A couple years ago I got sent a youtube video, namely “RuneScape is Awesome, And Here’s Why”. At the time I thought it was just a misguided analysis on why some people like the game, so although I didn’t agree with it I thought it was a really interesting perspective. Over time however, it’s become pretty clear that this has actually become the blueprint on how the game is being made. I also made a video two years ago ago to much less acclaim, titled “jagex has (accidentally) made players have less fun in OSRS – ramble”.

My aim here is to refocus the conversation about what the core design philosophy of OSRS is. To me, there are two vastly different competing interpretations on what makes OSRS into the game it is (or even more accurately, the game it was). 

The first perspective I want to share is that the game is a “sandbox” for lack of a better term. This is the type of OSRS that I personally like, and it’s very appealing to use the term in advertising materials. Someone who is bored with modern MMO design who stumbles onto the game can very easily confuse it for an actual sandbox MMO.

What defines a sandbox game from the players’ side is that it allows you to play the game in the way you want. A good example is contemporary analysis on the design of Minecraft. The scope of this essay isn’t big enough to go over every bit of “Why Minecraft Isn’t Fun Anymore” discourse so I’m going to go over the broad strokes. The core complaint comes down to the fact that the design of the game is incredibly unfocused and nothing you do in the game feels particularly rewarding. Every new update is criticized because there simply aren’t enough reasons to explore it.

The counterpoint is best expressed in a video titled “What I Learned from Getting 3 Middle-aged Men Addicted to Minecraft”. The title serves as a quick summary but the important piece of missing context is that the middle-aged men in question are veterans of boomer shooters who try new games with their family sometimes. In the video, the main focus is how each of these people likes to specialize their gameplay to serve one specific role in a multiplayer world. One of them likes going mining, another one likes exploring, the third one likes building.

This is the true appeal of a sandbox game. There’s a significant tradeoff in that no activity is particularly rewarding, but the upside is that you can choose which parts of the game you want to engage with. In essence, you can choose to ignore whichever parts of the game you want to ignore.

The other side of this “conflict” over what OSRS should be is expressed in the aforementioned video on why the game is awesome. I’m going to call this design philosophy “metroidvania” since a lot of the video focuses on borrowing the “locks and keys” terminology from that genre. For a near universal example when it comes to the ironman gamemode, a lock would be that you don’t have high enough range dps to comfortably raid, and the key for that would be getting a bowfa.

My second favourite game of all time is Hollow Knight (the first is Bloodborne if anyone was wondering) and that is very much a metroidvania. You run into an obstacle in the course of progressing through the game and you need to find the right tool to be able to move forward. A lot of the moment to moment gameplay is just going through each area you have access to and seeing if you can manage to find the specific powerup for that area.

And while the boss fights are the real selling point to the game to me, there are very clear advantages for having these locks and keys. Everything you do in the game feels meaningful since you’re always making tangible progress. Even if you aren’t currently defeating a difficult boss, you know that in just a couple of steps you will be and that you’ll have new abilities to try out for that fight.

This is how most recent OSRS updates have felt to me. They introduce some untradeable item (the fletching knife for example), which personally isn’t relevant to me since I’m an ironman, but do mean that people playing a main can’t ignore that piece of content. Then that item has some sort of benefit that lets you gain a huge advantage in existing content (making fletching at wintertodt incredibly effective). Thus introducing a key only to introduce a corresponding lock to use it in.

I personally haven’t had that much fun in the “OSRS platinum age”. Whenever I see a new update, I go like “oh that’s a neat thing I can ignore if I want to” only to discover eventually that actually it’s pretty vital to do something I was previously doing just fine. There are countless examples of this type of design, the log basket, gems and thread from toa, the items from gotr, and the list goes on. If these items were tradeable I would probably have gone back to playing a main, but there’s no avoiding them no matter what you do.

The facts of the matter are as follows, if you want to skip content in the modern iteration of the game, it means that you’re left at a huge disadvantage for a (possibly broad) category of other content. When a new update comes out, you’re expected to interact with it as it gives a large benefit to your gameplay in other areas. And the crystallization of this approach has been every single blog they’ve released on sailing up to this point.

The core sailing skill itself is incredibly simple and hasn’t changed since the pitch. You do something that involves sailing your boat and there are exactly three categories of things you can do: fetch quests, races, and harvesting shipwrecks. That is the entirety of the skill itself and it has not been developed any further. By doing these three activities, or by doing a larger amount of other related activities, you gain sailing levels. These levels allow you to access new islands, on which you can’t gain any sailing experience, but you can gain benefits for other skills.

Now, those other skills can then feed back into sailing. Sure, you’re on the island to chop a tree, but you can eventually filter the logs from that tree back into your ship through planks, which then allows you to do more of the aforementioned three options for sailing itself. But this doesn’t mean that these are activities for sailing. If they instead had decided to make redwood planks into a new item instead of introducing new trees, chopping redwood wouldn’t suddenly become a sailing activity.

So the outline is at follows. With the launch of sailing, there’s going to be probably fifty or so new locks that you can open with sailing levels. Some of these will have a major impact on other activities, such as providing the new best food in the game. But the sailing portion of the skill also has embedded locks, you need levels for unrelated skills like construction to actually build a ship good enough to do certain pieces of content effectively.

