I consider myself something of a fan of RuneScape, having played it continuously since 2004 and racked up more than four thousand hours of gameplay, and I’m sure few would disagree with that statement. That being said, I’ve been heavily critical of Jagex as a company and certain facets of RuneScape as a game, and nothing has caught my attention quite like RuneScape’s bloated, near-useless client.
It’s no secret that RuneScape has become massive over the years, straining the client to the point where it’s basically held together with gum and tape. The old client’s days were numbered when the big browsers announced that the end of days were coming for Java support, due to its instability and general habit of opening massive security holes in people’s computers. For RuneScape, Jagex made the attempt to jump ship a couple of years ago with an HTML client, a venture that has so far come up empty thanks in part to the platform itself not coming along as quickly as expected.
Jagex could have launched NXT with none of the visual upgrades and this would instantly be my update of the year. The current RuneScape client is incredibly janky, depending where I am in the world and what I’m doing it will either run smoothly or horribly and turning the graphics down does absolutely nothing to fix this. In the NXT client, I am able to set everything to its maximum value and still manage to play the game at over 70 frames per second. I teleport, I start skilling, killing things, moving around to new areas, and the game remains stable and smooth as butter.
But to top it off, Jagex has made the game look better than ever. The draw distance is now massive, as far as the eye can see, and holds up RuneScape’s unique graphical styling. The new client has made it painfully obvious in some areas how laughably small the world is, a fact previously hidden by the game’s short-sighted draw distance, but for the most part so far Jagex has done its job to play tricks and make the smallness of the world a lot harder to notice.
My first real thought while playing on the NXT client is the depressing thought that this beta is going to end in a few days, and at least until the client launches sometime in…sometime, I’ll have to sit through the old client for the time being. There are numerous visual bugs that are present in the beta, but since the game is running on the live servers there isn’t much of a reason not to give it a go if you are eligible to play this weekend.
I’ll be playing RuneScape quite regularly through the weekend.
MMO Fallout 