Gielinor is fleshed out in a way that makes it a believable world with cultures within that world that make sense. It makes sense why Gnomes are warring with the Monkeys and Apes culture of Ape Atoll, despite being on literal opposite sides of the world. It makes sense why Jatizso & Neitiznot (also a great pun btw) are essentially bickering brothers put into city form, and it makes sense that the Dorgeshuun goblins hid themselves away from Bandos, the God of orcs and goblins. These cultures are part of what make the game great if you take a break from your sik gainz, and actually pay attention.

The right click -> examine option is a tool that adds to the atmosphere. Examine works on literally everything, and gives a little flavor text for the thing being examined. It might just amount to explaining the obvious or making a Monty Python reference most of the time, but it's a nice touch for the game. Although this may seem like a total throwaway feature, it's always nice for just that extra bit of world building to exist in the game. Even if it's just something you quickly look at while grinding away at something, having a small quip or description from the perception of your own avatar gives the game just that much more character.

The other aspect of the game is great from a writing perspective is its example of hilarious dry, British comedy. Take the quest One Small Favour. Remember that episode of Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy, where the Ed-boys try to trade a bunch of things for jawbreakers? This quest is pretty much that, satirising quests that are essentially extended, daisy chained fetch quests. The game keeps this storyline going for so fucking long, taking you literally from one side of the world to the other with the reward being (on the surface) super shallow. It's fairly similar to the sidequests in Earthbound that give a borderline useless rewards like the pair of dirty socks. A lot of people despise the quest for reasons you’d expect, but I think it's absolutely great. First, the way the joke is presented it is constantly funny and so clearly satirical. The MC mentions how stupid the entire situation is, as sharpening a hatchet turns into a quest that ends up dismantling a dwarven gang, fixing a gnome landing strip, refilling an ogre mattress and exposing a fraudulent weatherman. All things that seem absolutely unrelated, but end up making sense within each character's needs (it's also a LONG quest, with the description reminding you that time is relative). There is also one of the biggest “Oh Shit” moments in a video game, when you finally get to the end of the route, and realize you're only halfway done with the quest. While this quest does a great job at satirising a style of quests, it ends up being a even better at giving a massive tour of Gleinor, and shows a real dependence on interconnectedness of the world giving the various cultures their own flavour and pointing out areas you may have missed. Its not as if this is the only example of the game being generally funny either. There are plenty examples of this style of comedy, along with decent amount of meta-humor. A good number of the quests within the game don't take themselves too seriously, and honestly that's refreshing considering all of the games within a high fantasy setting that go full grimdark. It’s not to say that Runescape isn’t serious when it needs to be, but Runescape’s writing is strongest when it is being comedic.

Runescape has a significant amount of content on each of its levels. A few major quests act as caps to either take you to the next stage, or act as a trophy for overcoming difficult aspects of the game. Take the (usually) last F2P quest, Dragon Slayer. Being incredibly simplistic on the surface, you end up doing exactly what the quest says you're gonna do. However, the way this quest is laid out makes the entire quest almost feel like a maturity ceremony both within the context of the game itself, and within the community at large. You see, Dragon Slayer is by far the longest F2P quest in Runescape and gives you access to the anti-dragonfire shield, the champions guild and the best free to play plate armour in the game, the Rune Plate (also the green dragonhide body, but that's not too important outside of F2P). The game hypes up killing what is probably your first dragon, as if you attempted to kill dragons without a shield at this point, you would have gotten bodied by its dragonfire. In order to start it, you need decently high stats for F2P, and enough quest points that is the equivalent of every F2P quest in the game. If you're doing this in a F2P environment for the first time, it is what your entire Runescape career builds up to. You have spent hours building your character in a way where you can finally say you exhausted most of free to play, and once you can finally buy and use Rune Plate armour it feels like a real achievement. The entire setup to even getting to Elvarg (the dragon you’re killing) is somewhat long, as you need to first find out where Elvarg is located and then you need to buy a boat in order to reach the island where she lives. It is about as standard as you can get with an RPG quest, but it feels like it holds actual weight, as you are treated with what is hyped up to be a legendary reward. This logic also extends to The Fremennik Trials, Monkey Madness (widely regarded as the best quest in Runescape), Mourning's End II (actually the worst quest in the game tho) and Recipe for Disaster. The completion of these quests for the first time feels like you did something worthwhile in the game. They are massive payoffs to all the work you put into the game up until that point.

