The original RuneScape was crude even for its day
How do you keep an online role-playing game feeling fresh after 15 years? You could add new levels, characters, and gear, but none of those sound as exciting as a healthy dose of cutthroat capitalism. That’s why developer Jagex just announced that it’s reinventing massively multiplayer online game (MMO) RuneScape as DarkScape, a new world where players can get rich with a new kind of economy, or die trying.
That brings me to the other big new feature, the “Squeal of Fortune”. With that feature you spin it based on how many spins you have (which are acquired through quests, purchasing them with real cash, daily spins, or random events) and can gain items. These items include money, food, ores, and much much more. It’s worth doing in my eyes. In fact, I’ve spent rs gold for sale many quests just doing them for the spins.
Personally, I’d never buy anything in Runescape except Membership. I’ve never really been big on using real cash for coins and such in games. Seems like a waste of money in my opinion. There are currently five champions you can choose from and play as. Each has a set of unique class-based cards on top of the common ones that each champion has access to. To unlock more cards, you level up your champion by practicing against bots of various difficulties, against other players in casual or ranked battles or buy card packs from the store. You can also create your own custom decks for each class with up to 35 cards.
There are players who focus only on certain skills for varied reasons. Most of them do it for achievement while some do it for fun. A player is called “combat pure” if he only trains combat related skills and he is called a “skill pure” if he only trains non-combat skills. I actually do not understand why some people do it but hey it is their account so let us just leave them in peace. I am actually planning to create a Woodcutting pure. How cool is that?
One of the biggest things for members is the land you get to explore. Below is a picture of the map but if you are free to play (F2P) then you can only go so far but if you are a member then you can explore this entire huge map as you go on your adventure. There is every type of landscape from the hot desert to the vast tropical jungle. It is amazing on how big the map actually is and how detailed everything is no matter were you are going.
But this is not all, the other things members have access to is way better and cooler looking items. Items like weapons and armor to other things like a spade or rake. The original RuneScape was crude even for its day, with a world that barely qualified as 3-D, no sound effects, and very little to do but grind skills for months on end. Writing the game in Java presented some pretty serious graphical limitations but was ultimately a huge boon for developer Jagex as accessibility through a web browser helped the game’s initial explosion in popularity.
The first major engine overhaul came with 2004’s RuneScape 2 beta, which replaced the 2-D monster sprites rs gold, and characters with basic animated 3-D models and produced new graphics for practically every object in the game. RuneScape still looked a generation behind the big industry players, but for the first time it was a fully 3-D MMO.
Runescape has perhaps improved many of its central features, but without that strong sense of companionship, I feel a lack of incentive. Nothing is keeping me here, in this backwater marsh behind Lumbridge and Draynor. Nothing is keeping me on this server. Nothing is keeping me here, using Internet Explorer for the first non-browser-download task in years. It feels hollow.