RuneScape

The Good
- Very interesting quests and mini-quests.

• Combat and controls are easy to understand

• Lots to discover in the big world

• Lots of skills
  
  The Bad
  - Constant disconnections and long loading screens

• Lacking graphics

• No more PvP the way I loved it

• Slow leveling

• Membership is forced on you
  
  The Bottom Line
  I remember playing this game when I was eleven years old, it was pretty sweet at the time, but I was even more surprised when I heard some kids in town talk about this game. After a very enjoyable year with this game I thanked it for its hospitality and continued further into the video game industry, so I wondered how much had changed in five years time. When I went to www.runescape.com I was treated on a very nice trailer that showed me amazing graphics (for a browser game that is), epic cinematic action and adventurers working side by side in order to survive an onslaught of enemies.

Hyped as hell I instantly logged in using Facebook (sweet!) and I encountered my first foe in this game: a loading screen. I sat there for a few minutes staring at the screen like it would hurry stuff up before going down to make a cup of coffee, when I got back the loading screen was just getting finished. After that delightful bit of torture the very next thing the game threw at me was a disconnection which send me straight back to the homepage. This is not what you'd call a good start.

After several minutes of disconnections and loading screens I finally got to a character creation tool which allowed me to pick between roughly two dozen classes. I went with the thief because that sounded like an interesting gameplay experience (plus it's the only thing I ever do in Elder Scrolls games) and after another freaking disconnection (this was not my internet by the way, it was working just fine and I was listening to music on youtube while "playing") I also got to pick between some clothes and hair styles.

The first thing I had to do when the game started working was starting out on a list with mini-quests that had me do little tasks that were not really worth basing a whole quest around. They started out pretty mandatory, but they became much more interesting as I got further into the game and nicely stimulated me to try a few things I normally wouldn't have done. What I also noticed the instance the game started working was that it took my preference for setting games on low graphics a little too serious and made it look like I was playing World of Warcraft on an Atari 2600. However after changing the graphics to their highest setting it still looked like ass and I gave up on trying to improve it somehow.

At this point it's also important to mention that you could control the entire game by just clicking on the screen, clicking did everything from moving to attacking. The only time you ever need to touch the keyboard is when typing in your password and moving the camera which I liked a lot. I also really enjoyed the huge amount of skills that were at my disposal, but what made me lose my temper was the fact that most of them (MOST!!!) were only available to members (the people who pay to play) including pick-pocketing which was the class I assigned to my character. What the hell is that about, I can pick a class, but not use it's skill? Why was this not mentioned on the character creation?! Becoming a "member" is pretty much required in this game; 70% of the quests are exclusive to them, half the world is also theirs and a lot of items can only be used by them as well as the skills mentioned before.

The world is still pretty big though and there are lots of interesting quests to do, which for some reason are much better then any quests in World of Warcraft because they all involve plot twists, cinematic moments and a certain amount of brain-power from the player. That does not mean the game is entirely grind free, in fact it's even more grind-happy then World of Warcraft because you need to level up your combat skills to level up your own level and once you get to around level fifty one combat level can take up to eight hours of constant grinding. Also don't forget that you'd need better food in order to help you while fighting, which means a higher cooking and fishing skill, but you also need armor, so be sure to keep training your forging and mining skills and I am sure there is some other stuff you'd like to grind yourself silly for because at the age of eleven you ain't got nothing better to do anyways.

Something I missed a lot was the wilderness which was a zone a long time ago where players could fight each other. It worked like this: The deeper you go, the higher your wilderness level gets, which meant could attack higher and lower level players (if you were level 30 and you were in level 5 wilderness you could attack level 25 players for example). This made for some very sensational adventures in the wilderness where you and some friends went inside the wilderness looking for lower level people to slaughter while simultaneously hoping nobody with a higher level would show up or optionally a dragon. This was awesome, but now you got arenas and special PvP games that cut out all the adventure because you always know when and when not you can be attacked by someone else.

At the end of the day, I do have to admit that I have grown too old for this game which probably means I am not longer its target audience, the people who this is intended for are little kids aged somewhere between eight and eleven and unless your some kind of Lucas (obscure movie reference), you are probably not going to know much about flawed game design and you probably never played a real big MMO to use as comparison when playing this game at that age. Runescape is a pretty sweet ladder that allows one to ease himself into the big world of video games with something simple that still offers a lot of depth for those who care to discover the story and secrets of the world (or pay ten euros a month).

The Good
Runescape was one of those games that “was my childhood” if you are familiar with the expression. Back in middle school I played this game almost religiously, and my brother played it too. And his friend’s played it too. Whenever the computer was open we were bound to be on it, fighting over who got off when. We looked up websites and read tables of enemy stats, and researched quests and all that good stuff. Okay, so I didn’t have much of a life back in middle school.

I will use my experience as a focal point for this review. That is, no matter how long you play, grind, and achieve, you will never be anywhere close to beating this game. There’s simply too much to do, too many places to explore, and too many classes to learn. And this was back in middle school, when I had 10 hours of free time to dedicate to the game. And back then there was a quarter of the quests and skills there are now.

