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[Reminiscing On] Runescape, 2003-2007
- Thread starter Tenebrous
- Start date
This game was fantastic because it took place in the pre-Wiki era. It was tons of adventure because everything was so unknown. There were entrepreneurial opportunities around every turn. MPKing, hunting rare monsters, rare materials. No one in the game was ever fully informed. You could start a successful business in the game. Of course, that was all ruined when they blocked trading between players. Then by the time they fixed it, the Grand Exchange and rampant bots ruined it yet again.
Yep I have to agree the game had amazing quests when you compare it to other mmos.
I'll never forget this sound effect especially in the wilderness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dyP4LDMLG4
Ya when Bots came around it was awful for us in F2p because no one could do any woodcutting.
I'll never forget this sound effect especially in the wilderness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dyP4LDMLG4
Ya when Bots came around it was awful for us in F2p because no one could do any woodcutting.
One of my favorite quests simply because it was one big quest split up into multiple smaller ones. And it was a huge joke but still a funny one. The Barrow Gloves was an amazing award, and the bank chest downstairs as well. (Even though I believe there was a bank added to Lumbridge upstairs later on.)
I still wish the Blue Party Hat man had a better quest when we finally got the quest about him. Had nothing to do with the bank break in, and we still have a man with a very expensive paper blue hat on the loose who is still living across the street from where he had his heist....
Ape Atoll was a blast, especially with the monkey changing magic.
Going through the Underground pass to an agility ridden paradise, all the way to a Vampire's Castle on the other side of Runescape disguised as a poor peasant.
The game still has a special place in my heart. But then a chicken comes out of nowhere, one thing lead to another, and I'm haunted each night by it's evil. At those rare events, Runescape is dead to me. All within good reason though!
Oh man. The stone of jas and god backstories and all that isn't just in the bible, it's literally the lynchpin of the game's plot these days.
Should've guessed lunar spells were your work too, those did hit pretty soon after the ancient set. Kinda niche, but neat all the same. I've always liked depictions of magic that break away from fireball and magic missile and get into weirder applications like that.
Again, super cool. Really impressed by how well it turned out, given the constraints and timeline you guys had to work with.
The 200th quest only came out earlier this year, but it's actually kind of a spiritual sequel named Dimension of Disaster. Keeps up with the core conceit of revisiting old quests as subquests, and the gypsy kicks it off.
That's a relic, yeah. All the random events got axed a while back when they rolled out better anti-bot tech, and now the associated NPCs are dotted around the world for flavor.
The drunken dwarf turned out to be the rightful king of the dwarves and now reigns as King Drunken Dwarf III.
Probably a long shot, but I'd also love to hear anything you can say about Mechscape. I don't think they've officially canned the project that turned into, but it's vaporware at best these days.
EroticSushi
Member
I remember all the scams people tried pulling off on others. Give me your weapons and gold and I'll forge it into the best one in the game! Just wait here and I'll be back.
WildEagle18
Member
The best one was probably a scammer wearing a Trim armour and getting telling players they'll trim their armour for free lol.
I fell for the "Jagex will censor your password if you try saying it" scam, because I was apparently that stupid.
In any case, some guy had control of my account for quite a while, as I continued to play on it. I think he set the recovery questions as well, so I was pretty screwed. At one point, I'd spent hours mining coal, got about 500 in my bank, and then it was gone. Eventually he changed the password, and then subsequently got the account banned somehow. I did get it back by submitting an appeal, but forgot the new password I set.
Also, an interesting thing I just noticed:
Which probably means the free game is just really damn boring, and maybe not a good sign for the future of RuneScape. I mean, how many new players are really willing to pay $10 a month on this game?
Although, the total amount of users online is up significantly from where it was a year ago, largely due to the introduction of free OSRS, it appears.
http://www.misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/?display=avg&interval=week&total=1
Why do you think it is that Runescape still has the best storylines and quests between all the MMOs released in the past 20 years? Was it the collaborative/interactive work environment that allowed that to happen?
WildEagle18
Member
From what I read Lizardsquad couldn't even access RS3 which was what Zezima plays. The vid of them showing Zezima's account was OSRS, which Zezima already said he wasn't going to play lol. So basically Zezima's 'main' where all of his stuff was weren't really touched.
Princess Viola
Member
I fell for a scam and lost my first 10k after playing for like two weeks or so.
Yeah that's not a lot but it felt bad.
JJDinomite
Banned
Oh my god I remember the gnome cocktail being annoying, but I literally had never been to the gnome village before. Seriously, you did some amazing work and truly impacted my early teenage years.
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
Wow, thanks for sharing. It's really cool.