The way skilling is set up is the other way the game pays off hard work. Within all the years I played the game, I only got one skill to 99, and that was woodcutting. But man, did the time and effort put into getting that 99 feel great. The game commemorated my achievement with a cape, and a custom emote which I could show off to others. But this isn’t only the case with getting 99’s, it also exists with how rewards are distanced well enough that, for the most part, you’re kept interested but not necessarily overwhelmed with choice. Slayer is the best example of this. Slayer is a skill that allows you to kill certain special monsters with better drops. The way you level slayer is the way that most games would give early quests, by saying kill X number of a monster. Slayer not only makes leveling other aspects of combat a little more interesting by rewarding the variation they give you, but there are certain monsters that only drop certain items. The Abyssal Whip is probably the best weapon at training attack in the game, and the only monster that drops it is an Abyssal Demon, which needs 85 slayer to kill. This goal is a high one, as it will take a player probably a few hundred hours to achieve, but it rewards you incrementally by having well spaced out and well compensated goals along the way like Basilisks, Cave Horrors and Aberrant Spectres. The distance means that you’re slowly getting newer tasks added on top to the pile that can get randomly selected meaning unless you're getting some bad RNG, the tasks don't get too old too fast. Especially because slayer specific monsters have aspects about them that make their fight more interesting. Abyssal Demons teleport constantly, Bloodvelds attack with magic based melee and Turoths can only be killed with either a leafbladed spear or a leafbladed sword. The rate at which the game distances levels helps contribute to this. For example, at level 92, you have about half the XP before you reach 99. At the same time though, you are likely gaining XP at a significantly faster rate than you would be at lower levels, so this distance isn't as big as it sounds. It does give a weight to getting individual levels at higher levels of play though.

It is difficult to mention this game, without mentioning “the fall” of the game. The removal of the wilderness is, without a doubt, what killed this game overall. After the removal of PVP, a good chunk of the community was done. I lasted a few more years, long enough to see them re-implement wilderness styled PvP into individual worlds, but by then the damage was done. You see, Jagex is a very strange studio overall. They are the absolute definition of one hit wonders, but the fact that their one hit was an MMORPG means that they have been able to exist in the form that they have for years. Runescape essentially became a big hit despite being started by 2 guys in their bedrooms. Andrew and Paul Gower developed Runescape 1 and it was slowly built into an empire that was pretty massive over the course of only 5-6 years. Jagex were honestly never prepared to deal with the number of users that they had taken on over this period, and as a result some of their decisions seem a bit...weird. For one, a lot of the quests are noticeably outdated compared to other quests. There are some quests from early on that really REALLY feel old. Waterfall Quest is a perfect example of this, for one its name is fucking WATERFALL QUEST. It also gives stupid levels of experience despite the fact that you can do it at level 3 somewhat easily. Other quests like Temple of Ikov seem to have ideas and plot lines that don’t end up going anywhere. Another weird aspect is their seeming to be their general love-hate relationship with their community, where they rarely admit they’re in the wrong. Multiple times there has been drama in oldschool Runescape involving weird relationships between Mods and Streamers that has seemed corrupt. Or their refusal to do something and changing their minds all of a sudden (Grand Exchange, removing splashing, etc.) Their game changes that have turned out to be bad ideas rarely, if ever, give apologies. The worst thing they ever did though was the removal of the wilderness in late ‘07. You see, the wilderness was the best area for PvP. It had the highest risk vs reward, to some extent was balanced through use of the combat triangle, and tempting players to be even riskier (increasing the level gap the deeper you went, skulling if you were the aggressor, etc.) Jagex have known to be total hardasses when it comes to enforcing rules. Muting is a super common punishment that was enforced super strictly, scamming and botting warrant heavy bans, etc. But the one thing Jagex hates more than anything else in the universe is real world trading. Jagex saw that plenty of people were buying money, and to avoid getting tracked by trade windows, were dying in the wilderness with that money so the buyer could pick it up. All of a sudden out of nowhere, Jagex decided enough was enough and absolutely butchered their game with 1 update. The wilderness and trading was essentially castrated to remove one of the central gameplay aspects for a lot of players. Let me break down what this massive update did.

