The upcoming Black Knight’s Fortress upgrade for RuneScape is visually impressive and can be seen when the update goes live next week. For now, see it with on the upcoming RuneScape 3 engine.
MMOrning Shots is a (mostly) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house or come to us in press releases, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”
RuneScape has become too friendly to new players over the years, at least that is what many longtime players will tell you. But is there truth to that statement? Muggiwhplar over at Tip.It says no, and argues that the introduction of Evolution of Combat (RuneScape’s combat overhaul) has made the game less friendly to free players.
So I did some research and, surprisingly, there were no guides anywhere written with low level combat training in mind. All of it was obsolete from pre-EOC. So if you’re a new player, you’re on your own to figure out how to train. This, again, wouldn’t be such a big deal if training in EOC wasn’t so niched. If you’re fighting monsters below your tier, your XP rates will be abysmal. If you’re fighting monsters above your tier, you won’t make a dent in them and they’ll destroy you. Additionally, every training spot is multicombat, so if the monsters are aggressive, you’re screwed.
You can read the entire post, as well as the following discussion, at the link below. How do you feel about RuneScape? Has the expanding list of skills and introduction of more complicated combat made the game less friendly toward new players?
(Source: Tip.It)
How Free Can You Be is a series of articles I had the idea for way back in 2009, and it deals with a complaint that I see a lot when it comes to MMOs: Players who don’t know what they’re going to be expected to pay for before they jump in. The idea was put on hiatus between 20010-2012 because of the massive amount of MMOs transitioning to free to play, and even those free to play models making pretty dramatic changes. So after waiting for the market to settle down, I’ve decided to give the column another go.
For the first game to cover under the new editorial, I’ve decided to pick RuneScape. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it in the comments section below.
For the most part, RuneScape is still technically a “freemium” title, that is to say a game where a wealth of content is available to free players with the option to pay a subscription for the whole package. Membership costs approximately $8 a month and gives access to everything not part of Solomon’s General Store (more on that later).
There are 25 skills in RuneScape, all of which can be trained by free players to a certain extent. There are nine skills that were previously available to members only, but can be trained up to a maximum of level five which offers a bare minimum for items in those skills. There is an exception to this, since free players still don’t have access to player owned housing, and therefore have no use for leveling construction. Otherwise players have access to basic potions, fletching, agility items, and more.
For the other sixteen skills, free players are able to level all the way to end-game (99 per skill, 120 for Dungeoneering) with certain limitations in access to weapons, equipment, potions, areas, and monsters. All of these restrictions, it should be pointed out, are lifted under membership and are not sold ala carte in the cash shop as in Turbine’s MMOs. As far as quests, skills, locations, mini-games, etc are concerned you are either limited behind free to play or you pay the $5-8 a month to unlock all of it. Jagex estimates approximately five thousand hours worth of gameplay available to free players. Skills that are fully available to free players are still limited once you hit higher levels. The most powerful tiers of equipment and better money/exp making areas are members only. For the sake of not pushing free players away, Jagex limits the use of members items to members worlds, so you will never be outmatched in PvP because the guy you’re fighting has equipment that you can’t access.
Overall, the freemium system in RuneScape is pretty inoffensive. Jagex has ramped up over the past couple of years bringing more content to those who aren’t willing to fork over a subscription, including opening up a preview of members skills, and CEO Mark Gerhard has even gone to some length to remove many of the in-your-face members advertisements that existed in the game world. New content is released every single week, with some exceptions, and except in a few cases is mostly members only.
Solomon’s Store acts as RuneScape’s cash shop, and is the most likely reason that this “How Free Can You Be” article will need to be updated by the end of the year. Solomon’s items can be purchased by free players or members, with members receiving one free promotional item per month as well as a 10% discount on anything on sale in the store. The store has some pretty regular promotions, and nothing is as obscenely priced as you might find in some other games.