ZeezbruhTV
Member
Haha im in the vid at 2:10, great memories!
Rest
All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
I had a friend in junior high that played RuneScape, so I started playing too. I probably played for about a year before I ran out of stuff to do in the free areas. It was a pretty fun time, but I always hated it freezing when I tried to play music on my computer instead of listening to its own sound track.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
This is probably much more seriously skirting NDAs, but;
- The game I spent three years on doing world building, quest design and lore along with 2 other primary 'game architects' that was cancelled by the executives the week before it was due to launch is never coming back, because one of the other primaries left to found Bossa.
- The game I spent 18 months on building raids and boss fights is never coming back, as the other primary left to join Mythic.
- The game I bailed out on that was internally 'rebooted' 3 different times before laying the entire team off I don't think will ever come back but some of the team who were shuffled onto RuneScape think will someday.
- The game that was there chatter about the company publishing under the Stellar Dawn name has already been released to pretty mixed reception from players.
I could probably give loose answers about the first version of the game because that is definitely never coming back, and I know which parts of the lore were burned with fire by my replacements when I left. The leaked video of it that was floating around showed parts from some of the prologue / tutorial content for some of the playable species I was responsible for.
At some point that was actually implemented as a real thing
RS style quests are incredibly poor in terms of the development time to player appreciation ratio. It's something well upwards of 1000 to 1 when you include devtime, art time, audio time and QA time (being 1000 man hours to produce something that takes 1 hour to experience). And it's not like you can play it again without rerolling an alt or something.
RS gets away with it because RS has always done it and because RS has always done it, anyone else who wants to enter that space (MMO with a bunch of point and click adventure style singleplayer content) has more than 10 years worth of that content to compete with on a feature level.
Played a lot of this game just wandering around exploring. Barely understanding english and poking stuff. It felt so huge at the time. Wilderness was super exciting, just hoping someone would die and you might end up stealing their rune sword. Quit playing when they released 3D characters and music, didn't feel right lol.
what
Of all the dumb reasons why video games have been cancelled at the eleventh hour, that is up there.
Didn't realize any footage had ever leaked, I'll satisfy myself with that.
Jesus. That's even more complicated than they'd let on. I'm gonna say that the dreams of the Jagex sci-fi MMO are dead, especially since they've moved on to Minecraft knockoffs.
Thanks again. It's good to have at least a little closure about all that, after hearing about it for so long.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
Quickly looking on youtube, this is a legit internal video of the first games build.
I guess they used to be more vigilant about deleting them from youtube than they are nowadays.
EDIT: Not the music though. lol. turn sound off.
Reminds me of when I spent a week or two crafting 20000 nature runes after that pure essence update just so I could make enough money to play castle wars with ancient magic and barrows gear for a week.
Oh god I remember actually finding the video on YouTube and posting about it on a forum and re-upped the video after it was taken down. Jagex then attempted to Subpoena me for the video because they thought I was the one who stole it. I was 13 and had a Subpoena email from Jagex.
Found a picture similar to the email I had
And there were also people who told you: give me your password and I will make you a member. I was one of them who fell on that scam.
Luckily, managed to recover my account the next day. And then put that person on my blacklist.
I remember all the crazy stories surrounding RuneScape, teenagers killing themselves because their in-game stuff was stolen, kids being murdered because of their in-game exploits, etc.
Yet everyone in high school was playing it. That and Americas Army were like crack to me and every other boy in my class.
Yet everyone in high school was playing it. That and Americas Army were like crack to me and every other boy in my class.
When you were there was there any concern of the future of Java? I feel like it is a surprise to no one that the game is bashing into the ceiling of what is possible in Java and they are extremely late to finding an alternative.
I really think Jagex should consider releasing a singleplayer version of Runescape. It would literally be the ultimate RPG. So many awesome storylines and things to do. Of course it would require a lot of tweaking (Such as Shield of Arrav, as a minor example) and making existing content a bit more difficult as well as introducing new content, but it'd be so worth it.
Have you heard about the Ironman modes? You can make a character that must be almost entirely self-sufficient. Dunno if that's quite what you were thinking, but it's kind of a cool challenge either way.
http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Ironman_Mode
Yeah that mode is pretty cool.
I assume he wants an offline experience though, which would be cool as a one time purchase.
I cannot quite recall when i played Runescape. It was so long ago...
I recall my very first times where with a modem... 56kbit one probably as they were standard then. I think?
It was back when the game had sprite-based characters and items.
I liked it. I like the atmosphere the game had, i liked the idea of a MMO, i liked the world, i liked the fun quests, i liked the sense of accomplishment when making stuff for my character. I liked painting my cloak... there were these goblins that people killed for dyes, i think?
