In some austere study, in an ancient armchair silhouetted
by the moonlight, there sits a man. Or rather, what was once a man. The ghastly
figure that now lingered in this place had clearly left its humanity behind
long ago. The figure had a horrible, scarred and stretched visage, complimented
by inhumanly pale blue skin, which wavered and flickered in the light with a
slight translucence. He – for it had indeed been a he, ages past – was clothed
in warped and disfigured rags whose original design was all but lost due not
just to their state of disrepair but also due to the chains. The man was
covered in giant, rust-ridden chains that crossed this way and that all around
his body in incalculable numbers. They rattled constantly, their grim, hellish
tones a constant and unceasing reminder of the twisted afterlife this
simultaneously terrifying and pitiable creature had unwillingly bought for
himself.
He was currently struggling with the phone.
“Yes, you heard me correctly” he intoned in an echoing
bass. “Yes, it still hasn’t arrived...a large pepperoni...no...it should be
under Ghost...yes, full name Herbert C. Ghost...yes...yes, stands for
Christmas...yes I’m serious...okay...okay. But I’ll call back again if it isn’t
soon...yes, goodbye.”
With this, the specter sighed and slid the phone back on
its hook. He opened up a book he’d left sitting on the coffee table in front of
him and read by the light of his fireplace for a while. Before too much time
passed, there was a knock on his door. He jangled as he pushed himself up from
his armchair and crossed the room over to it.
“About time,” he grumbled as he opened the door. “It’s been
45 minutes and your policy clearly states...who are you?”
“Hi there!” I said cheerily, giving the ghost a little
wave. “I don’t know if you remember me, but you haunted me about a year back. I
mean, it was memorable for me but you probably haunt a lot of people. I dunno,
is that racist?”
“Wha...” mumbled the ghost, leaning in closer to get a
look at me. “Oh. Oh you were that internet writer. Video games or something...”
“That’s right!” I said. “Last year you came to haunt me
on Christmas Eve, said I would be visited by the ghosts of three shitty MMOs
past.”
“Right...” he said. “But why are you here now? Actually, more important question,
how did you find where I lived?!”
“Well I’m here now because I’m ready for the second MMO!”
I said.
“Wait,” he said, “what? You only played one MMO? What
about the other two?! You were supposed to play them all in one night and learn
a valuable lesson transparently ripped off one of the world’s most well-known
Christmas stories.” He paused, and waved his hand dismissively. “Well I guess I
shouldn’t have spoiled the ending but honestly, everyone knew that. What
happened?”
“Uh...I dunno” I said, hands behind me back and eyes at
the ceiling. “I guess the second game just never found its way to me and-“
“Holiday horsecrap” said the ghost. “It was a
supernatural visitation brought by powers beyond mortal imagining, it isn’t
like it can take a wrong turn at Albuquerque.”
“Okay, look,” I said, looking him in the eye. “I may have
sorta, kinda...ignored it. And then forgotten about it. And then moved to
Canada for a while just in case it could still find me.”
“Ignoring why you thought moving to Canada would prevent
visions of the damned,” the ghost said, “why are you here now? If you avoided
the game before why come back and ask for it later?”
“I’ll be frank”, I said. “My blog has had half the
content of each previous year since I started it, and making fun of old games
is an easy solution to that. Well, less a solution and more throwing a measly
scrap of bone to a starving audience that’s likely indifferent in the first
place. The point is I need something to write about. If you want, I can pretend
I’m learning the error of my ways or whatever?”
The spirit sighed, rubbing his temples. “Alright,” he
said, “If I give you something, than will you promise to leave me alone?”
“Definitely forever and with absolutely no caveats” I
said.
“Then fine”, said the ghost. “Go play some online game.
Go play...I don’t know, Runescape.”
“I INSTANTLY REGRET THIS ENTIRE ENTERPRISE!” I screamed
as he slammed the door in my face.
***
Runescape was
an old MMORPG released way back in 2001 where it set itself apart from the pack
by being both free and browser-based. These two facts made the game wildly
popular despite it being, in my personal opinion, largely terrible. In fact, it
later achieved the Guinness World Records for both world’s largest free MMORPG
and most-updated game (thanks Wikipedia!). Though I didn’t know this before
starting this article, I’m not really surprised. Everyone I knew played or had played Runescape back in the day, and
it’s easy to see why. There was absolutely no cost of entry, no sketchy
downloads, not even much of a sign-up time. You made your account and you were
already there, playing in your web browser with thousands of other people.
But you may notice I slid in a reference to the game
being “largely terrible” in that previous paragraph. You see I, like many of my
friends, tried playing Runescape for a time back in the day. I was not
impressed by the experience. When I had the idea to play old MMOs for the
purpose of blog posts, I checked back to find that Runescape was still around.
