Runescape: A journey between two worlds

Hail Wanderers, Travelers and Lurkers alike.

When I was tasked with the mission to begin exploring the ebbs and wanes of the multitude of communities and cultures that exist within the virtual realms, I knew I was being set before a monolith that loomed over me like a stack of books threatening to tip over under precarious weight of it all.


Just about everyone knows Runescape. Even if you haven’t played it, you have heard it mentioned offhand elsewhere. From humble beginnings in 2001 and still thriving at the time of this writing in 2024, enduring nearly a quarter of a century, I knew this would be the first stop on my quest to experience the universes that people escape to to forget their troubles for a time.


The tricky part is, Runescape is a game split into two parts. Runescape itself has evolved, grown and changed with the times. As they do and should. This need to change however did not sit well with a very vocal playerbase and this is why Old School Runescape exists, recreating the second iteration of the game known as Runescape 2007. To serve this telling and to give respect to the game, I journeyed into both. What I discovered and experienced was what was essentially two apples, but one tasted like an orange.


Both games open very much the same, with you being thrust onto Tutorial Island to learn how the game behaves and thinks with some basic lessons. Gathering, cooking, combat, crafting, the simple toolkit we all come to expect from an MMO. Afterwards is where the changes begin.


Before we get into the meat of this telling, it’s time for us to lay out the mission. Combat, skilling and questing are stock and store features of most games. However the focus of this blog is to try and find the treats underneath the normal gameplay loops so focus will be less on the main gameplay. The details that might be overlooked by the average player too engrossed in their activities to take notice of. We dare to ask the question “What else is there to do other than kill stuff and make numbers go up?”


Old School Runescape:

Destination: Free Server 301.

I left Tutorial Island and emerged onto the streets of the town of Lumbridge. Host to a few basic services and a castle. There is enough going on to get you started, and a few quests to get you on your feet. You are left to your own devices on how to proceed.

Old School Runescape, from herein referred to as OSRS for brevity, has no overarching storyline for you to follow. Quests exist, however from my weeklong visit, I cannot confirm if any of them interconnect with each other. These range from helping a local chef make a cake to helping an addled wizard get his marbles back (they call them beads, but the allegory is there), to what seem like deeper, more involved affairs involving vampires and dragons and other dark forces. Beyond these moments, you are the master of your own destiny. The story is yours to make as you see fit whatever that may be.


This is when the paralyzing question occurs. What is my story? Where do I want to go? Where can I go for fear of running into something that will leave me a red smear in the grass? What sort of character am I making?


Naturally, we are The Wanderer, so an archetypical Wizard is the order of the day. Feeding into that mental image of an old greybeard roaming the world in search of something perhaps he himself doesn’t quite know.


From the start, you’re weaker than an infant trying to fight off rabid dogs with a sock. All your skills start at 1 out of 1. You need to slowly progress your skills to get better tools and gear so that you can contend with harder enemies and gather or craft more valuable resources. Early on the primary loop of gameplay is established. The more you do the more you will grow.


As custom dictates, over the bridge to the east of Lumbridge is the Goblin zone. A little area where Goblins and Spiders, who are not natively aggressive to the player, are fated to be spawn camped by players looking to test out their new kit, farm bones for Faith, and also act as one of two social hubs that I encountered during my visit to Gielinor. Players will often gather at the crossroads to socialize, engage in woodcutting and goblin massacres. Someone will usually set up a bonfire, which was fed and kept alight by those chopping wood, and the idle chatter and discussions were plentiful when not being drowned out by the baying cries of those pleading for money or spambots incessantly emitting their scripted lines trying to trick people into parting with their money with the promise of easy gains.

This is what I was looking for. The social aspect of Runescape. The creamy center under the base mechanics and flow of progression that would otherwise make the game nothing but mindlessly and methodically leveling skills to a max level seeking some form of purpose, objective and dose of Dopamine caused by numbers rising. This is where I learned that the OSRS community has their own syntax, a way of speaking. You can only type out so much at once, and with such limitation, it becomes necessary to develop a way to express yourself as briefly as possible, an evolution of early 2000s text speak. What you wind up with is a dialect of slang and abbreviations that make old timers like yours truly nostalgic for the halcyon days of being online.


