Runescape is an MMORPG made by Jagex with over 2 million players, and it was the first MMORPG I ever played. My first impressions were HOLY FUCK! THESE GRAPHICS ARE HORRIBLE! You start off by creating your character, and then you learn about the skills combat, strength, defense, hitpoints, prayer magic, cooking, crafting, woodcuting, archery, fishing, runecrafting, firemaking, mining and smithing on an island called Tutorial Island (not the most creative name in the world). My second impressions were, HOLY FUCK! THIS GAME HAS A TON OF SKILLS TO LEARN! Those were only non-member skills, the member exclusive skills are fletching, theiving, herblore, agility, farming, slayer, hunter, construction and summoning.
So Runescape has a ton of skills to master, they are measured in levels up to level 99. Since it would take a long time to list every-skill on that list I will just go through the combat skills, also you are not bound to a few skills, you can use every skill. Attack determines what types of weapons you can use (bronze, iron, steel, black, mithril, adamantine, rune and dragon), and how powerful your controlled attacks are. Strength determines how powerful your brute-force attacks are, and it also determines what heavy weapons you can use. Defense determines the armor you can use (leather: leather, hard-leather, studded leather, green dragonhide, blue dragonhide, red dragonhide, black dragonhide, plate/mail: bronze, iron, steel, mithril, adamantine, rune and dragon). Hitpoints is basicly your health, the higher it is in level the more damage you can take. Archery determines what bows/crossbows you can use (wood, oak, willow, maple, yew and magic) and works with defense to determine the archery armor you can wear.
Magic determines the type of robes you can wear (wizard, mystic, enchanted, split-bark and infinity) it also determines if you can use a staff or battlestaff (staffs just take the spot of the elemental rune they represent). It also determines what spells you can use, you see in Runescape your character doesn't have a mana bar and thus relys on runes to us magic. You need a mixture of runes to cast the more powerful spells and magic isn't strictly combat magic. You can use magic for teleportation (there are no other true fast travel systems to ensure you need to play longer). Magic may be a powerful skill, but the cost of runes makes it a skill you develop later on in the game.
To level up your skills you need to preform actions related to the skill, chopping down trees gives woodcutting XP etc. This ensures that players will keep playing the game for at least 2 years. Skills also have benifits, there are no health potions so you use food to heal yourself. The better healing food comes from a higher level cooking skill. Many skills also go together, to make better healing foods you need a high level fishing skill to get the ingrediants. Jagex also adds skills to the game to ensure it stays fresh (hunting, construction and summoning were not apart of the original game). Thus adding a few extra months to the game.
As you should know MMORPG's tends to not have a main story, only a series of quests. Runescape has 162 quests to complete. They require you skills to complete and sometimes are linked to other quests. These quests give the player access to new areas, skills and items to complete new quests. These quests are mainly puzzle based and will have the player march all over their massive gameworld. They will also have you fight extreamly powerful monsters that even the most powerful player would have trouble fighting. The quests give a better feeling of acomplishment than most RPG's, though it still cannot be forgiven for bullshit boss fights (if you die you lose all but your 3 most valuable items).
Another quest like part of the game is exploration. You travel between towns in Runescape so Jagex one day decided to add a feature that works like a shopping list of things to do. Let me explain, this is a checklist of things you can do in towns and cities to get cool new items. Not sure why someone would give you things for being a hardcore tourist, but loot is loot.
As you may have guessed, Runescape is very repetitive and chalked full of grind. This is the case with most RPG's, and Runescape is no exception. you will find yourself marching across the huge map for most of your questing experiance. The games combat system is also rather boring is Realtime-Turn-Based-Combat you and your opponent basicly take turns killing each other and only a few weapons have special powers to mix the combat up. There is also the combat triangle, melee beats ranged, ranged beats magic and magic beats melee. Not very creative or fair because certain monsters are melee fighters that are immune to magic and even use it. And prayer skills can make the player immune to magic, melee or ranged combat (but only one at a time). The monsters are also pretty stupid, there AI is as basic as it comes. They tend to walk right in front of boulders making them easy target practice for mages and rangers.