I remember when were daring with my friend and stored our important stuff and went wandering to the Wilderness. There was a place where pizza ingredients spawned constantly. We would cook pizzas there and train our cooking skills. Then we'd explore around, and get chased by a high level player killer.
Ah, it was so fun adventure. Never have experienced anything quite like that again in any other game.
I did keep playing even after the first 3d graphics though i think i didn't really like them... Maybe. It is possible i actually did like the first 3d graphics. As i said, it was so long ago, it is hard to recall.
Eventually i moved on to other games as we got new computer and other games.
I think i tried to get back to it at some point but i just couldn't stand the graphical changes to the game. Think there were UI changes as well, essentially i would have had to re-learn the game so i gave up.
I recall i named my character after the emperor in Dune, Shaddam IV. Recall people asking why my character was Saddam Hussein or something like that...
(I read Dune as relatively young and it has ever since been my favorite book.)
---
I do think Runescape gave me my love of MMOs.
Not sure i really like playing them though... There doesn't seem to be another one like Runescape.
As much as i love EVE Online, it takes too much time and requires specialization...
WoW limited my actions too much with class and profession systems, and its dungeon and raid focus weren't my thing (i effectively quit WoW when i hit level 80, because i hated Battleground PVP and i couldn't stand the idea of doing dungeons again and again, and the game offered me nothing else).
In Runescape, i especially liked the fact i didn't have to rely on money really. I would mine my own ores, i would chop my own wood, gather ingredients and bake bread and pizza, gather materials, etc. I would craft everything by myself, with occasional trading. I was kind of a generalist, i could do just about anything, though not very well. But that was all right, it wasn't an issue in Runescape as i played it.
Sure, it was slow but it was fun, especially with a friend doing the same stuff.
It was a fun game despite being so... crude in so many ways.
EDIT LOL, didn't realize i had so much to say about the game. Have to note i was a free player, there was no chance in hell i'd pay for the game, or more specifically, get my parents to pay for it.
I recall my very first times where with a modem... 56kbit one probably as they were standard then. I think?
It was back when the game had sprite-based characters and items.
I liked it. I like the atmosphere the game had, i liked the idea of a MMO, i liked the world, i liked the fun quests, i liked the sense of accomplishment when making stuff for my character. I liked painting my cloak... there were these goblins that people killed for dyes, i think?
I remember when were daring with my friend and stored our important stuff and went wandering to the Wilderness. There was a place where pizza ingredients spawned constantly. We would cook pizzas there and train our cooking skills. Then we'd explore around, and get chased by a high level player killer.
Ah, it was so fun adventure. Never have experienced anything quite like that again in any other game.
I did keep playing even after the first 3d graphics though i think i didn't really like them... Maybe. It is possible i actually did like the first 3d graphics. As i said, it was so long ago, it is hard to recall.
Eventually i moved on to other games as we got new computer and other games.
I think i tried to get back to it at some point but i just couldn't stand the graphical changes to the game. Think there were UI changes as well, essentially i would have had to re-learn the game so i gave up.
I recall i named my character after the emperor in Dune, Shaddam IV. Recall people asking why my character was Saddam Hussein or something like that...
(I read Dune as relatively young and it has ever since been my favorite book.)
---
I do think Runescape gave me my love of MMOs.
Not sure i really like playing them though... There doesn't seem to be another one like Runescape.
As much as i love EVE Online, it takes too much time and requires specialization...
WoW limited my actions too much with class and profession systems, and its dungeon and raid focus weren't my thing (i effectively quit WoW when i hit level 80, because i hated Battleground PVP and i couldn't stand the idea of doing dungeons again and again, and the game offered me nothing else).
In Runescape, i especially liked the fact i didn't have to rely on money really. I would mine my own ores, i would chop my own wood, gather ingredients and bake bread and pizza, gather materials, etc. I would craft everything by myself, with occasional trading. I was kind of a generalist, i could do just about anything, though not very well. But that was all right, it wasn't an issue in Runescape as i played it.
Sure, it was slow but it was fun, especially with a friend doing the same stuff.
It was a fun game despite being so... crude in so many ways.
EDIT LOL, didn't realize i had so much to say about the game. Have to note i was a free player, there was no chance in hell i'd pay for the game, or more specifically, get my parents to pay for it.
This is what's sad to me. Runescape revolutionized MMORPGs in terms of content, self-sufficiency, story, etc. The only negative were the abysmal graphics, but I eventually got used to that.
It's sad that there's still no MMO/game like it. It did so many things incredibly well.
