An addictive grind fest that one day will leave you wondering why you ever played this game in the first place.
Runescape is mainly divided into three different categories in terms of gameplay. What one person may like the other may hate it.
The first is training skills. Runescape contains 25 different skills within the game itself. These skills can be divided into 3 categories: Combat, Gathering, and Production. With so many skills you may be thinking that this game has loads to do! And you'd be right! However it definitely has its downsides. The Combat within the game is repetitive and has little excitement at all. You basically click and wait for you character to kill the monster and you move on to the next one. Gathering is the same way as combat only you click on a material such as a mineral ore and wait for your guy to mine it and move on to the next ore. Production on the other hand allows you to create items that may benefit you and even help bring excitement to combat. However many of the production skills cost too much money to bother with and are virtually untrainable by the average/new player.
The Second Category is Questing. Runescape offers hundreds of quests with actual story lines. While not all of the story lines are actually good, it is nice that all of them contain one. This is a nice change of pace from other MMOs that seem to be more about collecting rather then stories or even puzzles (which rs quests have a lot of). They release new quests about once a month too.
The Thrid Category is PVP. Each world now (due to the recent update to bring back the wild) has PVP in a place called the wild. The wild is a giant, barren play that is separated by the actual world. Everyone is able to be killed when in the wild if you are in the corresponding level. This is a very fun environment to pk in, but it is held back due to the terrible combat within Runescape.
Moving past what Runescape is basically about, the game has decent graphics for a browser based game. While they aren't the best, they definitely aren't bad. I am talking about their HD mode however.. their SD mode is terrible looking and this mode is why the games gets viewed as an overall eyesore.
Extra info that helps describe Runescape:
- It has a free trade system in which players make the price that you are able to buy/sell items for. This has both upsides and downsides. Some items are 20x harder to get than other due to rich players hoarding those items making them virtually impossible to get. Other then that the system works fine.
- It has many bosses within the game the drops loot. This loot can be sold to other players for cash, or kept for your own personal use. All monsters drop loot in Runescape, but bosses just have better loot which is common knowledge in MMO's.
- If you die in Runescape you lose all of your items except your best three. This causes players to constantly stay alert and prevents people for "afking" certain areas within the game. However in the wild the system is much different. If you are skulled (meaning you attacked another player) you will lose all of your items no matter what.
- The game is basically a grind fest in which you constantly train/grind to gain levels.The game went from being a fun game in which you would level with your friends or do quests for fun back in 2007 to the greed driven, fame wanting game it is today. Players now a days focus more on showing off their 99s or their wealth they grinded then the actual content.
- Most of the community has an iq less than 30.That is all I have to say about that.
Overall Runescape isn't a bad game, but it is held back by repetitive gameplay and the overall fact that is just a massive grindfest. If you are looking for a pretty good MMORPG to play in your free time with little to no cost to play, then Runescape is the game for you. However it can be addicting so beware!