What is Runescape?

Runescape is a game from early 2001 that emphasizes skilling, combat, player interaction, player progression, questing, a player driven economy and a unique competitive gameplay.

Competition is based off of whether or not you have higher stats/xp, are wealthier, have completed more quests or have a collection of items. Game statistics are collected for PvM(Player VS Monster), PvP(Player VS Player) and skilling and placed in an adventurers log for all to see and compare to each other. In addition, there is a centralized hiscores which allows you to see where you rank on a global scale.

Progression of Runescape over the years

The progression of Runescape is extremely fast. The development team at Jagex, since the beginning, has always been highly skilled. Rendering engines have been rewritten by different developers, graphics, songs and many other portions have been written by different people, with a few long standing employees which take the majority of the credit.

Because the progression is so fast, every year the video game is a completely different world. All the content 1 year before it, is added to what was previously done. Today in 2023 all content from 2001 still exists in the game. The difference is in the rework of the art, graphics, music, animations, models and even the general gameplay.

What is Old School Runescape?

There are specific snapshots of what the game was like at every year. The video game assets for every year were saved in a cache which over time was ordered by revision number. The game was updated arbitrarily so the revision numbers are arbitrary. At this link. take a look at some revision histories.

Old School Runescape(OSRS) was a specific snapshot of the game that was relaunched and rebranded in 2013 as an alternative to modern Runescape. You then have the choice of choosing to play Runescape by its original game play before 2010 or you can play modern Runescape.

When you buy the game subscription you get membership to both so in reality you get 2 accounts with Jagex for one subscription.

Interestingly, there was an even older version of Runescape which was completely reworked. It was RS or Runescape. Old School is RS2 or Runescape 2 and modern Runescape is RS3 or Runescape 3. So Runescape was completely reworked two times .

Officially, RS or Runescape is no longer available. However, some generous developers have released open source versions of classic Runescape which allow you play it as it was. The nickname of this original Runescape is "Runescape Classic". Here is a link for you to read about Runescape Classic.

Should you play Runescape?

My general opinion is no. It is better to do something other than play video games. Unless you are a streamer or doing it professionally then it is worth while.

Another good reason to play is botting/coding. The challenge of creating a bot through coding is a very valid reason to play Runescape. You want to learn the coding skillset, join an open source botting community and learn to code. Yes, it is against the rules of the game, but you are not here to play the game, according to my book.

You are hear to make something of yourself in reality. Additional coding avenues will be in remaking the video game in Java. There are lots of open source communities remaking Runescape at this instant. If you are interested in learning how to code with one of these communities, read at this link about open-source Runescape.

But, why do I say not to play the game? The video game is saturated with extraordinarily dedicated players of which you have no chance of beating in any hiscores. In fact, so many people have reached the top xp cap that the hiscores has become meaningless.

Fine, if you have friends that want to play in a group together in a mode called, Group Ironman, then sure, have fun with friends. But it is always better to focus on reality or some skillset or personal brand which will benefit you in the future.