RuneScape is one of the oldest living MMOs. This is the same age as Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot, and a little less than EverQuest and Ultima Online. And this game is still alive, which is incredible. Many players still look for various items and grind a huge amount of things. For example, one of the rarest items is the OSRS brimstone key. In this article, we will take it as an example to show why this game is still so popular.
Merciless Times
How would you feel about a game where you are killed before breakfast, during breakfast, and, of course, at lunchtime? For sure, you won’t really like it.
But RuneScape is loved for its cruelty towards players. Any belongings are gotten only if you grind it. For example, the brimstone key is extremely hard to get. However, sometimes, it is enough to have a secret in order to get the item. With the key, it is enough to go behind the tree at the beginning to get it. And death means the loss of everything, which is in the inventory. Under certain conditions, some of the items can be saved, but it does not happen really often.
The Best Times of the Game
The most ruthless in RuneScape was the first eight months after release. The only safe place is the city, and in the rest of the world, anyone could kill you. PvP was allowed to be turned off, but only once, and there was no turning back. If you wanted to fight again, you had to raise a new character. The players were divided into two oppositions. The hardcore players liked everything, and the adherents of peaceful professions and PvP did not want to create several characters at the same time in order to do their favorite things. The developers had to make a compromise. PvP was left only in one specific location. And it could not be turned off there as well.
All-Round Availability
Jagex did the right thing by ignoring the subscription fashion of the time. RuneScape was shareware. In 2001, a free MMO could seem like good magic or a scam. But curiosity prevailed. Even when premium accounts appeared (before that, the game was earning money on advertising). The year after its release, the game had a million players.
The online games market at that time was much more modest than today. And not that many players had a million players. Here one more competent solution of the developers appears. RuneScape was played entirely in a browser. With the bad Internet, not everyone could download the game and play with convenience. And RuneScape ran without problems almost everywhere and with almost any Internet. This is true even now. When launching a game in a browser, many players simply use it as an interactive chat.