Trading now had a 20k difference limit established by the median prices in the grand exchange (a global trading post of sorts)
PVP was totally revamped into Bounty Hunter, which is one of the most atrociously designed mini games ever for a myriad of reasons
The wilderness was changed into a slightly scarier skilling area, with the only real threat being Revenants.
Fuck revenants btw, it was the equivalent of getting a random event that could possibly kill you without any of the rewards or fun of a random event. The thought that it was supposed to replace PvP is nothing short of insulting

This update made the community furious, and rightfully so. People absolutely loved the PVP in Runescape, because it surprisingly takes a lot of skill, planning and technique especially at higher levels. It was probably the biggest cash sink in the game, and it gave skilling an actual market to sell to. The wilderness was balanced almost perfectly, with some areas being used for 1v1-ing, and others group attacking. The deeper you went, the higher level difference you could get attacked by, and skulling made you really think before you fought someone. Plenty of players were fighting in the wilderness regularly, it was possibly the most popular activity outside of skilling. After this update, the game’s focus shifted from one where PVP was one of the core focuses of the game to many, to a game that was entirely skilling and grinding with no real purpose except to raise arbitrary numbers. The money you made would go to either leveling skills that exist only to test your money and patience (herblore, construction, crafting…) or to PVM. Needless to say for most people, these aren’t goals worth working towards, in part because after the update, the economy crashed and slowly continued to fall as time went on. It is just literally grinding for the sake of grinding at that point. When the wilderness existed as a PvP arena, all skills worked towards it in some way, which meant every market had a use, and you could profit off of any skilling you did in some way (except construction, which is used for convenience and training other skills, and firemaking which is literally useless). Bounty hunter did not scratch the itch of most players because of how poorly implemented it was. Jagex caught a lot of hate for this move, but even after weeks of complaining and “rioting” (literally just standing in a major city and spamming how much you hate Jamflex), they held their ground for some reason, and let their game die.

I almost feel bad for Jagex though. They were a studio that found a cult classic on their hands and didn't really know how to handle it. They were so focused on adding content, that when they actually needed to fix problems within their game, they didn’t know how. They were a studio that had wide eyes and big ideas in mind for their game that they truly wanted to implement. This is only made more evident with how old school has been treated. But as times changed, and people left (myself included) they found themselves focusing less on what made Runescape successful for what it was, and started ripping on a more successful game. Runescape became a WoW clone, which is a damn shame, because if there is anything the MMORPG market needs less of, it is WoW clones. Although I left by the time this implementation happened, still hearing about the implications of the Evolution of Combat still hurt. Jagex has been somewhat known for coping what has been super popular. Ace of Spades blatantly stole a lot of its ideas from Minecraft, most of the games on their flash platform Funorb are just reskins of other popular flash games and although it plays completely differently, the new Runescape card game looks a lot like Hearthstone at a quick glance. But the combat triangle being exchanged for the EoC is the saddest, because it was evident that they had given up on what Runescape could have been for a more popular model because WoW fucking did it. is No more is the legendary Combat Triangle which dominated PvP and PvM for so many years, which was so simple to understand but actually gave some complexity in some cases. (Seriously, I’m not joking here watch some high level PvP and once you stop laughing at their choices of music you might get what I mean.) Magic is super effective against melee, melee is super effective against ranged, ranged is super effective against magic. It is a combat relationship that was as easy to understand as the implications of choosing your starter in Pokemon. And although combat was the ultimate example of clicking on an ugly thing and attacking back and forth until one of you falls, there is still inventory management, item switching, prayer flicking and a bunch of other concepts within the game’s combat that kept it playable and investable. To me, hearing what EoC implemented was the final nail in the coffin that the Runescape I knew and loved was dead. It was nothing but a former shell of what it once was and in existed in name only.

That was until Oldschool came out, and the reaction to old school seems like a significant amount of people greatly prefer how the game used to be before all of the removal of the wilderness, and EoC bullshit. Their fanbase never truly left, they just got sick of Jagex making poor decisions. Old school has been going fairly strong for 3 years now, which is kind of insane considering it was supposed to be a quick one-off project for nostalgia's sake. Oldschool has grown into an entity of its own, really giving an alternate history of the game if Jagex didn’t try to fix a problem at the expense of the entire community. It has its fair share of its own issues such as having such a small team, the dev team almost constantly stirring up drama and the community being mostly a cancerous mass. But once you get past those mostly external factors, it still manages to be a better game than what a lot of people give it credit for. Again, if you’re like me, you can easily play the game as a single player game with a chat function. The best part is how the game is still growing. Since Oldschool’s inception, the game has been experimenting with a system of updating where the developers ask the community if something should be implemented, and it it gets over 75% yes, the feature gets put into the game. The issue here is when they ask the community about fixing things that fall into bugs and balance issues.These polls (that definitely shouldn't be polls by the way) are more often than not ignored or voted against because it’s not a “fun” update. At least Jagex seem to have learned at least one lesson; make sure the fan base is on board before making large decisions. Im sure if Jagex put the PvP update up to a poll, or announced it before hand they would have got feedback telling them how terrible of an idea the implementation of that update would be, and they would have been more self aware about what they were doing before putting it into place. Now this isn’t the best idea in all cases and 75% might be a little too high, but at the very least this model has been an intriguing one to watch to say the least.

