RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I’d play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with bots. It’s honestly so bad. I tried to play it and it feels so… good, but also low effort. The worst part, however, is the corporate greed. Jagex, the company that developes Runescape, has been sold numerous times. This time, it’s owned by some Venture Capital or investment firm, the kind that kills games off to gain their IP and then sell them for huge amounts of money (CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments). The first thing they’ve done is raise the subscription of Runescape to nearly $15, which is truly nuts. This game used to be like $8 a month previously, some are still paying that much…
It’s sad to see corporate greed kill such a great game. Idk what to even play now…
Final Fantasy XIV may lack the point and click tick based combat and semi AFK gameplay but it’s a solid MMORPG.
Try Wakfu. There are a lot of chill trades to grind casually and the economy is completely player driven. There are no NPCs to buy or sell your loot to.
The PvE gameplay loop is really fun. The game has an adjustable level system that encourages players to replay lower level dungeons. Battles are turn based and have a surprising amount of strategy.
The only real problem with the game is that the devs seem to not care about player growth at all. They do zero marketing and sometimes the registration system is broken and won’t get fixed for awhile. It’s like the opposite problem to RuneScape.
How’s the bot situation?
Minimal. There’s a unique captcha system in harvesting that makes it difficult to bot. The closest thing to bad bots are people running multiple accounts on single account servers to run dungeons. It’s a bannable offense and people do get banned for doing it.
Check out walkscape beta
I second this! The game has really interesting idea and I have talked with developers and they are really awesome people.
I’m not sure what you mean by “low effort”? OSRS is an incredibly good game and keeps getting new content all the time. I’m happy to pay 15$ a month since we get a free update every wednesday. Sometimes it’s just some hotfix , other times it’s a whole new boss or continent. We had an new part of the map just last week.
Yes there is bot, but I never felt like it impacted my gameplay other than lowering the price of some items. The team is also doing a lot to ban them, it’s getting much better.
The community is booming. If you look around on YouTube, there’s a lot of content creators doing awesome thing on OSRS: custom game mode, weird twist on existing challenges, documentary, etc.
Honestly, I think we are currently in the golden age of Old school RuneScape, and if you feel like the game is bad or low effort, it might not be for you, which is fine, but the game itself is not the issue.
I hope you find some other game to give you what you had with RuneScape back in the days !
deleted by creator
For the last bit hoping they’ll find something like what RS used to be, they won’t. That type of game can’t really exist anymore. (It obviously could make money, looking at OSRS’s player base, but it would never get the funding it needs.) The best options are OSRS (or RS3, which has pros and cons with OSRS and doesn’t deserve all the hate), potentially Brighter Shores in the future (developed by one of the brothers who created RS), or playing a modern MMO.
BS comes out next month btw!
I don’t know about nowadays, but back in 2007 when I got bored with Runescape I switched to Guild Wars. Great MMO. Kind of dead playerwise now, but the servers are still up and it is soloable.
Did the Legendary Defender of Ascalon during Corona.
I should do some other titles with that character too…Man, spent so many hours in it. Recently installed it again and it still runs perfectly fine too.
I miss the heyday of both RuneScape and Guild Wars 1. Those were fantastic times.
Guild Wars 2 is still kicking.
Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.
They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.
They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.
I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.
Yeah it does a lot of stuff very good. The only thing I miss is something like chasing WoW raids drops. In GW2 you’re almost always working on crafting/mysticforge/achievements instead. I play a lot though don’t get me wrong :P
I’ve tried getting into GW2, but just couldn’t really get into it.
Doesn’t help that I fell of contact with all of my old guild mates who were supposed to be switching over.
You just reminded me, I should see if I can get City of Heroes Homecoming running on my computer.
Recovered my account a couple years ago with support and providing my og serials. Can’t believe it worked but it punched me in the face nostalgia-wise when I got into it.
I still occasionally fire it up and just walk around some of the hub cities.
I still remember hanging out in a few of them around this time of year when stuff was decked out Halloween themed. Never did beat the expansions. Crazy how little detail the game seems to have by today’s standards 🤣
There are fan projects like 2009scape that you can play for free.
I agree. 2009scape scratches the itch that RuneScape provides and it’s playable offline. The game doesn’t have every single quest, but the addictive part is still there.
they’ve done a really good job culling the bots in osrs, imo the biggest hurdle in it is the long boring grinds it takes to get to midgame pvm where it starts getting really really fun.
I’d also say that if you think rs3 is the default game you are very mistaken
osrs has been the more popular game by far for almost a decade now.
There is also iron mode which helps to ignore bots. Yes they can still steal your ore deposit but there are enough worlds to go to.
they’ve done a really good job culling the bots in osrs
You’re badly misinformed. Their official subreddit is rife with complaints constantly about how bad the bot problem is. Some top ranked players on high scores are bots too.
Example one where top fishing skill players are bots.
Example 2 The top 25 Bandos highscore ranks are dominated by ranged-only tick-perfect bots, with a combined kill count of 1.7 million, generating approximately 225 billion gold from Bandos sets and 50 billion gold from hilts, and similar botting issues persist across other high-level bosses and activities.