Runescape simply does not end. There are millions upon millions of items that can be used in junction with dozens of skills and hundreds of quests. I mean, come on, just look at the freakin’ map!. That was what it was like when I was a kid! Any it took me years to try and explore all of that. Even with all of my work I was still nowhere near done exploring all of the secret caves and passageways underneath the ground. But if you really wanna shit bricks, check what it’s like now. A walk from one edge of the map to the other would easily take 3 hours. To explore and do everything in between would take years.

But best of all is that it was free. I mean, you really have to understand what I was looking at when I was a kid. This was one of the biggest worlds I had ever seen in a video game (I had yet to be introduced to MMORPG’s) and it was all free. It was like giving out World of Warcraft accounts for free. In my premature years, my habit was nothing short of sheer addiction.

It was terrific. It had everything I needed. It gives you a good sense of achievement. The quests were fun, and the characters were very vibrant. A lot of them somehow acknowledged that they were part of an online video game, which made them extremely funny. Some of the quests are just downright silly. One of my favorites was when you have to dress up as a woman to rescue a guy from jail. Even better, the designers slip in funny message when you try to observe really simplistic things like posts or trees. Your own character is pretty witty even in the most dire, dangerous situations, and this was really a high point of the game.

And of course, like I said, its all free

The Bad
There are a lot of gamers out there who simply foam at the mouth just thinking about the potential this game has. It is such a living, breathing patchwork of questing and skills, and players and NPC’s that the appeal could just kill you. Even looking at the map gives one the feeling of an epic adventure. But honest to God, it simply isn’t as fun as it looks.

The feeling of having so many things around you is just too overwhelming. There are simply too many things to do. At first you want to build your skills, but you also need to do quests. At the same time you want to get better armor. All of this takes way too long. Getting past level 60 even in one skill ranking could take months and months of grinding. Again, I say, look at my example. I played this game for years on one single character, and I could not even get to level 60 in any ranking. Yet that unquenchable thirst that drives you to grow more levels is still there. In the end however, it is truly not worth it. The rewards for level growth is often minimal compared to the hours and hours of work required to get there.

As a result, no matter how hard I tried, I felt like I could never fit in, and in reality I really never was good enough for the big leagues. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was lowest level character in the entire bunch. It felt like I wasn’t supposed to be where I was, no matter where I was. I was the only person wearing gray steel in a bunch of Runite-clad knights. No matter what level I got to, there were still areas that were too high for me to go into, and there were spells and equipment I still had no access to.

Not to mention that Runescape was notorious for assholes who refused to help you on quests. It was really every man for himself back then. Quests with combat in them were difficult to finish because most combat quests were done solo. Mines were always packed and it was first come, first serve. If you weren’t fast enough to get to a rock in time, it was your loss. If you died, you lost ALL of the items on your possession, and you could count on it that your items would be scooped up off of your dead body within seconds.

Runescape, visually, is pretty unappealing. I can tolerate bad graphics, but even in the years that have passed, nothing has really changed. And I assure you, back then the graphics were shitty. And they still are shitty. When the backgrounds become detailed, they are usually meant fore nothing more than decoration. There’s really no interaction, and as a result, there really is no immersion that comes with the game.

But not only this, but the game was rife with horrible game glitches. Your character is slow as all Hell. Also, but the game window is seriously small. You move by clicking the mouse button on the ground around you, but because your view was so limited to only a few yards around you, you had to continually click in order to keep moving. Doing this over long distances is tiresome and tedious. Also, the game tended to lag a lot, then spike, so that everyone ran around furiously from all the clicks they made. Worse yet, accidentally clicking in the wrong spot could cause you to mistakenly attack a guard or do some irreversible damage.

Most of the skills are fairly useless too. The most you would need are the combat skills (melee, hand to hand, archery, magic, and maybe prayer) and mining, smelting, fishing, and cooking. The rest of the skills are quite useless. Skills like fletching and alchemy are rarely used in practical situations, so it’s an annoyance when you feel like you’ve wasted time grinding only to find out that the skill is of no practical use in the game. But the greatest problem I encountered in this game is that the only way to advance in levels was to grind up to the next level. Now, Runescape isn’t the most interactive of all RPG’s. The most you need is a mouse, since all of the commands are done through that. The result is, though, that training levels often incorporated merely clicking thousands of times in repetition for dozens of hours on end for a number of months until you get good at a skill, at which time you would move onto the next skill. And like I said before, the rewards for these tasks are minimal, and never compensate for the hours of work needed to be done to get to that point.


The Bottom Line
Most of RuneScape is eye candy. It looks like there’s a lot to do and explore on the surface, but the game’s appeal is superficial. Even after months and months of mind-numbing grinding, you are still nowhere close to playing in the big league and go on the “even more difficult dungeon” that you haven’t explored yet. There are just too many skills to level, and places to explore, and quests to do, and not enough time to do it.

