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RuneScape - The Re-Review 2023 Edition | MMORPG.com
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RuneScape - The Re-Review 2023 Edition | MMORPG.com
RuneScape is one of the highest profile MMORPGs on the market and has been for the past twenty or so years. However, what is it like to join as a new player, and does the MMORPG experience hold up in 2023? Here is our re-review of RuneScape.
Comments
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
combat is outdated and with the tick system, you press an ability only for it to activate a split second later or sometimes you'll have to press it twice to activate.
The movement is outdated. No wasd movement, point and click game. And even the pointing and clicking isn't always accurate. Plus you can't climb or swim in this game except specific areas. Sometimes you can't get pass a freaking puddle or small river, or jump across a few rocks. This makes moving across the world feel awful.
The economy continues to get worse and worse. You use to be able to buy membership with in game money/gold, it's called a Bond. The problem is, bonds are going to be 100m very soon if not already , which for those that don't know 100m is very high for a casual player, so now it's better to just pay real money for membership which defeats the whole purpose of bonds anyways.
Not to mention endgame gear and weapons cost a whole fortune and only the richest players can afford the best equipment.
The graphics also suck, and some places look new while other places still haven't been updated and look old. Character models look awful and 2d. There's plenty of clipping with the capes and gear. It's a shame too because the completionist cape does look nice, as do some of the other capes such as the skill capes, quest cape etc. but it's all ruined due to clipping.
The game lacks any real PvP at all. Entire pvp scene is dead, there's no regular pvp modes either.
The questing is not fun in my opinion either, you spend all day doing quests. Every little quest is full of puzzles and outdated mechanics. The game tries to be "cool and different" by not following the "fetch/kill 10x" generic quest model, but honestly it's just as bad and mundane.
A single quest can take you hours because as I said earlier most of the quests in this game are full of puzzles and other mundane tasks. They try to be complex and end up being overly complex. Some of the "grandmaster" quests which are the highest tier of difficulty for quests, can take a day or two days just to finish them since you'll probably take breaks between each part, and each part will have several puzzles, boss fights, etc.
The story is also pretty laughable. Your main character you play as is basically just a pawn to other pompous false deities who think their a big deal, when in reality you do all the work for them. They call themselves "god" yet are a bunch of pushovers, honestly that's just disrespectful to the real GOD and his Son. The entire narrative is also really bad, main characters don't die off permanently, the game has no world building, nothing really matters. Everything feels like a side quest.
Other than those issues, the game just has way too much grinding. Some skills take months to Max. Completing all content in the game will take you nearly a year at least or even years if you're playing a slower pace.[it takes some over a decade just because they take breaks]. The devs also nerf all the great XP farms and money farms like Elite Dungeons or Player Owned Farms which was great farming XP, because all the max level sweats go on reddit and cry about methods being too "Op'' and need nerfing. Boss drops got nerfed pretty hard too.
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
Pretty good quests though, I'll give it that. But OSRS has this too, just not the same ones after the divergence.
RS3 has a serious identity crisis. Its attempt at action-style combat is completely destroyed by being the same tick-based system as it was 20 years ago, so the only word that can describe its combat is clunky.
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
The dinosaur engine still depends heavily on an outdated tick based system, the movement is still a clunky tile based traversal.
Pathfinding is still not as good for followers. The developer started and then abandoned a much needed character overhaul keeping it primitive compared to modern day standards.
The game engine still lacks major open world features and environmental effects which makes the game unappealing for newer breed of gamers.
The engine still cannot go past a 2.14b cap whereas prices of top end gear keeps exploding several folds past the hard limit, forcing players to trade in non conventional ways, giving rise to large scale scams that usually go unchecked.
They also killed off an entire chunk of playerbase by eliminating PvP content and abandoning casual competitive content for clan based community in favor of a more social based approach to player community which hasn't really paid off as such.
The playerbase lifespan has shrunk considerably as compared to before. The developer is milking the remaining playerbase with a regular flood of selling XP and other boosters in an attempt to get as many players past the mid tier content which largely remains outdated and suffers heavily from power creep of newer content.
Overall, the current playerbase in the market is much different from what created and forged runescape's identity and the developer has a lot to do before the game can meet the expectations of a modern gamer and bring back comparable popularity.