What sort of person plays OSRS? Why settle on this particular game? During my stay in the Old School side of things, this was another of several questions I sought to answer. From the populace, the answers were numerous. It was simply what they preferred. Nostalgia. The dopamine rush of leveling up a skill. The thrill of PVP. The enjoyment of just Bankstanding with a bunch of strangers and idly chatting away the hours. The absurdity of watching people being as offensive online as they were back in 2005, when being called a slur was considered comedic gold.


Taking all of my social interactions together and seeing where the lines met in the middle, OSRS just made them happy. I understood, but at the same time I didn’t. I’m no stranger to the idea of people having a comfort game. Something they can turn to, tried and true, that never fails to make the world seem less bleak and dismal, and our burdens a little less so. Some of the people I walked amongst had grown up with Runescape. In a world that thrives on change, and the need to adapt being the difference between failure and thriving, having that one thing that hasn’t changed all that much can put the world to rights again.


Visually, OSRS is…Simple. Everything in the world is polygonal, and looks more like a very early alpha build of a game by today's modern standards. The good part is everything is recognizable. Someone new and fresh faced to OSRS might look at the different armor and weapon models and consider it to be rather underwhelming with the very simplistic graphical style, but one needs to try and see it as a young lad or lass back in 2007 getting ahold of these items for the first time…Okay, I Confess, it’s not like other games weren’t blowing OSRS out of the water even when OSRS was just Runescape. In 2004 World of Warcraft arguably set the standard of high fantasy visuals back when Runescape still looked like a retro point and click adventure game from 1990. What it lacks in detail, it carries in charm. The music accompanying your walk from town to town creates a very cozy atmosphere. Combat is simple enough in it’s execution one needn’t worry too terribly about getting swarmed and swamped while out in the world. It’s the reason it’s often called the best “second monitor” game, something you can play while doing something else. You can be studying or working or anything and just need to venture a moment of your time to like your next tree or mining node or enemy or whatever and carry on.


What bothered me was the lack of a sky overhead. Imagine a world of eternal daytime, but the sky is always an inky black. There is nothing above, it is all below. Often I caught myself looking up into the void, and a sense of existential dread began to seep into me. It was ominous, to say the least.

I found myself often traveling between the town of Lumbridge and the city of Varrock, as that seemed to be where the scuttlebutt was most common. The experience of walking (as your stamina to run drains very quickly…) from place to place, especially as a wizard with his staff in hand, had a very…as much as I don’t like to use the word, Cozy feeling. It was very zen.


The simplistic graphical style lends to you wandering through plains and fields, mountains and swamps that depict themselves enough to be distinctive. It never takes long for one to get from one place to another, unless you’re the impatient sort. But it remains simple. Nothing in OSRS stands out as grand or visually striking. But it does harken to a time when our imaginations were needed to make such worlds come alive.


Something was still missing. Player Housing exists, but it’s only for members, and thus as a quest in his realm visiting for free, I am barred from that experience. There are additional skills only available to paying members, so I was unable to investigate those and how they all fit in the larger zeitgeist.

As I pondered on what was causing this strange melancholy in me, I did as I did several times. I went for a walk. Perhaps it was because the players were so involved in what they were doing, seeking some form of progress, and keeping to only a few places in which to socialize or “bankstand” as they call it…It left other places feeling very lonely outside of the normal NPC’s strolling around. Taverns were often completely empty of players. Taverns are the common social hangouts in MMOs, they are designed for this function, even though you cannot actually sit anywhere…Which was irritating. Instead they prefer to park themselves off the paths at crossroads to converse. My theory was, all the locations where you were guaranteed to find people on server 301 were always less than a minute's walk to a bank, or the Grand Exchange. Always within arms reach of their storage or trading hubs. Even in socializing, they never strayed far from the grind, it seemed.


This made my heart heavy. They worked to play, and played to work. But to what purpose? This I cannot answer faithfully. A tree was not a tree. It was a source of woodcutting and firemaking experience.


