RuneScape has long been a popular free to play MMORPG

The history, lore and religion of Runescape is very in depth and told mostly through quest lines but all of it can be found on the website. A lot of players tend to choose a deity and can show their support through clothing, items, ‘titles’ which show up after your name or, these days, by supporting them in the current war. There are a lot of quests available in the game, almost 200 for members but a comparatively paltry 24 for free players, but generally they’re all pretty good quality. Runescape comes with a great deal of sardonic British humour that makes reading the dialogue very worthwhile. The free player quests are all graphically updated and are of a generally higher quality than the members quests as a lot of the members’ ones are getting on years now.

 

Quest series tends to stretch across a variety of different storylines; from a penguin ‘cold-war’ type takeover, to vampire quest series to elven quest series but these are generally felt by the members more than the free players. Free player quests are generally an introduction to different skills and serve as the opening quest to several long and complicated quest lines that are realized later on in your Runescape career. A change to the system in 2008 took PvP from "The Wilderness" into a pseudo-Mini Game; many players protested this change for nostalgic reasons, but Jagex concluded that this relocation would help with the ever-present MMORPG problem of real-world trading. Now, Runescape has a variety of PvP options, which includes capture-the-flag, duel and team battle formats.

 

Because you can choose whichever quests you want, there is no direct path storyline (ie, there is no ?Main Quest? ? only side quests). Your goal is to level up all of your skills to level 99, choosing which skill you which to hone at any given time. There is, however, a 7 part storyline known as? Plague City? where the player unlocks various pieces of a story about a conspiracy with elves. Currently this story is incomplete, however, and according to the makers of RuneScape this is the closest thing to a central storyline in all of the game. Initially, accessing RuneScape is an incredibly easy experience. Since the game is browser-based, there are no hour long installation times. Instead, a player merely needs to create an account and fire up the RuneScape client, which is clearly labeled at the game’s official website. After doing this, the game will download a few files (which shouldn’t take very long, even on a slow connection) and then you’re ready to begin your adventures in RuneScape!

 

Customizations are better than ever. Your character can have so many different types of hairstyles and clothing options when you create a character. I was very impressed with this new feature because I LOVE to customize my characters whenever possible. A great feature that's also new to Runescape is being able to teleport to "Lodestones" all over the map. Before, you could teleport straight to Lumbridge, with a cooldown as well. Now, you can teleport ANYWHERE without a cooldown. This makes things much faster and quests are easier. Activating the Lodestones are simply just clicking on them, and then they become available from that point onward.

 

As you move around, cities and towers are visible on the horizon, while lush landscapes roll away from you. It stops Runescape from feeling so enclosed and really shows how massive the world is. HTML5 also means that you've got more control over the camera and you can move the viewpoint a full 360-degrees, zoom in and out, and even see the sky for the first time. WebGL means that softer shadows and reflective water can be used for the first time, too. You can see the differences in the game by comparing the two screenshots below.

 

RuneScape has long been a popular free to play MMORPG. It is widely regarded as one of the most popular browser based games around and has been constantly evolving since its humble beginnings over a decade ago. With hundreds of millions of accounts there are plenty of players to join you in this fantasy MMORPG. RuneScape offers all the features you would expect from a modern game with quests, skills, trade, chat, mini-games, NPCs and co-operative based adventures.