Many Welps

Runescape has always been a game about setting your own goals. It does very little in the way of telling you what to do. There are some “Adventure Paths” in the beginning that give you some ideas but for the most part it’s up to you.

To keep everything managable and relearn the game I decided not to get a memebership off the bat. While the free to play version is a very tiny percentage of the total game, there’s still a lot to do. Plus, holding off on the membership let’s me see if this is a passing interest or if this is something I want to stick with for a while. So far, I can say it’s the latter.

My goals before I subscribe are to complete all the free to play quests and visit all the old locations I remember from back in the day. I have the most nostalgia for the free to play area a that’s where I spent just about all of my time as a kid. I figure, if I get through all of that and still want to play then I’m actually interested and not just riding the nostalgia train.

There is a fantastic wiki for Old School Runescape that is helpful beyond belief. It even rivals the amazing Warframe wiki. Even so, I’m trying to complete quests without going straight to the wiki. Runescape’s quests usually have a lot of moving pieces and items to gather to complete them. However, it’s also notoriously obtuse sometimes. If I can’t figure something out in a resonable amount of time I’ll go ahead and use the wiki.

Without any prior knowledge, it leads to a lot of walking back and forth between spots of the map. This can be a pain when you get an item walk across the free to play map and then are told you need another item form the place you just came from….But it also adds to the sense of adventure! At least for me.

The last goal is to play the way I want without looking up to many guides. I have a bad habit of rushing to a games subreddit and sponging up all the knowledge there on how to “play correctly”. OSRS is more about the journey than the destination, as it were, because reaching end game takes so dang long.

In the back of my mind, I keep thinking I should have made an Ironman character. This limits you to not being able to trade with others and you have to do everything yourself. But at it’s core, I have fond memories of trading and selling materials in Runescape so playing without trading just wouldn’t be the same game. For now, I’m playing a kind of semi-ironman. Gathering most of my materials but buying things from the Grand Exchange that I either can’t by from a shop in the free to play areas or would take to long to get my skills up to craft myself. So far I’ve only bought an adamant platebody and a rune scimitar. I enjoy the crafting skills in Runescape so it’s not a chore to gather and craft my own materials most of the time.

I’m enjoying my time in OSRS much more than I thought I would. I have a habit of playing something heavily for a week and abandoning it. But with OSRS I feel like I’ll be playing for quite a while.

I’ve decided to start up and try out Old School Runescape again. I had previously made an effort to play earlier this year and bounced pretty hard off of it. I meant to write a post about it but never got around to it. This time, I was told by a friend that if I was going to play OSRS I really should use the Runelite Client.

Runelite is a third party, open source, client for OSRS that adds a ton of quality of life features to the game. I haven’t had a chance to dig into a lot of them and some of them may not even be relevant for me until later. My favorite so far is the XP Tracker. It’s simple, a bar that shows how far you are in a level and a tracker that displays XP/hr and how many actions are left until the next level. If I’m being honest, this is the thing that’s hooked me back into the game. Watching numbers go up is one of my favorite things in gaming.

There’s also the Skill Calculator which shows you how many actions you would need to perform to achieve a desired level. There’s the Grand Exchange tab where you can search an item and see the average price on the exchange. There’s the World Hopper that will let you sort not only by player number and region but also ping. There’s also a screenshot button to take screenshots easily which will automatically take screen shots of completed quests and levels up too.

Runelite comes with a ton of plugins that add a ton of information to the game as well. Looking through these plugins there is a ton that Runelite’s doing out of the box that’s not in the actual game. Simple things like overlays on fishing spots that tell you what kind of fish are there, adding additional information to the World Map, showing hit points of enemies you’re fighting, showing item stats and prices in your inventory, and labeling items on the ground. There are plenty more and even a plugin hub for player created plugins.

I’ve been playing Old School Runescape pretty much every day this week and I do not feel like I’m bouncing off of it this time. I know part of that is fueled by nostalgia but the QoL improvements Runelite brings to the table help me stay engaged with the game. So if you’re thinking about trying out Old School Runescape I would recommend using Runelite.