I won’t even bother going onto the dismal notion of players preferring to play the game so efficiently, they optimize their mouse clicks for optimum experience down to the precise number. They seem lost in their own pursuit of perfection.


It was at this point where I realized that if I didn’t move on to the next part of the project, I would eventually find myself wandering the roads of OSRS lost in my own thoughts for longer than I wished, so I forced myself to carry on…



RuneScape 3- Runescape as it is now

Destination: Free Server World 3


That’s not to say Runescape didn’t advance with the times as MMORPGs moved away from the slow burn grind approach to progress, and more quality of life measures were added. To hear the tales, whenever the developer Jagex attempted to innovate Runescape they were met with an impressive amount of outrage from the players. This lead to the creation of OSRS in 2013, giving the player base back their version of Runescape as it was in 2007, while Runescape itself did it’s own thing and continues to this day with more polished modern graphics and odds and ends some may come to expect of a modern MMO.


I was greeted with Tutorial Island, very much the same as OSRS. The only difference was, I didn’t appear in the heart of Lumbridge, but rather what appears to be a mining village called Burthorpe, located just west of the city of Falador. In OSRS, if one were to look at the maps of each game side to side, Burthorpe doesn’t exist yet. However the mining area Burthorpe would feature is there. On an idle stroll to get my bearings, I walked from Burthorpe and found Lumbridge, and walked the usual road to Varrock, to Falador, the Barbarian camp. The usual places. It really was Runescape, just…Modernized. It was recognizable, but also alien. The simple graphical aesthetic was gone and now everything was very realized and modeled. Combat was more animated. Quests had cut scenes. Gold was easier to come by (not nearly enough to be swimming in it, naturally, but it beat the few coins you’d get here and there). While more accessible, it was by no means easier. Hostile enemies would still send me running for the hills if I was foolish enough to wander into a higher level domain.


But something was missing. The scenery was vibrant and very high fantasy, but it also felt very…Lonely. World 3, the most populated free server at the time of my visit, had the bankstanding players talking about their special flavor of nonsense, as did the Goblin spot near Lumbridge. But it wasn’t the same. Even now as I write this, even though I enjoyed Runescape in its modern form more than OSRS…A comment I know will have many accuse me of heresy…It lacked the cultural charm of the Old School variant. This left me perplexed. It was more fun, more engaging as a game, but as an MMO…Again, very lonesome for a lone Wanderer looking to immerse himself into the culture and the world.


Runescape, in its history, has been home to moments of legend, from the Falador Massacre, and played host to the actions and trials of players that seem from the outsider looking in, larger than life. From stories of players who ran a monopoly on smithing and their downfall, a cult formed around the worship and picking of cabbage, to a glitch causing one player to be able to slay an insane number of players even having a book written about the event…All of these come from the humbler age of Runescape. That era is locked in time with OSRS, while Runescape itself continues forward.


A week was not enough time to truly comprehend what Runescape was and is. There are lands I did not see. Quests I did not do. I hardly scratched the surface. Runescape OSRS and its current version both have layers that reveal themselves the more you do. The more you experience, the more you understand. The longer you play it, the deeper it gets into you.


Would I return to Runescape after this all-to brief tour of the realms it presents? I would. There’s a magic that both versions of the game possess that leave you wanting more. An addictive desire to continue on your personal journey. To gain skills and mastery in whatever you desire with people like minded and from all varieties, from good natured veterans helping the newbies along to the trolls far too eager to try and trick you into the Wilderness.


Runescape filled me with a childish joy but also as an adult, a certain sense of sadness. I am not one of them. I am an outsider yet. I fancy I will continue to play the games in between my adventures, because it is genuinely enjoyable if you play the game your own way. As for the company you will keep with you all really depends on you. Perhaps there are Members servers where the communities are more vibrant and engaging. Maybe someday I’ll throw my coins on the table and see for myself, and get the full experience.


But for the time being…The portal is open and I must pass from this realm to the next.


Travel well.

Same location, different generations.