Not only was it still around, but it was technically on its third iteration! That’s right, there was
a Runescape 2 and we’re now on Runescape 3. Runescape 3 has succeeded the
previous games, and is now the only one you can play.
The banner on the
front page of the site is certainly snazzier.
Well, that’s not quite true. Enough people actually asked
for the original Runescape back that
a year ago the site offered the full experience of it again. However, even
though that may be the authentic experience, especially if you want me
complaining, this is only available to paid members. Were I not playing this
for the blog, I would probably rather pay 5 dollars for a punch to the face
than another round of original Runescape. The new version intrigued me, and it
also offers a better answer to the question of ‘how far have they come’. So,
we’re playing the new Runescape.
But since that’s the case, I should probably spend some
time discussing the old one for context. Discussing why it’s horrible. I admit the original Runescape
isn’t completely unsalvageable. It had some decent ideas that could have
elevated it to a better game if properly executed. They weren’t properly executed, in case that was unclear. There were a
lot of flaws in Runescape, but the one people most immediately notice about it
is the visuals.
Think back to the earliest days of 3D graphics, and
picture in your mind a particularly grievous example of pointed polygons. For
purposes of example, let’s look at, say...the non-combat models of Final Fantasy VII.
These models are some
of my go-to examples of early 3D graphics, because, I mean, come on. Restraints
of the time and all, but never again would we have literal cubes for hands.
Alright, got it? Now take those relatively nice
hand-drawn backgrounds and throw them away. Instead the environment is all 3D
like the character models, except with even fewer colors. Now make the sky an
endless black void. Now take away some of the limited artistry you can even
expect from such low poly models and make characters that are less appealing
and colors that are more garish. Surround the whole thing in an obtrusive,
early internet user interface and you have the original Runescape.
Oh yeah, true beauty
right here.
Let’s clear up a couple things. 1. This is the version of
Runescape I played, and it actually looks somewhat better than when the game started out. 2. Final Fantasy VII came
out in 1997, and the absolute earliest this game was around was in 2001. By
2001 the Final Fantasy series was on Final
Fantasy X. Let’s take a look at that game to compare Runescape to its
contemporary.
Oh I dunno, we’re neck
in neck on visuals here.
Now this comparison isn’t exactly fair. This is from a
pre-rendered cutscene near the start of Final Fantasy X. I’m sure the regular
in-game graphics don’t look near as good as this. Yeah, I’m sure if we had a
regular screenshot of the game then Runescape would start to look pretty –
Oh.
I’m sure people still wish to point out unfair
comparisons here. Final Fantasy X, regardless of people’s opinions on it as a
game, was generally seen as one of the best games graphically of its day. It
was also the latest in a long series of highly acclaimed games, with a
tremendous budget and experienced artists. I’m also sure that Runescape had
enormous technical hurdles to overcome that hamstrung its art. Keep in mind
that not only was this game trying to work in a continuous online environment
with tons of players, not only was it a free game made by a smaller team, but
it was a game that played in early 2000s
browsers. Really, it’s somewhat surprising it managed to exist at all.
But even though Runescape had all these technical difficulties
to deal with, that doesn’t change the fact that these difficulties made it a
worse game. That’s kind of the plight of the game in general. We may be able to
forgive the developers for these flaws, but objectively speaking the game still
has them. I made these comparisons to show that not only was Runescape not near
the best game of its time graphically, it wasn’t the best game graphically several years before it was made. Not
even just in technical graphics but in aesthetics; in character design, in environment
design, in color choice and all sorts of other ways. Long story short, the
visuals sucked, and sucked hard. But don’t think I’m unfairly focusing on one
aspect of the game. The combat sucked hard too!
Slow down. How could
something that looks THIS AMAZING possibly be bad?
Let me try to explain the highly intricate and complicated
way combat works in Runescape. So okay, you want to get to your off-screen enemy.
Click the ground to move to that point. Now your enemy is in view. Click the
enemy to walk over to them and start attacking them. You may get low health
during this fight, so make sure you click your backpack open to be ready to
click any food you have to eat it for health. If you managed to follow that, we
can get into non-combat activities.
If you want to fish, you need to have a fishing pole
equipped (click it in your inventory), and then you click on a fishing spot. If
you want to mine some ore, you click on an ore vein. If you want to chop wood,
you click on a tree suitable for chopping. If you want to do some cooking, if
you want to do ranged attacks with a bow and arrow, if you want to interact
with NPCs, guess what you do? If you said “press the keyboard”, then stop being
a smartass. Of course, if you want to do some non-standard action like
examining an item or trading with someone it gets more complicated. For that
you right-click, then mouse over the
correct option and...click.
The most shrewd
detectives among you may be aware of a running theme here.
‘But wait,’ I hear you say. ‘Clicking is simply the way
you do most things in online games! These games aren’t about reflexes, the
inputs don’t matter so long as the options you get from them are interesting!’
