Daemonheim
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RuneScape: Sixth anniversary retrospective
When it first launched back in 2001, RuneScape was a primitive beast. Its blocky three-dimensional world was littered with hand-drawn two-dimensional sprites, and most of its sound effects could have been created by whacking random objects with a hammer. Only a handful of quests and skills existed, and there wasn't much land to explore. After over a decade of development, the RuneScape we have today bears little semblance to its primitive ancestor. The map is an order of magnitude larger, the list of quests has grown immensely, and there are countless things to do in the world. With several million actively playing free accounts and over a million paid subscribers, RuneScape has risen from its humble beginnings to be one of the world's most popular free-to-play MMOs. It's been a long road, with a few important milestones along the way. Today marks the sixth anniversary of the date that the RuneScape 2 beta was officially completed and the game's first major overhaul was launched live to players. Anyone who played back then will remember the beta fondly as the rebirth of a game they loved. Since then, regular game updates have added a huge amount of depth and content every year. In this retrospective article, I look back at RuneScape's past to see how it got to where it is today and what's new to the game over this past year.
Massively's hands-on with RuneScape's Dungeoneering
For many of today's MMO players, RuneScape provided a first taste of massively multiplayer online gaming. Released in 2001, RuneScape was a blocky world full of ugly characters trading each other logs and feathers. The world existed only to perpetuate an endless skill-grind that was largely without purpose, and the height of competitive or co-operative gameplay was racing a friend to a particular skill level. It's been almost ten years since those first moments of RuneScape, and the game today is barely recognisable as that world many of us grew up in. The game engine has had several major graphical overhauls over the years, from the RuneScape 2.0 3D upgrade in March 2004 to the RuneScape HD overhaul in July 2008. There are now hundreds of servers worldwide, and players can benefit from ten years of previous content updates. Back in April, Jagex published the largest content update in RuneScape's entire ten-year history. The Dungeons of Daemonheim expansion brought in dungeoneering -- a fantastic new solo or group activity with practically infinite replayability. Players can form groups of one or more characters and venture down into the dungeons of Daemonheim to test themselves against some unique challenges. The high degree of replayability comes from the fact that the dungeons are procedurally generated and tailored to the specific skills of the players in the group. The dungeon rooms are filled with monsters of varying difficulty, items you can use and skill challenges that unlock bonus rooms and loot. Dungeoneering is available for free players, though some of the content is limited to subscribed members. In this hands-on article, we get to grips with RuneScape's massive dungeoneering system and ask whether or not it's as fun as it sounds.
RuneScape wishes members a merry Christmas with its December update
Christmas is quickly approaching, and with it many MMOs are gearing up for a December update. For EverQuest II, World of Warcraft and many others, this means it's time for the annual Christmas festivals or other wintry festivities. Other games, such as EVE Online and Asheron's Call, will be giving players a major patch this month to add new content or features. Players of RuneScape will be similarly celebrating the holiday season with a Christmas patch full of goodies. Included in the update will be improvements to the Warrior's Guild, new hit splats to give additional information about damage, and the new area of Daemonheim for subscribed members. The Warrior's Guild will be getting a new challenge called the Cyclossus, and many of the previous challenges will be updated to include additional rewards. Daemonheim will bring players the winter Heimland Games, with activities ranging from snowball fighting and snowman decoration to ice skating and something ominously referred to as "seal sliding." To top off the December update, a new Damage Soaking stat will be added to several pieces of high-level gear to fix what Jagex calls "an imbalance between the potential damage per minute (DPM) and damage capacity (DC) of higher-level players." If you're one of RuneScape's several million players, you'll have a lot to look forward to this holiday season.