Runescapes combat isn't very exciting and Jagex knows it. So they added dozens combat and skill based minigames to try and liven it up and to add new items. They are all for members though and you can lose your items in some of them.
Barbarian Assualt: A team/strategy minigame where the players take on roles to kill quickly adapting monsters.
Blast Furnace: You and a team keep a furnace going to smith ore into bars to get better XP for your smithing.
Castle Wars: Capture the flag RS edition, you and a team of 20+ players face another team of players to capture the others flag and bring it back to your castle.
Clan Wars: You and a clan (a Runscape guild) fight another clan in the wilderness.
Fishing Twraler: You and a team of other players keep a ship going to earn extra fishing XP and fish.
Games Room: Basicly a collection of boardgames.
Gnome Restaraunt: You deliver gnome dishes around the game world to earn cooking XP and gold.
The Wilderness: You can kill players in certain parts of the wilderness, but it's filled with monsters with cheap attacks. It also has the best treasure.
Theres more than that but I haven't played all 36 minigames. So lets continue with this review.
To get ahead in the game you need gold (no suprise there). You can get gold in many ways, through combat, monsters have loot that they drop but this isn't the best way to earn a living. You can use your skills to get easy cash by selling the products on the grand exchange. The Grand exchange is basicly Runescapes auctionhouse. It works more like the stock market though. Prices rise or lower due to supply and demand, so you'll never encounter that stupid price posted by some money greedy fuck. The downside to the GE is that you cannot have more than six items up for sale. It really doesn't make sense, maybe it was put in place for the sake of balance, I don't know.
You can also build and own a house. You use your construction skill to build rooms and objects, everything from kitchens to dungeons. It's main purpose is to house portals to teleport quickly to certain areas of the map. It can also have servants and you can host your own parties. Not really important, but it's pretty cool.
Runescapes membership is dirt cheap, it's under 10$ a month. If you don't have 10$ you live in a 3rd world country. It's a great game for what you pay for it.
So let's quickly recap.
Bad things: Grindtastic, repetitive, runs on an old graphics engine, crappy combat and bullshit bosses.
Good things: Creaters constantly update the game, lots of skills to master, fun extras, tons of quests, a shit load of minigames and it's fun and addicting and cheap.
Runescape is a great MMORPG in my books, it's negetives have plagued MMO's for years and the graphics ensure that any PC can run it. It's also good to see the staff constantly update their game and add on to it. And it's cheap. If you can put up with simple combat and bad graphics, give this game a shot.
Please comment.
So Runescape has a ton of skills to master, they are measured in levels up to level 99. Since it would take a long time to list every-skill on that list I will just go through the combat skills, also you are not bound to a few skills, you can use every skill. Attack determines what types of weapons you can use (bronze, iron, steel, black, mithril, adamantine, rune and dragon), and how powerful your controlled attacks are. Strength determines how powerful your brute-force attacks are, and it also determines what heavy weapons you can use. Defense determines the armor you can use (leather: leather, hard-leather, studded leather, green dragonhide, blue dragonhide, red dragonhide, black dragonhide, plate/mail: bronze, iron, steel, mithril, adamantine, rune and dragon). Hitpoints is basicly your health, the higher it is in level the more damage you can take. Archery determines what bows/crossbows you can use (wood, oak, willow, maple, yew and magic) and works with defense to determine the archery armor you can wear.
Magic determines the type of robes you can wear (wizard, mystic, enchanted, split-bark and infinity) it also determines if you can use a staff or battlestaff (staffs just take the spot of the elemental rune they represent). It also determines what spells you can use, you see in Runescape your character doesn't have a mana bar and thus relys on runes to us magic. You need a mixture of runes to cast the more powerful spells and magic isn't strictly combat magic. You can use magic for teleportation (there are no other true fast travel systems to ensure you need to play longer). Magic may be a powerful skill, but the cost of runes makes it a skill you develop later on in the game.
To level up your skills you need to preform actions related to the skill, chopping down trees gives woodcutting XP etc. This ensures that players will keep playing the game for at least 2 years. Skills also have benifits, there are no health potions so you use food to heal yourself. The better healing food comes from a higher level cooking skill. Many skills also go together, to make better healing foods you need a high level fishing skill to get the ingrediants. Jagex also adds skills to the game to ensure it stays fresh (hunting, construction and summoning were not apart of the original game). Thus adding a few extra months to the game.