I agree with you, theoretical onlooker! Mainly because you are a temporary
construct I’ve foisted on my audience to get my point across. I love plenty of
RPGs that are, in pure terms of buttons, merely scrolling through a menu and
selecting things. There’s nothing wrong with that, you could still have a game
with only clicking that worked. The problem is with all these actions you
perform via clicking. Namely, that none
of them are at all interesting.
That scenario earlier where I mentioned clicking on
enemies and healing through food? Assuming you keep an appropriate level/group size
this can literally cover every single
fight you ever have in Runescape. I once saw a video of a group of players
taking on a big boss enemy, and recall the person in the video looking exactly
like I did when I fought low-level rats and such. The only difference was that
he had prepared hundreds of cooked
fish to constantly drip feed health to himself. It’s an RPG, so you do get
bigger numbers as time goes on, with more attack and health and such. But you’ll
be fighting stronger enemies too, so it kind of balances out. And apart from
running away, there genuinely aren’t many other options for combat in
Runescape.
Well...there is one. One whose name might cause you to
think it’s more important than it really is. Runes. Runes are also a thing in
Runescape, surprisingly enough. They’re the way you cast magical spells, and
they’re set apart from other games in that regard. You see, every single time
you want to cast a spell, you need to have the runes for it. Runes are single
use, disappearing when you cast spells with them. Higher level spells take even
more runes to cast. There are three ways to get runes in Runescape. You can
farm killing monsters, you can spend a good deal of time and effort to craft
them yourself...or you can buy them.
Yes, runes are like reagents from old-school role-playing
games, except taken to the extreme in an environment where such a system is
much less effective. I admit I’m biased here, because I hate systems like this.
Any situation where I have to pay for temporary
combat advantages, I try to avoid it. As has been established in the past,
I’m not a fan of random chance (man that article feels like a long
time ago). When I have the choice between spending resources on a temporary
bonus (like a brief stat boost or potion) versus a long-term one (like a
permanent stat boost or armor) I will always choose the permanent ones unless
the temporary one is massively better or required.
But even if I wanted to go with temporary systems in this
case (which I might if only to make Runescape combat interesting for once), I
wouldn’t be able to! Back when I was playing at least, Runes in Runescape were
prohibitively expensive. At low levels you couldn’t even afford them in the
first place, and were stuck slowly clicking everything to death. Even at high
levels, there’s the fact that you can survive more or less everything with high
enough stats and enough food on hand. You see, since runes are worth money, and can be sold to other players,
you’re effectively pissing away cash to use spells; money that could be spent
on better equipment or hideous hats or something. To put the cherry on top of
it, there wasn’t an enormous selection of spells and you could see them all at
any level.
The ineffable mysteries
of the arcane, contained within a list of tiny icons.
So let’s recap. Runescape had an inaccessible and
disappointing magic system; a combat system that was barely passable with that magic system and supremely
dull without; a suite of non-combat options that were all essentially just mindlessly
clicking things; near-objectively unpleasant visuals; and sound that...hm. Come
to think of it I don’t really remember the music to Runescape. I think it
played somewhat sporadically, as can be the case with MMOs (particularly old
ones). Maybe it was actually fantastic and I just forgot? Due to, uh, mystic
memory genies or something?
Eeeeeh, yeah no. That music isn’t terrible or anything,
but I don’t find it that great either. The melody and composition just leaves
me feeling indifferent, and the sound is notably dated. I can handle
old-sounding music, but this doesn’t stick with me like other old game music
does; it has an unappealingly generic fantasy feel to me. Other songs seem to
get about the same reaction, so I think I can conclude that Runescape’s music
is okay, but can aspire no higher than that. So a notable improvement on the
rest of the game, huh? HEY-OOOOOOO!
Oh and as a final note, given the time period this was
created, everything in the game would be accompanied by lag. Your character
would lurch around the world in brief spasms of movement, particularly
egregious in cities where players would congregate. So not only were you
playing something uninteresting, but most had to play it with some level of
jerky unpleasantness.
I’ve tried to make disclaimers throughout this, but I
want to reiterate that I don’t despise the thought of Runescape or the people
who enjoyed it. But I do think the game, whether it was due to its
circumstances or no, suffered a lot of problems that made it less enjoyable to
play. I spent so long introducing this series and rambling about these issues I
dug out of my childhood psyche that this post is now over 3,000 words long
without even getting into my experiences with new Runescape. And it’s now Christmas Day, so...
Yup, I’m gonna make this a series. I’ve already played
new Runescape and collected screenshots from it, so with any luck this won’t be
like last year where I say I’ll continue and completely neglect to do so.
Hopefully you enjoyed seeing me spitefully dog pile on a browser game from over
a decade ago. Join me next time when I may or may not dog pile on a browser
game that’s current!
And of course, all snide remarks and sarcasm aside: Merry
Christmas!
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