About Runker 51:
My on and off journey with this MMO started back in late 2005, and since then I’ve seen many an update and many changes to the playerbase, as I’m sure your first question is: How big is the playerbase? Fairly large, actually. Rune Scape is not going anywhere soon. Now onto the review. A game 20 years old that sees literal weekly updates that add content most of the time, and sometimes just patch bugs- RuneScape is a grand journey. This game is a marathon, not a sprint. Combat experience is much easier to get than it used to be, but hitting 99, or even 120 in all skills takes a very, very long time. While the commitment may be a turn-off to most, remember: you can automate combat and most of this game is played in a separate window, essentially AFK. This is part of the main draw to this game, aside from the excellent boss fights/dungeons and the questing. Being able to pay little attention while doing menial tasks and leveling your skills is fantastic. Not to mention this game has as much as freedom as a tabletop (which is is loosely based on DnD!)- you can level any skill at any time and you are never forced into a single combat style unless a specific encounter requires it (ie: the Corporeal Beast requires spears or poison damage, otherwise you will deal significantly reduced damage). The boss encounters; hoo boy, this one is great. Despite the outdated tick system, the encounters (for the most part) feel extremely fluid and everything is responsive, and ever since ~2014/2015, they have been extremely grand in scale, making you feel powerful and as if you’re taking down an equally powerful foe until you break the damage numbers by optimizing an ability rotation. The music adds to this, especially so in newer (~2018+) bosses, such as Nex: Angel of Death, Raksha the Shadow Colossus and Kerapac the Bound. All-in-all, the PvE (we call it PvM here!) is gratifying and fun and a huge draw to the vast majority of players. So you like lore? You like characters and good story? Welp, lemme tell ya, the quests in this game are entirely different from any other MMO. While older quests are not voiced at all, their premises are still unique and often very British in humor (as Jagex is a British company). The writing 20 years in the making has been fantastic just about the all way through and various communities exist to discuss and solve in-game lore/lore riddles. The usual “questing” you’d see in other MMOs is just a skill here, called Slayer, where you are given a “task” to kill x amount of creatures. Every quest is entirely unique and never asks you to do the same thing as previous, unless it is a mechanical part of a questline, which will then usually have some humorous dialogue accompanying it.
