Falling in Love With RuneScape Again

April 4, 2024

In 2021 I made a video called A Love Letter to RuneScape Classic where I went over my love for the game, my journey replaying it and my overall sadness on not being able to replay RuneScape as it was back then during its early days popularity.

Fast forward to March 2024. My wife asked me if I wanted to play RuneScape with her, she wanted to play an MMO with me for the first time and knew about my RuneScape history. At first I was pretty apprehensive, I played that game religiously between 2001 and 2004 for god knows how many hours and I knew from logging in every year or so that RuneScape (RS3 specifically) was just not fun to play anymore and it was just pay to win microtransactional nonsense.

I gave it a little more thought, and I recalled Old School RuneScape (OSRS) being a thing, which is essentially RuneScape 2 from 2007 onwards. When I played back in the early 2000s, I lost my spark to play the game around the time Classic RuneScape evolved into RuneScape 2, which I didn’t really give a chance because I was so burnt out from playing Classic so much. To my surprise, Old School is SIGNIFICANTLY more popular than the modern version of RuneScape (RS3).

So, we jumped right in! I was really taken aback that my RS3 character that I’ve had since 2001 was there just waiting for me despite never playing Old School RuneScape, but it makes sense since Old School is essentially a 2007 fork of RuneScape.

Taken after a couple of months of playing OSRS

We skilled, did some quests, explored the map and overall just had a nice relaxing time destroying Goblins. After a couple of weeks, Lindy decided to leave it at that, as a former WoW player who had never played RuneScape, the controls and mechanics were a little frustrating to her which I can totally understand, it’s not for everyone that’s for sure.

Here come the noobs

I thought I’d stop playing after she did, but… I had the bug again. I wanted to continue replaying with this fresh start character I had. I was super impressed with everything I saw, it really made me appreciate the work that Jagex put into early RuneScape and beyond after Classic. It must’ve been a huge undertaking to not only redo everything but to redo it very well. My goal was mostly to redo all the old quests I did back in the day and see how much they had changed, and boy, did it.

Even going to placed like Varrock and Falador felt so nostalgic despite being completely remade from scratch in a different style, they really did it a great service. Over time I started playing with both old and some new friends I had met around the world, encouraging each other to do our best.

Playing with my friend Shading during the Easter 2024 event. He’s the guy that encouraged me to make that Classic video above =)

I’ve known Classic has been dead for some time, apart from some incredible conversation efforts by teams like OpenRSC, but I wanted something official, something which has a really active player base which felt like Classic and honestly playing Old School RuneScape gave me that itch that I had been looking for, for so long.

THIS, was the game I needed in my life again. It’s not perfect, it’s definitely not got all of the social aspects I miss from those days but that’s the case with every MMO I’ve seen, people just tend to do their own thing and look on the wiki for help. Times change and so much we. I’ve learnt the hard way that wanting to relive the past is just going to constantly disappoint you, so I’ve really just learnt to love RuneScape all over again, figuring things out myself slowly and not rushing things.

I’m having a lot of fun =)