As you should know MMORPG's tends to not have a main story, only a series of quests. Runescape has 162 quests to complete. They require you skills to complete and sometimes are linked to other quests. These quests give the player access to new areas, skills and items to complete new quests. These quests are mainly puzzle based and will have the player march all over their massive gameworld. They will also have you fight extreamly powerful monsters that even the most powerful player would have trouble fighting. The quests give a better feeling of acomplishment than most RPG's, though it still cannot be forgiven for bullshit boss fights (if you die you lose all but your 3 most valuable items).
Another quest like part of the game is exploration. You travel between towns in Runescape so Jagex one day decided to add a feature that works like a shopping list of things to do. Let me explain, this is a checklist of things you can do in towns and cities to get cool new items. Not sure why someone would give you things for being a hardcore tourist, but loot is loot.
As you may have guessed, Runescape is very repetitive and chalked full of grind. This is the case with most RPG's, and Runescape is no exception. you will find yourself marching across the huge map for most of your questing experiance. The games combat system is also rather boring is Realtime-Turn-Based-Combat you and your opponent basicly take turns killing each other and only a few weapons have special powers to mix the combat up. There is also the combat triangle, melee beats ranged, ranged beats magic and magic beats melee. Not very creative or fair because certain monsters are melee fighters that are immune to magic and even use it. And prayer skills can make the player immune to magic, melee or ranged combat (but only one at a time). The monsters are also pretty stupid, there AI is as basic as it comes. They tend to walk right in front of boulders making them easy target practice for mages and rangers.
Runescapes combat isn't very exciting and Jagex knows it. So they added dozens combat and skill based minigames to try and liven it up and to add new items. They are all for members though and you can lose your items in some of them.
Barbarian Assualt: A team/strategy minigame where the players take on roles to kill quickly adapting monsters.
Blast Furnace: You and a team keep a furnace going to smith ore into bars to get better XP for your smithing.
Castle Wars: Capture the flag RS edition, you and a team of 20+ players face another team of players to capture the others flag and bring it back to your castle.
Clan Wars: You and a clan (a Runscape guild) fight another clan in the wilderness.
Fishing Twraler: You and a team of other players keep a ship going to earn extra fishing XP and fish.
Games Room: Basicly a collection of boardgames.
Gnome Restaraunt: You deliver gnome dishes around the game world to earn cooking XP and gold.
The Wilderness: You can kill players in certain parts of the wilderness, but it's filled with monsters with cheap attacks. It also has the best treasure.
Theres more than that but I haven't played all 36 minigames. So lets continue with this review.
To get ahead in the game you need gold (no suprise there). You can get gold in many ways, through combat, monsters have loot that they drop but this isn't the best way to earn a living. You can use your skills to get easy cash by selling the products on the grand exchange. The Grand exchange is basicly Runescapes auctionhouse. It works more like the stock market though. Prices rise or lower due to supply and demand, so you'll never encounter that stupid price posted by some money greedy fuck. The downside to the GE is that you cannot have more than six items up for sale. It really doesn't make sense, maybe it was put in place for the sake of balance, I don't know.
You can also build and own a house. You use your construction skill to build rooms and objects, everything from kitchens to dungeons. It's main purpose is to house portals to teleport quickly to certain areas of the map. It can also have servants and you can host your own parties. Not really important, but it's pretty cool.
Runescapes membership is dirt cheap, it's under 10$ a month. If you don't have 10$ you live in a 3rd world country. It's a great game for what you pay for it.
So let's quickly recap.
Bad things: Grindtastic, repetitive, runs on an old graphics engine, crappy combat and bullshit bosses.
Good things: Creaters constantly update the game, lots of skills to master, fun extras, tons of quests, a shit load of minigames and it's fun and addicting and cheap.
Runescape is a great MMORPG in my books, it's negetives have plagued MMO's for years and the graphics ensure that any PC can run it. It's also good to see the staff constantly update their game and add on to it. And it's cheap. If you can put up with simple combat and bad graphics, give this game a shot.
Please comment.
