/games/ - Video Games

>>63478
Play OSRS, the newer versions are complete shit. You can definitely get into it as a complete beginner even now, most of the content that actually relies on other players comes much later on in your leveling experience so for a long time it's almost like a single player game. In terms of what you should do first, part of the beauty of osrs is that it's non linear. See which skills are interesting to you, start training them. Through doing this you will begin to form goals and gradually expand your knowledge of the map.

>>63479
I should also add that there is a lot of free to play content that you can work through, so you have a while to decide if you want to pay for a subscription or not (the main downside of the game)

>>63479
Thanks for the info. Gonna start playing one of these days

I highly advise against getting in to Runescape. I started playing as a kid in 2004 and amassed over 52 days of total playtime before 2007… With school and a bedtime. Did I enjoy exploring the low poly world? Yes. Did I like talking to randos for hours at the fishing sites? Verily. Did I spend 11+ hours grinding on skeletons for a single attack level increase? You bet. But what made it fun then has not only been washed away by updates and a culture shift (even on OSRS), but is also just incompatible with my elevated state of existence (I'm an adult like you). I've revisited it multiple times over the past 15 years and every time it becomes an objectively worse game.

For it being a multiplayer game, it falls as short as it can. It's effectively a singleplayer game in which you can also see other players carrying out their singleplayer tasks. Nobody is talking or hanging out anymore. Most of the people you meet either have chat disabled or won't speak English, even in your most local server. There's no way to troll people and banter is pretty much censored out entirely. Trading in person was replaced by the GE. There's no party system or co-op quests. Even the few minigames that are team based are empty with the few players being metabuilders with the absolute best stuff so you stand no chance to either contribute alongside them or beat them. Nobody PKs because there's nothing a guy can drop that can't be bought from the GE after a day of using the current get rich quick strategy. Money and the current best gear for a level is in such an abundance and easy to materialize that you can't even roleplay as a good guy going around and uplifting people with your charity. There are no noobs you can see doing the little starter quests and you'll never walk upon a dead player whose loot you can steal because that's been taken out of the game. Look at the screenshot in the OP. That's half the game's server, idly staring at menus in the GE to make their yellow coin number increase. Nobody talking, no PVP, no arguments. Might as well just be you and the same menu those players are staring at. You can even count a few bot or smurf accounts there.

There's no story or narrative depth. No funny, cute, or cool quests, characters, or events. If you like anime, Lord Of The Rings, medieval history, and European culture as a whole then too bad this game has nothing like any of that. The very need for NPC interactions has long since been phased out - unless you're playing hardcore ironman you are never going to find out how quirky Zaff of the staff shop is because his prices are inferior to the GE. Even if you do take the time to talk to him, you'll find that pretty much all characters in the game over nothing but short functional interactions exactly like his. You can go in to a pub and talk to the NPCs there.. Maybe they will have something interesting to say or a quest to give.. Nope, was a sentence or two and all quest givers are marked with an icon on the map. There's no story or lore for them to progress or divulge in, there are no cute witch GF NPCs to bully, and no mysteries to unravel. The world is incredibly small, taking about 12 minutes to run from one end to the other. And then you unlock teleporting and never have to see 50% of it again. There's no rare resources to discover or crazy enemy encounters because everything is fixed in place. After 20 years of updates, the small world is littered with a bunch of random out-of-place objects relating to new quests and out of season events that would have been fun when they were popular, but are now just as desolate as the rest of the game.

The gameplay itself is point-and-click to make the number go up. This would be fine if the other two areas I've moped about were better, but without them you're going to have a less invigorating experience than Farmville has to offer. Click, number go up, inventory go full, empty inventory, repeat. That's every single skill. Uh oh, other player clicked on what you ere clicking on, now you gotta wait. Turns out he's a bot too. Oh you called him a nerd? Ban. The combat is a diceroll at a fixed pace and nothing out of the ordinary every happens. Especially as a low level you're going to be watching your character swing a sword and a blue 0 appear to indicate that you failed to hit the rat. The rat fails to bite you back, so now you just had 5 seconds taken from you. There's no strategy. You can increase prayer by burrying bones. This will unlock a temporary hard skin buff so the rat fails to bite you more often. You can camp NPC spawns to kill them and get the bones and then site there clicking the bones to bury them and do this for 4 hours till you get the first buff.. Or you can click on iron ore for 2 hours, sell the ore in the GE instantly, and use that money to buy the bones that you can click on teh spot to get your prayer up. That's the entire gameplay loop. Quest rewards are null compared to just grinding it out which is fine because the quest are just "kill this" or "go pull that lever". There is no reward in trying to do things the expected way because there's nothing to enjoy on the journey.

Runescape gained popularity because it was a small browser-based game that kids could hop on and use to keep chatting with their friends after school. Hanging with chums, listening to the nice midi music, gloating how you leveled up and sharing what you read on Zybez. Making friends who are sharing the same point-and-click struggle. Trying to gang up on noobs in the wildy. That's not really possible anymore. If it was I'd recommend Runescape to kids today as an alternative to Discord or Linkeden or whatever they use to chat. because that's what Runescape is, a browser chat with a little game attached.

tl;dr substanceless, non-fun idle world made so kids could chat with friends in 2004. Now just a substanceless, non-fun idle world with no chatting. There's nothing cooler than wasting away on escapist devulgance as a NEET but have some self respect and don't shoot for the lowest, most time-wasting option. Go play LOTRO or Minecraft.

Personal opinion responding the first question is yes, runescape is alive and better than ever. Unlike other major MMOs you don't have to sell what's left of your soul to rank up fast enough an on expansion packs to actually enjoy the game. To the follow up question OSRS is significantly calmer and way more enjoyable for me to play and is the one I recommend. RS3 is a flaming pile of dogshit to play and I highly advise against it.

OSRS is great! The game has way more mechanical depth than you would think once you get into it. It's about as anti-modern game design as you can get and it has its audience because of that.

If any wizzies wanna add me Scum Idiot can't promise to be social but who knows

>>63483 This guy is just flat out wrong and overly reductive on most all accounts. It can be the most single player multiplayer game. It did get its start by being accessible.

>>63499
>The game has way more mechanical depth than you would think once you get into it
Click the bad guy and wait
>If any wizzies wanna add me
Yuck.

>>63500
They recently added a bunch of entry level bosses to get newer players out of the click and wait mind set for combat. But there's more to game than the combat systems.

>>63501
>there's more to game than the combat systems.
Mining?
>click the rock, click the bank
Fishing?
>click one of the few bubbling spots, click the bank
Runecrafting?
>Click the ore, click the bank, click the altar, click the bank
Wow much diverse, such gameplay

There is NO gameplay that goes beyond being one of those "idle" games but with some extra clicking to move between what you want to click on. There is no cool story, cute succubi, scary stuff, funny things that can happen, crazy people to meet, ways to use your particular skills to help people, ways to grief people, events to take part in, or anything that makes Ruenscape a more enjoyable game than any other MMO.

I feel the pull of woodcutting and chatting with people like in the old days, but I'd have to start over again instead of my account on RS3. And it's unlikely I'd have that experience unless people on Wiz suddenly decided to start playing.