Example 3 where CVC admits they have no fucking idea how many bots there even are but that they’re important to OSRS and part of the game.
The bot problem is out of control and they obviously profit from it massively, banning them takes away subscribers
example 1 is from a year ago, 2 is new so it may still be a thing but likely something they’ve already dealt with and 3 is from “someone close to CVC” how on earth are you gonna take that as fact?
from mod ayiza’s response to that 3rd one:
"To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats:
Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.
So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.
Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.
Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy. "
they’re playing wack-a-mole because there’s no possible way to preemptively ban bots, but they’ve done a good job of it and will continue to.
Corporate greed has killed all of my favorite mmos, and every new mmo that comes out is further down the spiral.
So I decided to make my own damn game, a mashup of my top 5 favorite defunct mmos. Base gameplay/progression/dynamic events from Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies crafting/building, Firefall jumping/gliding/thumping, the mechs from Exteel, and the territory control map from Planetside 1.
It’s 100% a shameless asset flip, and currently jank af, but pretty fun at the moment.
Am down for that. Anything public yet?
This for real?
sorta ^^
If you’re not excited about Brighter shores then I really don’t know, for some reason no one else has ever tried to make the same type of game (aside from Genfanad and Titanreach, both of which have shut down quickly after release)
You could check out Project: Gorgon, it’s something of a mix between Runescape’s multitude of slow-to-level, interconnected skills on one character and a more typical MMO with distinct classes, buildcrafting and group content. It has a free demo on Steam. All of that said it’s only vaguely similar, and I wouldn’t mention it if there was anything closer to OSRS.
$8 in 2001 is about $14 now. Kinda seems like the same value is there, it’s just adjusted for inflation.
No, it’s adjusted for corporate greed. World of Warcraft has never once raised their subscription. Also, they shouldn’t have had to raise their subscription because they introduced microtransactions in both RS3 and OSRS which further boosted revenue. You’re comparing two very different times in the game. There’s no excuse whatsoever.
OSRS was in the $4 per month range for me when I played it when it wasn’t OS. I never got it.
I stopped playing due to all their stupid additions all the time. Like the sailing/whatever skills they want to add, it’s all bullshit and copium by and for adults wanting new stuff. Their “democratic” voting is an absolute joke; “oh it didn’t pass? let’s just poll it again with slight changes”. That’s a cheap and dirty way of pushing their own agenda.
I did the maths some time ago, a subscription to 1 Runescape character is 20 times more expensive than a WoW character.
does them adding new content somehow detract from your ability to do whatever it was you liked to do before said content was added?
“I hate that expansions are provided at no additional cost, and also it costs too much” is kinda one of the wildest takes on the game I’ve ever heard ngl
Yes it does. The waste of experience feels terribly wrong on RS.
You could stand by and hope for great things with Brighter Shores, from one of the original makers of RuneScape. I’m hoping it gives me that seem feel rs did decades ago.
I’m done bro. I have no hope left in me after Back 4 Blood. The original creators of Left 4 Dead, totally failed to deliver a fun and interesting game. I can’t believe the whole “original creator” bait anymore
Perhaps Albion Online for a similar kind of game?
I played Albion Online for a while until it was clear it needed a lot of grinding and paying to be able to play properly. Not going back.
Never tried that. What is it?
Bit of an interesting game, when I tried it a long time ago, but it was too much of a grindfest for me. Then again, I never got into Runescape either for similar reasons.
RS was a grind but it was relaxing. That’s what I loved. Come home, chill, chop some trees, level some skills, be a mage and kill some bad guys for slayer. Now it’s just min maxing for end game. The grind is unreal for some people, they kill the same bosses 20000 times for a pet to drop
Albion Online has a fully player-driven economy (or at least had last time I played it, back in 2022, prolly still does)
You can play it almost entirely as a gatherer, crafter or merchant (auction houses/markets are local to the cities they’re in), avoiding combat nearly everywhere. It does put a lot of emphasis on PVP tho, but at least the areas/maps where that can happen are clearly marked. Higher level materials are only found in these pvp maps, though it can take quite a while until you can even start gathering them.
AFAIK, all gear that drops from dungeons can be crafted as well. Nothing is character bound and being on red or black maps means that you lose all your stuff being carried on death.
Come home, chill, chop some trees, level some skills, be a mage and kill some bad guys
Well, that sounds a lot like what I found in Albion Online, though I can’t speak for how it’s changed. From what I understand, it has some extensive guild/clan systems too, where you can work together to build larger projects and wage war with rivals.
At low levels, a free-to-play isometric fantasy MMO.
At higher levels, a grindy gankfest.
This is going to be a weird suggestion but, if you like the pvm aspect of killing bosses to get powerful loot and take on more difficult challenges, you should play Remnant 2.
It’s a souls like shooter about exploring a few different worlds searching for new gear so you can make better builds, loot is not randomized so there is a clear BiS for your build.
Waiting on Brighter Shores to come out!
