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The Soapbox: RuneScape is a proper MMO
Most of us will remember RuneScape from its first incarnation: a tiny and blocky world with simplistic gameplay, no sound, and only a handful of quests. The product of two brothers operating out of their parents' house in Nottingham, the original version launched in 2001 and slowly carved out its niche as a game for kids that could be played in a web-browser. RuneScape has a special significance for me as the first MMO I ever played, and it's responsible for starting my life-long love affair with online gaming. A whole generation of gamers grew up with that primitive, blocky world and eventually left for more polished games. But RuneScape has grown up too -- and boy did it have a growth spurt! Today's RuneScape bears little resemblance to the classic version many of us played as kids. The graphics are now considerably better, the world map is about five times the size, and it has features most people dream of getting in their favourite MMOs. RuneScape now has player housing, guild halls on huge floating islands, a full player-designed battleground system, procedurally generated dungeons, regular content updates, and 186 quests packed full of British humour. People sometimes say that RuneScape isn't a proper MMO like World of Warcraft, but I'd argue that it's actually more worthy of its "massively multiplayer" title than most of the MMOs released in the past decade. In this editorial, I look at just how far RuneScape has come and argue that RuneScape may be more worthy of being called a proper MMO than some triple-A releases.
Funcom outlines The Secret World's dungeon mechanics
If you've been thinking about dungeon-running in The Secret World but you've yet to take the plunge, Funcom has published a new blog post that may push you over the edge. The piece outlines the basics (one dungeon per play field, five-player groups, etc.), but it also gives a bit of insight into Funcom's encounter design. Gone are traditional waves of time-consuming trash mobs. The devs have instead opted to provide a series of ever more challenging boss fights. Once you've mastered a dungeon's eccentricities in normal mode (and once you've completed all the Solomon Island and Egypt dungeons), you can access each instance's elite mode. If you're skilled enough to survive elite mode, you can test yourself against Funcom's fearsome guardian. If you survive one of his challenges (of which there are three, one each for the main group roles of healing, tanking, and damage-dealing), you can access nightmare mode dungeons. Read all about TSW's dungeon options on the official website.
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 guide to RuneScape's wilderness and free trade
Back when the open-world PvP of Ultima Online was more than just a memory for most people, it just seemed natural for a game to let players beat each other to death. Having open-world PvP in an MMO checked off another item in the list of things that attracted people to the genre. RuneScape's wilderness area was Jagex's compromise between letting players smash each other's heads in and not alienating players who don't want their heads smashed in. While most of the game remained PvP-free, the wilderness to the north was an open PvP bloodbath complete with corpse-looting and rude language. PvP was removed from this area several years ago as part of a major effort to beat the RMT business. At the same time as wilderness PvP was removed, limitations were placed on the amount of gold a player could gain or lose in player-to-player trades every 15 minutes. Trading was migrated largely to a new Grand Exchange system with built-in price limits. This all but killed the game's emergent trading professions, severely limiting the scale of shops and making life harder for the wheelers and dealers out there. Both the trade and PvP restrictions were lifted just over a month ago, and players are quickly learning to take advantage of all that's been brought back to the game. Skip past the cut for Massively's look at how you can take advantage of free trade and wilderness PvP and how RuneScape's community has reacted to the revival of these long-lost features.
Massively's exclusive interview with RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie
Last month, Jagex did the unexpected when it opened up a major game-changing decision on its popular MMO RuneScape to a public vote. As part of RuneScape's 10th anniversary this year, Jagex gave players the chance to vote on whether they want PvP in the wilderness and free trade between players to be restored. These are two key features that were removed from the game around three years ago as part of an anti-RMT campaign. Over 1.2 million votes were cast in the public referendum, with over 90% of them asking for the revival of wilderness PvP and free trade. The much-loved game mechanics should be returning to RuneScape in early February. At Massively, we took the opportunity to interview RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie on the upcoming changes and what the future has in store for this popular browser MMO. Massively: When you initially put out a vote on the restoration of wilderness PvP and free trade, did you expect the response to be as overwhelming as it turned out to be? Mark Ogilvie: We really weren't sure. I spend a lot of time talking to my players, but you often find that PKers are a vocal minority. We wanted to run a referendum to see what the truth was, but we really weren't sure what was going to happen. We had a bit of a friendly sportsman's bet to see where the percentages would be, and I'm quite proud to say my guess was pretty spot on. I was really pleased when my bosses said, "let's ask the players and see what they think." Taking the risks to do something like that, putting a decision that big in our players' hands -- that's quite brave. Skip past the cut to read the rest of our exclusive interview with RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie.
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.
WoW Rookie: Dungeoneering 101
New around here? WoW Rookie has your back! Get all our collected tips, tricks and tactics for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. WoW Rookie is about more than just being new to the game; it's about checking new areas, new styles, and new zones. Successful dungeoneering is about more than just getting a group together, although that is admittedly the first step. When five people descend into an instance, there is a level of coordination and role execution that doesn't exist in normal questing. These are the things you need to know before entering in an instance. You will hear people refer to the random dungeon finder as the LFD or LFG tool. This refers to the function in game that allows you to randomly be grouped with up to four other people, providing you enough players to go do an instance. You access the tool on your interface or by pressing the key "I." You can use the dungeon finder to queue a specific instance for which you are eligible. Eligibility is determined by your character's level and overall gear status. Alternatively, you can just tell it to queue for a random dungeon. The first time you queue for a random dungeon, you get a bonus to your usual rewards. This is an important incentive to keep people using the dungeon finder, which itself is key to all of us easily finding groups.
RuneScape gearing up for big November additions
Halloween may be over, but Jagex is still in a festive mood judging by all of the November updates coming to RuneScape. Chief among the additions is The Warped Floors, a high-level dungeon update that features the toughest bosses in the long-running history of the free-to-play title. New rewards are also in store, including prayer point necklaces, a new pet, and the scroll of cleansing (which grants a permanent increase to potion-making speed and gives you a chance to save a secondary ingredient). In addition to the dungeoneering updates, RuneScape is adding a new quest that involves the lore of the game's desert region, as well as the Pharaoh Queen Senilten, plagues and sandstorms, and the vile Devourer. Finally, there's the newest master quest, Do No Evil, which involves Three Wise Monkeys, King Awowogei, and the Kharidian Desert. Sound good? Check out the official RuneScape website for more details.
