Contrary to its reputation as glorified task fodder — as a perceived anticipation of the idle/incremental microgenre — Runescape’s appeal to me has always been the passion with which it paints its world and binds it together with an almost obsessive logic. Take a pizza, for example. To make one in Runescape, you need to obtain grain. Then, you take that grain to one of the many lovingly bespoke windmills throughout Gielinor, put it in the hopper and operate the controls, and then put the resulting flour into a pot. You then combine that flour with water (obtained from a select few sources of tap water, of course) to get a pizza base. Combine that pizza base with cheese and a tomato (of which you can happily farm yourself!), plop that into one of Gielinor’s oven ranges, and put optional toppings onto it: voila, your pizza is done! All for a food item that heals barely more than just a regular ass cooked fish.
This sort of obsession with process might seem absurd, but back when interacting with strangers on the internet wasn’t an unsavory thing, it’s those little processes and worldbuilding minutiae that gave players the tools to work magic with in interactions with other players. The Jolly Boar Inn is for all purposes a useless and dead locale nowadays, but back in ‘07 it was the hot place to hang out with your clan buddies simply by virtue of it being a neutral space repurposable to players’ desires. You can’t become The Pizza Man without crafting a series of gameplay loops open enough in their intent to allow players to fill in the gaps so to speak. The end of the road is static and obvious — get 99 in every skill and complete each quest — but it’s the sheer horizontality of approach to those goals that defines Runescape’s sense of freedom and opens it up to player expression.
Of course, the problem with this level of mechanical indulgence is that you’re regardless going to have a path of least resistance: there’s always going to be a best, most efficient way to level up x skill or get y item. And with each variable added to the mix, you’re increasing the friction with which players are able to find content that they enjoy and also fractionating the playerbase into ever smaller partitions. If you give each quest a Witch’s House or Draynor Manor, it becomes obvious soon enough that your in-game world will bloat beyond its ability to sustainably foster environments for players to interact in. MMOs by nature have the sort of parabolic investment curve that makes these low-level quest locations unsustainable: areas that are meant for levels 1-20 might only occupy a fraction of the player’s time as ones for 21-40 and so on. And that’s sadly the case in Runescape: wander around a full 2000-player packed server and you’ll be shocked (but also not really shocked) at how few players you actually come across in a world filled with one-trick quest locations.
This is to drive at what might be Runescape’s biggest contradiction: on one hand, its status as a multiplayer adventure game; on the other, its status as an MMO. On one hand, its ability to stake out a world and populate it with thousands of interactable objects, NPCs, puzzles, and monsters for players to define their contextual relation to; on the other hand, its ability to keep the player drinking from a wellspring of numerical Progress, a Progress that liquidates context as a means to lower its own barrier to entry. The problem with an evolving game like Runescape is that it’s always going to be in a one-sided battle between these two impulses: rarely are players going to clamor to make the game more clunky and involved, but the reward for tidying up a grind and making progress more immediate is obvious. And what this constitutes is an eventual cultural and reputational shift away from the game’s origin as medieval-themed AOL chat room and more towards a traditional vertically-inclined MMO.
Not that I’m fully adverse to this — I’m impressed with how the Oldschool team has managed to squeeze out such a high skill ceiling out of this Lucasarts point & clicker — but I have to wonder to what degree the elements that made Runescape so unique in the first place have faded. Forestry, a recent update to the game’s woodcutting skill, is a good example of this. Traditional woodcutting in Runescape is pretty simple: you cut down trees to get wood, and then use that wood in an unbroken chain of other possible tasks: use a tinderbox on it to make a fire, use a knife on it to make an archery bow, cut it into planks at a sawmill to build things with, etc. This is still how it works, but now with Forestry, you also have a chance of obtaining something called “anima-infused bark”. This bark has no practical purpose outside of being exchanged for rewards through an abstracted shop menu: it’s simply an isolated currency. The contrast in tactility here is staggering: where traditional woodcutting presents access to an entire network of possible interactions, Forestry presents a single path and flattens its visual representation into a GUI. The role of process becomes usurped by progress. And Forestry’s not the only addition like this: achievement diaries, combat achievements, and even older ones from 2005-2008 like the Slayer skill and the Grand Exchange have all been content additions that “flatten” otherwise multifaceted gameplay systems into their numerical representation on a menu. I like these different additions in their own way (except for the G.E., ironman for life!!!!) and there’s nothing preventing you from just ignoring them, but regardless I feel that they fail to use Runescape’s variables at play. It feels less like you’re reaching out into the world and more like you’re fiddling with numbers on a spreadsheet with these systems. And this sort of numerical obsession breeds asociality: maybe it’s just the older age demographic nowadays, but I get into spontaneous social interactions in OSRS far less than I did back in 2007, as if the game’s possibility as a social sandbox has been forgotten.
I guess at some point I must come to the sad conclusion that the web browser game I played when I was ten years old now exists in a changed world: you’re telling me there’s monitors that go beyond 800x600 now? There’s some argument to be made that any evolving game like this is going to reach some flashpoint of its essential being before it begins to trail off: if I had to pin that date on Runescape, I’d put its peak state at around 2003-2005. At the very least though, I’m still left with a game that delights me to my core, even if I’ll fully admit that I love it in my head more than I do actually playing it. I love Gielinor’s earthy green terrain, lovingly populated with N64-era high fantasy assets. I mentioned in my HOMMIII review how much I love this sort of softly sardonic yet completely genuine fantasy, and I’m shocked that I forgot to mention Runescape as being the origin point for that love. I love Ian Taylor’s chirpy MIDI music that transforms even the most mundane corners of the map into effective mood pieces. I love archaeologically digging through the game and finding parts of it left untouched since 2001, like this useless flyer item that generic human NPCs will occasionally give you when you talk to them. It reveals to me a game with a sense of naive spirit and experimentation that’s hard to match nowadays, a game I’ll always rest with happy memories for in my heart. Life is but a dream.