None of this is designed to be ignorable in any way, it has veered decidedly into the realm of pure “metroidvania” style design with no concern for players who prefer the “sandbox” style.

The easy objection to make is that quests have always served as a simple lock and key system for progression. And that is true. But for me personally, that portion of the game is the tutorial. The point of it is to get you try out as much content as possible so you can make a proper decision on which aspects of the game you like and don’t like. For me, once you have a quest cape, you should be able to ignore whatever content you want without a huge penalty.

A few years ago in the video I made I described how the huge jumps in gear strength, various diaries, skill requirements, combat achievements, and other types of lock-key progression have diluted the ability to make your own choices in the game. Sure, you can still ignore things, but if you don’t have a high enough mining level, you’re going to be punished for it in ToA for no good reason. And instead of players wanting the game to let them enjoy the content they like, it seems that the idea of “I want the quest cape grind to last forever” has stuck for good.

This website itself is a testament to how broad that sentiment has become. I do recognize the irony of making a somewhat comprehensive content exploration guide and then railing against this mindset. But the important guiding principle for that project is that I wanted to clearly mark which pieces of content you realistically CAN ignore if you don’t want to grind them out. A lot of the guides for the ironman gamemode, especially when it comes to PvM, try to sell a specific set of items that allows you to unlock more content.

The fact of the matter is, that for the vast majority of the game, you really don’t need gear. You can play perfectly fine with an RCB, a zombie axe, and a warped sceptre and you can do basically anything you want. Granted, that will make for relatively slow progression once you decide that what you want is a specific megarare and that you will be ignoring all other parts of the game. But that doesn’t make it incomprehensibly worse than the currently more popular type of step-by-step progression where you gradually increase the difficulty of the content you engage with in accordance to the items you have access to.

For further context, about a year ago I decided that I want to start playing Magic: The Gathering again. It’s a game I loved as a young teenager and thought that with more disposable income, it could be a fun hobby to pick up. Immediately, I was faced with what has now become known as a “dark night”, a moment in the game’s history where you either quit or come to terms with what the game has become. To make a long story short, Hasbro decided that the new Final Fantasy cards are going to appear in every single format of the game. I like FF14, but I don’t want to play Y’shtola in my card game.

For me, the past couple of years have been a “dark night” when it comes to OSRS. I really love the game when it comes to moment to moment gameplay. I like going to tob or killing the new boss or slowly chipping away at my long term goals for post-99 xp. But whenever a new update comes out, I really start considering whether or not I still want to play the game. I like taking things at my own pace and flitting between whichever activity strikes my fancy at any given moment, I don’t want to rush over to the new thing just so that I can go back to the old thing sooner.

And with some activities, the “old thing” doesn’t even really exist anymore. I know people on twitter loved making fun of fe papi asking for mixology nerfs every week, but the fact of the matter is that old herblore doesn’t really exist for skillers anymore. If you don’t spend a third of your time at mixology, you’re just wasting time for no good reason. This is especially depressing since herblore is the hardest skill on an ironman by far, in large part to the long-term commitment to herb runs. And that time investment got drastically reduced by being able to get a lot more xp for each herb you use.

With one update, I can never get back the thing I liked doing for years.

This isn’t to say that the new thing is intrinsically bad. I actually quite enjoy mixology and don’t mind spending time there. But with the way that it’s balanced, it’s not a matter of what I enjoy more and what I enjoy less. When I have to make the calculation of how I want to reach my multi-year goals, personal preference can only go so far in a game that can take tens of thousands of hours.

In some aspects, I have accepted this new way of things. I used to avoid a lot of PvM pet grinds since I didn’t have the best gear I realistically wanted to use. Why would I ever do amoxliatl without a scythe, why would I touch grotesque guardians with my meager dps, and so on and so on. Over time though, I just stopped caring. If I feel like doing a boss I’ll just do that with whatever gear I have, even though I’m burning time with every single kill I do.

I honestly don’t know if I can reconcile the way I want to interact with the game and how the game wants me to interact with it before I eventually quit. I have been very depressed about how the entire sailing process has gone and how it keeps slipping away from how I personally like playing the game. But maybe it comes out, I get it over with, have some amount of fun, and then happily ignore the parts of the game I have no interest in. I don’t know yet but I want to leave you with one last example.

I mentioned how sailing is going to introduce the new best food in the game. This by itself isn’t super meaningful to me. If I like the new fishing activity I’ll do it, and if I don’t like it I won’t. I don’t have a pressing need for healing slightly more when I can get a load of karambwans from afking or get previous high tier food from drift net, both of which are activities I enjoy. But what leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that just a bit ago, Jagex decided to remove most high tier food from most drop tables.

Previously you could “go infinite” on food when killing bosses that consumed a lot of it. The bosses dropped just enough food that you never had to worry about running out. That food has since been replaced with shark lure, a functionally useless item that makes fishing sharks slightly faster and has no impact on anyone trying to obtain food with any degree of efficiency. This seemed odd to me at the time, but after players overwhelmingly accepted that the new best food would come from sailing, it left me with a question.

Did Jagex intentionally create a new problem just so they could solve it?

I can’t be sure, but it’s not encouraging.