Through my years of addiction and relapse into this game, giving it any less than a 10 would simply be lying to myself. This game has legitimately shaped my taste, got me into TF2 and subsequently PC gaming (no joke) and wasted thousands of hours of my life. And you know what? I can still see myself relapsing back into the addiction that this game causes me at any time. With DOTA 2, I wasted a few hundred hours sure, but I left not wanting to play that game any more. Those hundreds of hours I mostly regret at this point. Runescape, although I’m currently not playing it (although as of writing this, i've gotten the urge to continue playing again so that may not be the case much longer) I do not regret playing. I enjoyed most of my time with the game despite how mind numbing it can be. But because oldschool is a thing, it will welcome me back with open arms any time I choose to. And I can enjoy it anytime I choose to. As much as it has its numerous flaws, Runescape absolutely deserves a 10 from me, whether I want to admit that or not.

RuneScape is an unique MMO in a sense that everything you do on it is divided into 23 different skills instead of being more focused on combat and leveling up like other MMOs. With RuneScape being divided into 2 different games, OSRS is basically an answer to the question "what would RuneScape be like if Evolution of Combat never happened and RuneScape 2 was still actively developed"? It still looks and feels like RuneScape 2 but 10 years of development later there is now a lot of new content and even completely new regions to explore and the game is arguably better than ever.

Much like everyone else I stopped playing RuneScape in 2012 when the devs tried to bridge the gap between traditional MMOs and Runescape and made the game worse as a process, but came back to OldSchool recently after realizing most of the content I consume on Youtube is OSRS related. Goal? Start a new account from the scratch and get the Quest Cape, as it is quite balanced way of playing the game making you experience all of the lore with the requirements of most skills only being at 70s, but it definitely wasn't as easy as I expected. Long past are the days when you could simply get 43 prayer to get protection from each of the 3 combat styles and make yourself immune to bosses and then just sit there attacking them until they die. No, many of the bosses in the new questlines make you sweat your balls off for how difficult they are to beat, and it's not just Grandmaster quests, even Master have some mean mfs that you have to fight multiple times until you understand the fight mechanics and all of the phases and whatever. You can't either only just melee bosses, you have to utilize all 3 combat styles, but all of that makes it a more fun experience and the Quest Cape even more of an accomplishment than what it used to be.

No matter what your goal in the game is, OSRS is as grindy as it was back in the day so nothing's changed on that front, but some of the new content makes skilling more fun, like the skilling boss minigames for the more boring skills such as Firemaking, Runecrafting and Fishing or Hallowed Sepulchre which is the ultimate way to practice Agility while making some money. Forestry is also a great addition making Woodcutting better by bringing back the old Woodcutting spots to some worlds that everyone remembers, which would be empty otherwise. Simultaneously though I feel like they spent too much time in creating end-game combat-focused content like high level bosses or raids of which there are 3 of and aren't really a thing that belongs in RuneScape in my opinion - a game where you spend most of your time AFKing your skills while watching videos/stream on your first monitor or reading a book or whatever, instead of sweating it against bosses that OHKO you if you make a minor mistake.

With raids also comes an issue of gear progression. You can hit 70 Attack and Defence relatively quick and get your Whip and some Barrows armor for few millions of gold, which is the setup that made you a king in old RuneScape 2, but because all of the new better equipment is raids exclusive rare unique drops and raids isn't that popular content to begin with, they are some of the priciest items in the game and your trusty old Whip and Barrows are now mid-tier items. After securing your whip your next upgrade would be either Fang or Rapier which both go for 45m, but when you are a poor farmer making your money by growing herbs you don't exactly see that kind of money, nor is it worth it for such a small improvement in DPS. I eventually got the money for all of the melee gear I wanted, worth 125m, but that took me like a month of doing nothing but Hallowed Sepulchre and herb runs, and even after acquiring the cool stabbystab Rapier, I couldn't even use it in the hardest, and the latest quest (as of writing this) Desert Treasure II because the bosses have such high stab defense, so I ended up using whip anyway. Cool.

