From being a somewhat detached tale of warring factions, RuneScape’s narrative is becoming about the ongoing history of the game itself. “Our gods represent different emotions, but those emotions lead nicely to differently aspects of gameplay,” Ogilvie says. “Generally speaking a player-killer is more likely to follow Zamorak, because Zamorak overthrew his master and stabbed him in the face with a holy relic. They love to stab things in the face.” Jagex are trying something truly ambitious with RuneScape 3, and it’s worthy of close attention. The new RuneScape is built around a set of ideas – player power, persistent change and community-building – rather than a fixed goal for the future. “It doesn’t need to have an end point, but it needs a purpose,” says Mansell. “That allows you to embrace whatever the players throw at you.

The three basic combat styles are magic, melee and range (archery). Characters do not have classes and they are all human so every character can use all of the combat style. If a character wants to use melee, he or she equips a melee weapon and the same is true of magic and range. Dungeoneering is a skill in RS and it is one of the best things about the game. The instanced dungeons are different each time the player enters one and they can be played either solo or in groups of up to five people. Runescape Gold for sale continues to offer a huge variety of play to its “F2P” members; without paying the monthly fee (which is currently set at $5.95 per month), players are allowed access to the majority of skills and most of the content under each ability. Subscribing provides access to an additional nine skills, members-only servers, and a world which is suddenly three times larger. Arguably, this is one of the biggest “P2P” upgrades while being offered at one of the lower subscription rates.

While the implementation of quests and rewards is certainly not unique to Runescape, I have experienced few games with a wider range of humorous content. Unlike other MMORPGs, RS does not require the player to perform the same quest repeatedly to gain experience, faction, or other skills. Once completed, the player receives their reward; sometimes an item, occasionally access to a new world or experience in the skill(s) featured. It’s pretty easy to make money in the game and there’s no way to buy in-game coins with real life money. All players have access to player trading and a stock market where you can buy and sell your items with ease. A lot of people use this as a way of making money so if you’re into number crunching then go right ahead and try ‘flipping’ for cash.

You earn money in Runescape in quite an organic fashion, through training your skills and selling the materials. If you don’t know what to do with your time in Runescape there are things called ‘daily challenges’ where free players get up to 2 at a time. These challenges will tell you to do something like craft x amount of x or kill x amount of x and then reward you once the task is completed with experience in the relevant skill and trading items if it involved collecting and handing over materials. Daily challenges are a great way to trying out new areas of the game that you may have not yet experienced as it encourages trying out new activities. There is also a task system available in one of the cities where, by completing a set of tasks you’ll get an item with special abilities at the end of it along with a bit of money for each task completed.

RuneScape is an BBMMO designed to resemble World of Warcraft (WoW), in that you create your own questions and go off on your own adventures, either with a group of your friends or solo. The game is designed around quests and experience, with hundreds of quests available in many different areas of the RuneScape world. In RuneScape, there is no storyline. Rather, the goal of the game is to complete quests from a list of dozens of available questions. You choose which path you wish to take, giving the user the choice of what he or she would like to do on any given day.

Over a decade ago, two brothers working out of their parents’ house in Nottingham set themselves the impossible task of building their own graphical multi-user dungeon, a genre that later evolved into the MMOs we know today. RuneScape launched to the public in 2001 as a low-res browser game with only a few hundred players and 2-D sprites for monsters, but several years later it boasted over a million paying monthly subscribers. The 2007 Sunday Times Rich List even estimated the Gower brothers’ business empire to be worth over ￡113,000,000, due almost entirely to RuneScape.

An entire community of players built a PvP scene around the ruleset of the game circa 2007, and their protests at subsequent changes to the combat system led Jagex to set up an alternative, time-capsule version of the game for them to play – a situation that represents both the developer’s willingness to be lead by their players, cheap Runescape gold and the challenge of trying to please everyone for 12 years. “[Those players] are more connected to a game that existed some time ago,” explains design director Mark Ogilvie. “I don’t have a problem with that. If they still want to play that game, that’s absolutely fine.”

The majority of players, Ogilvie argues, want to see change. “They want to see something that is reacting all the time – otherwise, they wouldn’t be consuming content at the rate they do.” Thanks to its character-class-free skill system and elective gameplay, there are no limits to the hero players can become, no quest you cannot complete and no requirement to collaborate with others or face them in player-versus-player combat unless you so choose. RuneScape’s distinctive role-playing style rewards players who think strategically and play smartly. Its witty, intelligent tone, finely balanced gameplay, epic questing and myriad in-world diversions combine to create a must play browser game.

There are many other fun features of Runescape that I have not talked about yet such as the events, tasks, minigames, and so forth but this review should have given you a good idea of what the game is like. The only thing left to mention is that the map of Runescape is divided into two parts – the free to play map and the members map. Skills are also divided into free to play skills and members skills. Membership is monthly and it costs slightly less than $10. A year’s worth of membership is currently $89.99. According to Jagex, the makers of Runescape, 90% of players are members. RuneScape has a load of end game content (and more is always coming, due to the weekly updates) in RuneScape. From high-level dungeons and raids, to group bossing (God Wars Dungeon), high level slayer assignments, high level quests and minigames – RuneScape may not have the most end game content out of the MMOs, but it certainly has enough!

Music in Runescape is unlocked as you enter new areas and can be controlled via an in-game music player. A lot of the music is now considered out-dated compared to the new style of music that is being released into the game. Despite this it’s still extremely popular in the community as it’s reminiscent of retro RPG classic games. More than 100 of the old music tracks have been recently re-recorded for the release of Runescape 3 with a live symphony orchestra, making Runescape music some of the best and most atmospheric music in online RPG games. Some quests now have voice acting and where voice acting is implemented it is truly of a fantastic quality. The dialogue is varied, humorous and emotive with no two voices the same. Where implemented, the voice actor’s style truly does match that of the NPC character.

RuneScape is an MMO that has been going since 2001 and is growing every day. Where some MMOs are losing subscribers, RuneScape is gaining members and with the release of Old School RuneScape (a separate server from 2007), more people are returning to the world of Gielinor and I’m glad! It’s a great MMO and a great game overall. If you don’t really like the bigger MMOs such as WoW, or your sick of traditional MMOs, give RuneScape a try! It’s not for everyone, but its there for you to try!