First Impressions of RuneScape 3 from a returning player

Over a decade ago, two brothers working out of their parents house in Nottingham set themselves the impossible task of building their own graphical multi-user dungeon, a genre that later evolved into the MMOs we know today. RuneScape launched to the public in 2001 as a low-res browser game with only a few hundred players and 2-D sprites for monsters, but several years later it boasted over a million paying monthly subscribers. The 2007 Sunday Times Rich List even estimated the Gower brothers business empire to be worth over £113,000,000, due almost entirely to RuneScape. The secret behind RuneScape is success is that it is been continually updated throughout its lifetime, not just with regular infusions of new content but also with several major graphical and gameplay overhauls. The game was recently reincarnated as RuneScape 3, which is as far as it gets from the primitive game many of us grew up with. It now boasts a visually improved HTML 5 client with graphics acceleration, orchestral music, some voice-acted quests with cutscenes, and a fully customisable UI. This combines with last year is Evolution of Combat update and over a decade of new quests and zones to produce an MMO with more depth and character than many other AAA titles. In this hands-on opinion piece, I put RuneScape is three major versions side by side and look at how far RuneScape 3 has come since those early days of punching 2-D goblins and mining for fish. Your first moments in RuneScape 3 Rather than force new players to muddle through an elaborate and text-heavy tutorial island as in past versions, RuneScape starts off with a voiced cutscene. Players are given a quick demo of one chosen combat style (Melee, Magic, or Ranged) before being dropped into Burthorpe, which has been redesigned as a training area for new characters. NPCs here will explain how each of the game is skills works and set you tasks to get you started. Existing players logging in for the first time since the update will see a cutscene introducing the story behind the Sixth age of RuneScape, with the gods Zamorak and Saradomin returning to raise armies and do battle. It is an interesting change to see cutscenes and voice acting in RuneScape, though the graphics engine honestly doesnot suit close-ups on characters faces. The voice work in the newer quests definitely helps immerse you more in the story, but the cutscenes sometimes just look out of place and unnecessary. My first impression is that this is more of an incremental update than a total overhaul, and there is definitely still a lot of room for the game to grow. The new UI system is a welcome change, allowing you to move every element around, combine windows, and snap windows into position next to each other. Quests and events The world event that is going on right now sees players take sides in a war between the gods Zamorak and Saradomin by collecting God Tears and exchanging them for favour with their chosen deity. A warzone has opened in Lumbridge where tears can be harvested; they can also be found randomly when you are training skills anywhere in the world. Earning favour gets you tickets to spend in a weekly global vote to decide what minions should be added to the battlefield next. Players essentially decide how the event unfolds through their collective actions, though the sheer number of active players means you canot make much of a difference. RuneScape has always been about completing the latest quests, and time not spent questing or PvPing is usually spent grinding up skills to meet the requirements for the next quest you want to do. The skill grind now feels a lot more forgiving than it was in RuneScape 2, and winning the occasional XP lamp in your daily Squeal of Fortune spins certainly helps. You can also now set a quest as your currently active task to keep track of it and set a destination on the map to get a handy direction arrow on the minimap. But a lot of information is still not easily accessible in-game, so you well find yourself frequently looking up the RuneScape Wikia page to check what an item does or see what the next step is in a quest.