Old School Runescape Review: How to Play and How To Farm Gold in OSRS?
Most MMOs take you into a campaign where the most important characters, areas, and actions are introduced, and only then do they take the leash off and tell you to do whatever you want. This is the last bit where Old School Runescape begins. It’s a sandbox MMORPG that’s deliberately flimsy and frighteningly inarticulate. You go through a five-minute lesson that teaches you the absolute minimum, and then you unceremoniously peek into your hometown of Lambridge. It’s a game where you have to add a wiki to your bookmarks before you can get anywhere. But if you’re willing to go through a harsh learning curve, and if you find that Runescape’s sense of freedom of adventure is liberating rather than overwhelming, you may well find your everlasting game.
One of the reasons Old School Runescape explains itself so poorly comes down to its legacy. Ten years ago, there was no Old School Runescape. There was only Runescape. But after a major update completely overhauled Runescape and turned it into what is now commonly referred to as Runescape 3, Jagex conducted a poll to see if players wanted independent servers on which they could play Runescape, as they did that day. Nearly 500,000 people said yes, and Old School Runescape was born. So, a tedious tutorial is more than enough for people who have played Runescape before (like me). However, Old School can still help new players a little better because it’s completely different from other MMOs.
There are no classes, to begin with, just skills. Each person has 23 of the same skills, which can generally be grouped into combat skills such as Strength and Distant Combat, crafting skills such as Herblore and Fletching, and gathering skills such as Fishing and Mining. All skills start at level one and go up to 99 when you gain experience by dealing damage, creating potions, catching fish, and so on. In other words, you are not a mage, you have high magic. You are not a warrior, you have high attack, strength, and defense. Your skills reflect your style of play, but there is no clear division between character types. Everyone is encouraged to level up all of their skills, and the ultimate goal of most players is to get them all to 99.
Old School Runescape also does not play like most MMOs. It lacks the usual set of skill bars, hotkeys, and recovery times. It feels more like an old-school cRPG. It is presented in simple, literal terms and is almost entirely mouse-driven. The world is laid out on a grid, and to move your character, you click on the square you want to move to. To talk to an NPC, you select the “Talk to” option. To attack a monster, you click on its “Attack” option. You can do almost anything without touching the keyboard, although it’s much easier to play if you set up some shortcuts.
Gold farming or buying? – How do I get OSRS gold
In Old School RuneScape, as in many popular games, the calculating coin is in-game gold. You can get it by logging, fishing, PvP battles, hunting powerful beasts, and many other ways. The more difficult the task, the more advanced skills are needed.
For those who want to get a big kush at once, without long farming and dubious deals, we recommend paying attention to MmoGah and buy OSRS gold from them. This service for many years legally and safely sells in-game services for games like Old School RuneScape.
Recipe for Success.
Old School, from the low-polygon graphics to the point-and-click interface, looks about as humble as it gets, but simplicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s no fat on Runescape, and it works because, more than anything, it’s a game about setting and achieving goals. It’s about improving your account by reaching finishes you set for yourself, whether it’s enough money to buy an expensive item or training a skill to 99. You decide what you want to do, and with each milestone you pass, you discover new things to do. It’s a very exciting cycle for the right player, but it’s not always fun.
I’ve always looked forward to my next opportunity to be a smartass.
Runescape doesn’t have a specific campaign or main storyline. Instead, its world is filled with quests that are structured like short stories. Runescape’s quests are not one-shot quests like the extraction quests you choose from random NPCs in many MMOs-at least most of them are not. They are loaded with branching dialogue, unique puzzles, and delightfully sharp cutscenes. In one quest, after building a research tower, I unwittingly helped a bunch of explorers create a homunculus, and then I had to appease the confused, ugly creature I helped create. In another, I discovered a rogue plague that the king used to isolate half his kingdom to cover up some demonic activities. The recipe for disaster was to save committee members from the Culinaromancer, a powerful food wizard,
I remember spamming lazily through the quests as a teenager, but this time I read all the dialogue. I’m glad I did because Runescape is a very fun game. It has great, dry British humor, and it’s not afraid to be silly. One day I helped King Arthur and his knights (who were on vacation in Runescape) recover the holy grail, infiltrate the monkey kingdom disguised as a gorilla, and help the quarreling goblin leaders choose a new closet for their tribe.