Yup. I'd pay through the nose for RuneScape type skill systems with a WoW level of polish.
WolfForager
Member
Damn, reading this thread really is bringing all the memories back.
I used to be an admin for a site called Heart Unit that specialized in providing fast paced Pest Control games. That community was like a family to me for years, made my time playing Runescape that bit more special for me. My interest in RS faded soon after they downgraded the rewards from Pest Control as it led to the ultimate demise of Heart Unit.
Came back on and off for a year or two after to train my Slayer skill, lost interest completely after a while. Tried going back a couple of years ago, the game had evolved so much however that I had no idea where to pick up, so that didn't last long!
Also yea, the quests in RS were amazing, I remember playing Monkey Madness with my heart in my throat thinking I was gonna die nearly every time I entered a new area.
Spent so much time at the Barrows as well, that shit was addictive as hell.
I used to be an admin for a site called Heart Unit that specialized in providing fast paced Pest Control games. That community was like a family to me for years, made my time playing Runescape that bit more special for me. My interest in RS faded soon after they downgraded the rewards from Pest Control as it led to the ultimate demise of Heart Unit.
Came back on and off for a year or two after to train my Slayer skill, lost interest completely after a while. Tried going back a couple of years ago, the game had evolved so much however that I had no idea where to pick up, so that didn't last long!
Also yea, the quests in RS were amazing, I remember playing Monkey Madness with my heart in my throat thinking I was gonna die nearly every time I entered a new area.
Spent so much time at the Barrows as well, that shit was addictive as hell.
GifGafIsTheBestGaf
Member
ha! that place was the goat. i think i leveled up fishing and cooking up 60 something till i got a sub.
200 coins
harpoon/lobster cage
that was all you needed.
then i went to world 1 or 2? to sell it raw
selling 5K raw lobs!!! (add color to text cant remember the comand)
selling 5K raw lobs!!!
[cyan]selling 5K raw lobs!!![/cyan]
edit: easiest 1million, sometimes even more. higher level dudes training cooking would buy it for higher prices specially when you were selling a lot
it's strange, I have the sensation of playing a shitload of runescape but I have almost no distinct memories of it whatsoever apart from lots and lots of campfires, that weird prison tutorial island, and also for some reason falling down a well endlessly (I think this was a related flash game on Jagex's website... maybe)
daTRUballin
Member
Were these stories actually true? If yes, then that is insane :/
You probably were. Monkey Madness was hell, especially if you did it near launch with the sort of combat level most people had back then.
Played this game way, way too much during middle school/high school, haha. Lots of great memories from this game. Some bad memories as well, but mostly good mories.
I was still playing it not that long ago as well by the way, I was still playing it in 2012 and early 2013 if I'm correct. I liked all the new content and the 'Evolution of Combat'.
But yeah, I just lost interest in the game, not due to the changes they made to the combat or something (like I said, I actually liked most of the changes and new content), just lost interest in playing the game as a whole. They probably made a lot of new changes by now as well.
I still have the urge to go back playing it sometimes. I have 2 major accounts, and I really liked playing with my pure with the EoC. Managed to get the Fight Kiln cape with my pure at level 85 combat. (those who played in 2012, post-EoC will know what this is)
And yeah, the quests are really great in RS, really liked doing those.
Some bad memories as well, but mostly good mories. I was still playing it not that long ago as well by the way, I was still playing it in 2012 and early 2013 if I'm correct. I liked all the new content and the 'Evolution of Combat'.
But yeah, I just lost interest in the game, not due to the changes they made to the combat or something (like I said, I actually liked most of the changes and new content), just lost interest in playing the game as a whole. They probably made a lot of new changes by now as well.
I still have the urge to go back playing it sometimes. I have 2 major accounts, and I really liked playing with my pure with the EoC. Managed to get the Fight Kiln cape with my pure at level 85 combat.
(those who played in 2012, post-EoC will know what this is) And yeah, the quests are really great in RS, really liked doing those.
nrvalleytime
Member
So I randomly decided to re-up my account - any one around here still playing? Would love to spend time playing with other GAF members.
Benzychenz
Member
Just saw a Runescape meme on facebook and got all nostalgic.
Went to play some classic but don't remember my password. Put an appeal in but don't remember shit about old passwords, payment details etc from a decade ago so hopefully my recovery questions are enough.
Kind of tempted to make a new character haha, I remember the quests being incredible, and no MMO has ever recreated them.
Went to play some classic but don't remember my password. Put an appeal in but don't remember shit about old passwords, payment details etc from a decade ago so hopefully my recovery questions are enough.
Kind of tempted to make a new character haha, I remember the quests being incredible, and no MMO has ever recreated them.