Overall I enjoyed my deep dive back into the world or Gielinor. It took me 4 months of daily playing to complete my goal but I enjoyed reliving the past times I had with the game while also enjoying the new stuff. From exploring the Kharidian desert to the jungles of Karamja. From visiting the elven capital of Prifddinas to the gruesome vampire-governed maze city known as Meiyerditch. Saying hello to the Gnomes in Tree Gnome Stronghold and infiltrating Ape Atoll as a monkey. Even dicovering a brand new continent of Kourend and all its cities. It was a good time.

grindfest with a community of losers that hate fun

This game defined my childhood. I spent most of my time talking to others about the game, life, and other assorted stuff around Lumbridge and Varrock. I didn't progress that far in the 3 or so years I played on a F2P account but the community made the game for me. The devs were conscious of the player base and made tutorials that were very helpful for growing up online such as not giving out passwords and basic deduction skills and not trusting strangers online. Despite the tutorials this is the first game that I got my password stolen for an account and I learned a very valuable lesson about not trusting everybody.

The game is a static world consisting of a set number of quests. Each player will experience the same content, it is mostly up to the player how they want to build their account or what skills they want to level.

Does the game stand the test of time? I think so, revisiting the current 2007 servers there is still something about the game that is charming enough to keep me coming back for more, although not as a noob like the first time.

RuneScape is a magical thing that we'll likely never see again, thank the lord it is still thriving.

90s WRPG design with the design sense of the world's largest point and click adventure all wrapped up into an MMO...how are we so blessed? In much of RuneScape the pen and paper roots of RPGs are still clearly visible. In fact, even avoiding mechanics, RuneScape goes out of its way to be your typical classic fantasy novel / pen n paper rpg setting. Plain green dragons, classic names and representations of tiers of metal for armor and weapons, all the fantasy races you'd ever expect, etc. But this was built for years. We have layer upon layer upon layer of typical fantasy shit that became so intertwined in this beautiful and comforting world that it managed to carve out its own space.

The point and click influence can't be ignored. RuneScape is funny as fuck, and it solves the question of "how do we have meaningful questing instead of KILL 20 BEARS" in the coolest way possible: make it like a mini section of a Lucasarts or Sierra game! The tongues of the developers are permanently stuck inside their cheeks, and you're doing yourself a massive disservice if you don't read through all the dialogue. I'm not kidding when I say even the game's most irrelevant quests have more thought put into their flow and dialogue than most games have for their main story. "Use all items on all things" gameplay is also carried over, and I understand that this can be frustrating for some (it often is for me), but there's no shame in using a guide as long as you still read the dialogue! Really, I can't express how alive this world feels compared to any other MMO world, almost any other RPG world in general. There are so many characters that will stick with you for years and years even though they only had 10 lines in a free to play quest you did the same number of years ago.

As for the MMO mechanics, I'm less interested. Not because they don't work, they do, but they're only an excuse for the rest. RuneScape is constructed in such a way that you will not get maxed unless you set that goal aside specifically. There is ALWAYS progression, and anything you do will bring progression. Most actions in the game give experience in some skill, and with the skills themselves as motivators, it's hard to feel like you're wasting time unless you fall for the "no xp waste" meme. Bossing is cool, but you can never do it and enjoy yourself. PKing is cool, but you can never do it and enjoy yourself. Hell, if all you want to do is chop trees, catch fish, and cook food, you're going to have a great fucking time.

And the game scales SO WELL. You can spend a lifetime doing quaint little fun things in a cute forest somewhere, or you can slay gods, or you can hunt other players. You can cooperate, you can fight, you can ignore others. RuneScape allows for so many different playstyles and there's so much you can do that all synergizes with each other to make a big beautiful whole.

There's so much to talk about. The soundtrack is such perfect fantasy nostalgia. It has long-term goals that actually feel worth working for. Its symbols of prestige are clear and genuinely awe-inspiring. Its towns, cultures, and people have so much detail, much being stated and much left to discover. The "examine" descriptions give every object in the world character. Meaningful rarity. Long, winding narratives that you'll be working through for much of your playtime. Butting heads with other players. Finding harmony with other players. Learning zones and routes on your own. Sourcing your own information for what to do. You can hang out and you can be intense. Exploration even with no hidden parts of the map. Meaningful transportation. There are ALWAYS unknowns and there is ALWAYS more to learn. The only MMO left that can be another life.