As for “pay to win,” that depends on your view of the game’s goals. Since RuneScape is all about leveling your skills and collecting large quantities of stuff, the fact that there are emotes and cosmetic outfits hidden behind the paywall will offend some more than it will others. For the most part, the goods in Solomon’s Store are purely aesthetic. Alternate animations to gathering or crafting skills, emotes and teleports don’t change the function of the skill itself, but they do allow you to show off to your fellow players. Cosmetic outfits that display over your equipment allow you to fight in style, with varying degrees of fashion.
Where Solomon’s store does step into the pay-for-advantage realm is in the pets. There are currently three pets for sale that can forage for items, but they can also bank one item every ten minutes from a player’s inventory (excluding when in the wilderness pvp area). The pet can also scavenge items dropped from enemies. Players are also able to buy bank boosters, increasing bank slots in increments of 50 up to five times. Jagex has stated that the bank boosters were supposed to be buyable with membership “loyalty points” accrued each month, however that has not been added in yet.
Squeal of Fortune is a small activity where players receive daily stipends of tickets to spin a giant wheel of fortune. Players can also choose to buy spins for real money, and spins can be received randomly in-game while skilling, fighting, or taking part in other activities. Rewards offered are mostly experience lamps, experience pendants (double experience gain in a skill up to a certain amount), low to mid level resources, cosmetic items, experience boosting clothes, and more.
In a previous article I wrote, I discussed that while Squeal of Fortune has the capacity to enrich a player who spends a good deal on spins, the odds of getting that lucky off of the mini-game are extremely low and, ultimately, a massive waste of money that could have been better spent as a donation to your old pal Uncle Omali. You have the chance of obtaining a grand prize of 200 million gold, high end equipment that is character bound, and more, but with how low the odds are, you’re better off planning for the martians to invade earth.
Perhaps the highest criticism against Squeal of Fortune has to do with the fact that there are indeed items that can shake up the game that are time-sensitive, a blatant and unapologetic grab by Jagex to encourage buying large quantities of spins. There was an uproar when Jagex introduced a discontinued rare item into Squeal of Fortune for a limited time. The developer has also recently taken to retiring items from Squeal of Fortune, again to gin up more spin purchases.
As far as RuneScape goes, you can’t get much better in terms of an inoffensive cash shop. Free to play has access to a lot of content, and membership grants access to every quest, monster, skill, and location. As I said earlier, with Jagex’s commitment to weekly content updates, odds are that this article will need to be updated in the future, in which case you will see a notice on this page.
To give some perspective, I originally pitched the How Free Can You Be set of articles in 2011, and picked RuneScape because it was the easiest game to review, with neither Solomon’s Store or Squeal of Fortune present. Barring Squeal of Fortune having a habit of some rather unsavory business practices, I give Jagex an A- on the “How Free Can You Be” meter, since the game can be played to its full extent without paying a dime above the membership cost, and Squeal of Fortune can still be enjoyed with the daily stipends.
Ever since Jagex released RuneScape 2 in 2004, the developer has looked at making its skills more varied in use than simple gathering from nodes and production using those items. Skills like farming require patience and timing, construction is directly related to player owned housing, summoning brought in familiars, and dungeoneering opened a whole new area of the game’s lore. While skills normally release around two to three years apart, Jagex unveiled two new skills coming in 2013, without giving a whole lot of information surrounding them.
IGN has unveiled that the first skill will apparently be Divination.
Two new skills will also be added to the game; while one hasn’t been revealed, the other, divination, will apparently play a key role in the latter stages of RuneScape 3’s story.
Jagex recently shook up the RuneScape world by ushering it into the Sixth Age of the timeline. The god Guthix has been killed and with his death the edicts preventing the other deities from meddling in the world are gone as well. In the months and years to come, players will decide which god prevails.