One of my favorite quests is One Small Favor, which is basically a chain of retrievable quests in which each person you ask to help with something, in turn, asks you to help with something else. This will continue until you have a detailed list of services to cash in, and after the fifth or sixth request, your character will just freak out. “Oh, let me guess.” ,” hissed my avatar as the hundredth NPC fumbled something about the missing watchamacallit. If I didn’t aspire to read along, One Small Favor would be bored to tears, but I always looked forward to my next opportunity to be a smartass.
Delivering.
Before I could start the saga, however, I needed to earn money and buy some basic supplies. My shopping list included potions to improve my skills, food to restore my health, accessories to teleport me to important places, and magical stones called runes, which are used to cast spells, especially handy teleportation spells. I decided to make money by training the Hunter, one of Runescape’s newest skills. The basics of the Hunter are simple: you set traps to catch little NPC creatures and then collect their carcasses for resources. It’s one of the most vital skills similar to The Sims, and its development has been enjoyable for all the little subtasks.
Mastering the chinchompas was especially interesting because I decided to hunt using a form of cancellation animation called “three ticks.” I’ll spare you the specifics-just know that by putting in more effort and reducing time, you can shorten the time it takes to perform certain actions by tricking the game engine into turning a long animation into a short one. Old School Runescape still uses the same engine from 11 years ago, and this animation trick is just one of the many ways players have pushed it to its limits. Veteran players have figured out how to do everything Jagex never planned to do, from shortening animations to using artificial intelligence.
I found the crafting skills particularly tedious. For example, to train Herblor, you take inventory after inventory of herbs and water from your vault and then just watch as your character combines them. It’s a slow process that never changes significantly because, unlike setting different traps in Hunter, no matter what potion you make, you always do the same thing. These types of skills are at their worst when you lose money on a deal. They feel like a second job that you have to pay for. Some other skills, such as dexterity, feel out of place. Dexterity allows you access to quick shortcuts around the world, but you train them by running circles around closed obstacle courses. Dexterity is dynamic and useful in action, but training is a chore completely separate from what you are actually using the skill for.
New Tricks.
Over the years, Jagex has managed to squeeze amazing complexity out of Runescape’s basic combat system.
Fortunately, some of the latest Old School Runescape updates have introduced mini-games that help bring boring skills like cooking and fire-making to life. And while some skills are still boring to learn, they’re at least more useful thanks to the addition of regional journals, which have skills that give you a global to-do list–kill this monster, talk to this NPC, complete this quest, create this item, and so on. Filling out diaries unlocks incredibly useful utilities and shortcuts, so they motivate you to train skills and complete quests. They also offer a small but valuable dose of direction: if you need a new goal, you can always work on your diaries.
Like diaries, the new game modes also encourage players to train their skills. I said earlier that there are no classes in Runescape, and there aren’t, but there are two different types of accounts: regular accounts and Ironman accounts. If you play in a regular account, you can do whatever you want, but if you’re an Ironman, you can’t trade with other players, which means you have to earn and create all your items yourself. This makes Runescape much more demanding, but it also increases the payoff from completing tasks. Thus, it is quickly becoming the most popular way to play. True devotees can further increase the difficulty by playing as hardcore ironmen, who are demoted to regular ironmen and discarded hardcore leaderboards if they die even once, or real ironmen, who can’t keep their stuff and must always carry everything with them.
In the same vein over the years, Jagex has managed to squeeze amazing difficulty out of Runescape’s basic combat system. I was able to try a few of the last bosses in the endgame, and even with the best mechanism in the slot, they were not easy to take down. Most bosses have a timer that you can use to race, and my times were terrible. Exchanging attack styles mid-battle requires a lot of coordination, and knowing the boss’s clean attack patterns is crucial for clean kills. Suffice it to say that simply hitting the attack button does not result in a level reduction.
Playing Old School Runescape is like rebuilding an old car. It’s not always fun, it’s often hard to work, and most people don’t know why the hell you even bother. But it’s damn nice to step back and see how your efforts have paid off. It still has a bad habit of hitting the brakes abruptly, and it’s definitely not a game for everyone — even by MMO standards — but there’s a reason why nearly 500,000 people have demanded the return of Old School Runescape. It’s still one of the best and most popular sandbox MMO games out there, and it’s only getting better with age.
Old School Runescape Verdict
Old School Runescape is a massive but irresistible waste of time, and even after all these years, there is simply nothing like it.