There’s nothing really “fun” about Runescape at all. It was more frustrating to play than fun. The quests are nice and funny sometimes, but the interface is clunky and frustrating, and the skills are about as useless as being on the high score list at the local arcade; it looks good and it gets you bragging rights, but that’s about it. There’s no real skill involved. It just depends on how much time you’re willing to dedicate to this MMORPG, and how long you can repeatedly click your mouse. So if there’s no achievement and there’s no fun, then what ‘s the point of starting at all?

The Good
So if you're into browser games of any sort, you'll probably have heard of Runescape the MMO java game. We all know that it is HUGE, if you have no idea how big the game map is, just go search for Runescape world map in Google now, you'll be amazed. This massive landscape is probably the selling point of Runescape, (note the words selling point) it pretty much guarantees that you will never explore it all.

But of course a big map can't be the focal point of a game, there are the generic skills all fantasy RPG games tote, skills such as: Attack, Defence, Strength, Ranged ability, and Hitpoints. Attack determines what weapon you can wield, so you may see someone with a lower than usual level, carrying round a pretty devastating weapon. Defence is self-explanatory, the higher your level the more sophisticated armour you can wear.

Strength is probably the main factor in melee warfare, basically the higher your strength the more likely you are to do more damage. Most people will grind this skill, for hours upon hours just so they can trawl through NPC enemies more efficiently.

In addition to the usual RPG formula skills, there are a healthy amount of interesting skills that you won't see in many other RPGs. If you decide to walk the criminal path you can have a bash at pickpocketing, where after many hours of pilfering menial amounts of gold you can rank up to steal cakes, precious stones and other things of higher value.

Another rather, different but definitely welcome skill is farming. Now when people think of farming as a main part of an RPG they lose all hope for it, but don't be put off just yet, its entirely optional, you're not going to be forced to do it, (unless there's a certain quest which asks for it, which we'll discuss later) and it can prove to hold quite a bounty. Again, if you grind through levels and levels you'll eventually get better rewards, like being able to plant and harvest useful plants which can be parts of medicine, which in turn can sell for a fair bit of cash, if you don't mind playing the waiting game.

We can't go much further without mentioning the quests, which is another big good point on the board for Runescape. There are loads, probably at least hundreds, enough to keep you occupied for a long while, until another one appears, which usually happens very often and is appreciated and gracefully taken. Most of the time it may be, go to point A, kill person B, go back. But they like to mix it up a little, you may have to hide into a crate, be transported to a far away island and kill all who dwell there. Either way the quests can be rewarding and easy, depending on the needed skills for it.

Merchanting is largely a player made idea, not really approved by the developers of Runescape. Nonetheless it is still a big part of Runescape if you want to make serious cash. It works as a marketplace really, you go to the nearest bank, where there is always lots of people spewing, "NEED RUNE SKIMMY, 70K PLZ, >>>>AZNMAN120!<<<" you will come to this bloke's rescue, by buying the item he wishes, at a low price, and selling it to him to make a profit. The saying buy low, sell high really comes into play here, and you often see big numbers thrown about like spare change.

The final good point I'd like to make is that the NPCs and even your character seem to be aware, he/she knows people are controlling them, and that they're in an online RPG, and often say things unnatural to their setting, it can seem out of place but humourous all the same, and is a welcome change to the ever serious characters of World of Warcraft.

The Bad
You know most of the good points I listed up there? You won't be getting them for free. Of course no one would be gullible enough to think they get a mass landscape to explore, a dose of unique skills and a neverending amount of quests, but you would have thought you'd get some of it for free. Well you do, but you really won't be playing the game unless you're willing to part with some money.

The free members map, is a mere fraction of the size of the members map, its still fairly large, but you will run into gates alot of the time informing you that you are not a member, and therefore have no right to go any further.

The amount of skills are cut down, you still have your basics that I mentioned earlier, but you won't have many of the interesting ones, ala Farming, pickpocketing and hunting. And the amount of quests you get for free, is measly, you will easily complete them within a few weeks of playing, and with nothing else to do except occupy yourself with some player made past time.

Which brings me onto another point, if you're drooling at the thought of Merchanting and have six figure numbers in your bank account, you better be a member. Yes you can't even merchant if you're not paying because the members, only want rare MEMBERS things. You will have nothing to offer to them because they will have it already, twice over.

Another thing not mentioned about the quests is that the prequisites for starting the quest can just be there, to waste your time, yes you will need that skill at that level for that quest, but sometimes its such an unreasonable level, that you will just forget what you were doing in the first place.

Finally, you better be willing to put up with pretty shoddy graphics.

Yes I know there's recently been an update, (which has only updated it to look like really bad PS1 games) and that its a java, browser based game, but really, when water just looks like a blue carpet with some holes in it, you know there's something up.

The Bottom Line
There's no doubt that Runescape offers alot.

Huge map, Mass amount of skills and quests, and occasionally funny NPCs.

But only to Members remember.