(Source: IGN)
Ever since Jagex released RuneScape 2 in 2004, the developer has looked at making its skills more varied in use than simple gathering from nodes and production using those items. Skills like farming require patience and timing, construction is directly related to player owned housing, summoning brought in familiars, and dungeoneering opened a whole new area of the game’s lore. While skills normally release around two to three years apart, Jagex unveiled two new skills coming in 2013, without giving a whole lot of information surrounding them.
IGN has unveiled that the first skill will apparently be Divination.
Two new skills will also be added to the game; while one hasn’t been revealed, the other, divination, will apparently play a key role in the latter stages of RuneScape 3’s story.
Jagex recently shook up the RuneScape world by ushering it into the Sixth Age of the timeline. The god Guthix has been killed and with his death the edicts preventing the other deities from meddling in the world are gone as well. In the months and years to come, players will decide which god prevails.
(Source: IGN)
RuneScape has some pretty massive updates coming this year, from two skills to an overhauled interface, the move to HTML5 as well as Jagex’s continued pledge to weekly content additions. In the past, Jagex has talked about the trouble of bringing RuneScape to consoles, particularly that Sony and Microsoft refuse to allow players to be on the same servers with their cross-console counterparts. Since then, Jagex has shifted focus mainly toward getting RuneScape on mobile platforms, and in a statement from Mark Gerhard, we will be seeing that sooner than we thought:
“We’re working insanely hard to make sure it’s ready for Q4 this year on tablets,” says Gerhard. “I think that’s a risk in that there’s a lot of unknowns, there’s a lot of R&D going on, and there’s still some tech questions, but right now the team is laser-focused on RuneScape 3.”
You can read the rest of Gerhard’s comments at the link below.
(Source: Gamasutra)
RuneScape’s economy runs partially on the idea that high level item drops from bosses don’t just require a good amount of time in order to obtain, but that the bosses are almost entirely open world, requiring players to compete with each other for the kill, and thus the loot. While most MMOs have moved over to a system where bosses are instanced and can be fought by players without the fear of being interrupted by others, developers like Jagex have held off from making the transition, generally citing either in-game economy or a desire for competition.
In an update released today, RuneScape will see the inclusion of instanced boss battles at the God Wars Dungeon. Players will have the option when entering a boss creature’s room to choose between the non-instanced, publicly accessible monster, or to enter their own instanced version complete with the ability to invite friends or clan members. That said, freedom isn’t free, and neither is your own private boss dungeon. If you want to kill a demon general without worrying about a clan crashing your game, you’re going to have to pony up some gold coins. Costs vary between bosses, and are paid on a per hour basis.
It will be interesting to see how the cost of using the instanced dungeons will balance the likelihood that more God Wars equipment will likely be entering market circulation. Instanced vs open world bosses is a big discussion in the MMO genre, with both sides fiercely defending their preferences.
Jagex has launched the RuneScape New Interface alpha, and I’ve decided to dump a few screenshots I took to show just how customizable the interface is. Players will be happy to know that interfaces like the inventory and prayer tabs no longer need to be connected, but they can be if you prefer it that way. Just about every interface can be ripped from its base, moved around, conjoined, and resized. There are more interfaces that aren’t yet available, but we will have screenshots of them when they are. Also remember that this is a work in progress and subject to changes before the official release.
Click on each image to expand it.
I’ll try not to embarrass myself too much on this post. Buenas dias, RuneScape players! Jagex has announced that RuneScape has been fully translated into Latin American Spanish, and that players can check out all that RuneScape has to offer in their native language. This marks the fifth official language translation that Jagex has added into the game, following German, French, and Brazilian Portuguese. Players are reminded that they are on the live version of RuneScape and any quests already completed cannot be rerun under the new language server.
(Source: RuneScape)
RuneScape’s HTML5 beta is well under way, and considering how different the game looks from its current implementation, I keep getting these nagging feelings that the screenshots I’m seeing are fake, even though I’m the one who took them!
![[Community] RuneScape: Observations From A Noob](https://mmofallout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/chrome-2013-04-19-11-34-47-16-e1366385822885.png?w=1200)
MMO Fallout 