This is the best MMO. RS3 is good too. GW2 and ESO are pretty good. EVE is cool if you ignore the space ancaps. But RS2 / OSRS is by far the peak of the MMO genre, and it's the last bastion of a kind of game design that we simply don't see anymore.

There are people who haven't played through One Small Favour? I pity them all.

If I had to ever make a list of 5 most nostalgic games for me before high school, the list would probably go something like Crash Bandicoot 2, Star Wars Battlefront II, Spyro the Dragon 3, Gex Enter the Gecko, and this game. I remember when I first discovered this game I was probably in 7th grade, and it was sometime in 2004, I remember somehow finding this game, we had just gotten our first computer at the time, it was some shitty Dell and I was big into free online games at that time. Somehow I stumbled on this game, and made my character, I remember it well, his name was Jim Dies and the name was based on a comic book series I made based on my uncle where he would always end up getting hurt or dying in random ways. Anyway I remember I gave him a red mustache and had him dressed in a tuxedo looking coat. I dumped several hundred hours into this, I remember many times coming home from school and going straight to the computer to play it, I would play it in the evening when it started to get dark out, and I would play it almost every day from the time I was in 7th grade up until I started high school. I remember just exploring around, collecting cool armor and items, and occasionally messing around with people. My brother and sister had accounts but didn't play as much as me, although for like a month my dad bought my brother membership for a month and I enjoyed watching him do the new content. Thats the thing about Runescape, it had a ton to do, you could mine, fish, fight enemies, do the quests the game gave you, go in the wilderness and battle strangers and find rare loot, mess around with magic, or just explore.

There were tons of different enemies in this and areas, although I will admit the areas were a bit generic Dungeons and Dragons style enemies, and a lot of the areas in this game did look a bit similar, and hell the graphics looked like they were early PS1 era, and this is when games like Half Life 2 and Resident Evil 4 were coming out. But damn the hours I spent playing this and leveling skills, it just felt satisfying leveling things like mining or fishing and knowing you could create higher level armors, and it was awesome getting more powerful armor and weapons, plus the music in this game was kind of eerie and pretty catchy. I mean I never played WOW or other MMOs, so I can't really compare this to anything else, I'm sure WOW was bigger, had better quests and interactivity, but for being free this wasn't that horrible, and brings back so many memories and nostalgia. I played this game frequently for nearly 2 straight years, and the story ends sad unfortunately.

So near the end of Summer before I went to high school I had an orientation thing where you could go and explore the school and put things in your locker, so I remember mining and talking to a guy and he claimed he had membership and could get me really good armor, but he needed my password to get me into the membership area, I wasn't really aware of the Runescape scams so like an idiot I gave him my password, only to find when I logged back into my account when I got back home that all my armor and weapons were missing. I was pretty upset and knew I'd been hacked, so I changed my password and moved on, but then a week or 2 later my account was banned and apparently the dude took control of my character and brought me into the wilderness and had one of his friends kill me so he could get the loot, and he swore while writing to his friend, and Jagex were too big of Jagoffs to care about the hacking or scams going on in their game so they ignored when I appealed the ban and sent a generic message saying something like the rules are the rules.

I ended up making another character right after called Jim Dies 2 who looked the same, and tried to go through the main quests again and level up the important skills, but it just didn't have the same feel to it, and it would take ages to get many of my skills up to the same level as my old character, and I was already in high school, so Runescape was kind of wearing off for me, I didn't get the same magical feeling I had when I first played it, and the game was getting a little old. Plus that wasn't long before I got a PS3 and went back more into my console games. I just grew up and Runescape felt like a kid game once I got into high school and even the kids I sat by occasionally at lunch made fun or Runescape and called it a kid game when I brought it up once. So I decided to just give my account with the few skills I leveled to a complete stranger and retired the game for good about a month into my freshman year of high school. Looking back maybe it was for the best that my account was sabotaged and banned because Runescape just ate up so much of my life and most of what I did in Runescape was mindless grinding and going back and forth between the same areas I'd been to a hundred times before. Plus when I got older and into college, during my Freshman year a friend logged into Runescape to play it and it looked completely different with updated graphics and new areas, and it just wasn't the same game I remember growing up with. But still the memories I'll have of playing this along with my brother and friend when he'd visit are just so strong, and even if at best this was a repetitive, mediocre game, with bad graphics, its still a game I'll never forget.