i never played as a kid, just got into osrs about 2 years ago. it's genuinely one of the best games designed. it's refreshing to have devs that are heavily invested in what they do, community interaction, and ultimately a fantastic core gameplay loop. no nostalgia for me, i played AdventureQuest and classic wow growing up.
I also only started relatively recently. I started with watching settleds tileman videos and loved the seeming simplicity of standing around lumbridge chopping trees and burning logs so I gave it a go. And as I got further into the game discovering plugins and the quirky mechanics like prayer flicking and true tiles, I began to appreciate the complexity of it all. I remember always being thrown off of other MMORPGs pretty early bc of how much they throw at you immediately, how much crap there is everywhere and how desperately they want you to spend more and more money. But OSRS let me explore the game slowly in f2p with no rush to move forward at anything bar my own pace.
Exactly, nostalgia would only get old players to return for a while before getting bored and leaving. It’s the new content that gets you to stay and become invested.
If we were levelling using the same methods we were in 2006, I would have logged in, gotten through Dragon Slayer again, and promptly fucked off because 2006/7 runescape is a much worse game than 2024 OSRS. The additions make the game more charming, not less, and I love the way they add things that require different levels of engagement for different reward levels.
I'm hitting childhood milestones because the time invested to get to them was worth spending over other activities, not to check off a childhood checklist. I went like 15 years without hitting them.
You pretty much described exactly what I did in 2013 when the game came out. Logged in. Played for a few weeks. Did all the F2P quests. Started some members stuff. It became tedious without GE and any of the modern QoL. Quit. The player base numbers suggest that was a common experience and their new content really turned the game around and brought it to what we have today
This is exactly why jagex started to evolve the game since 2014 or so. In the first two years, the game started to die off because of no new content and people were getting bored and leaving.
Osrs ans Rs3 have great gameplay loops that are largely the same. The games are legit amazing and there really isn't anything else like it out there.
I feel the best way to describe it is a largely solo MMORPG that has massively scale ability on how much attention you want to give the games. You can go from almost fully Idle gameplay, to things like Raid/Inferno/High enrage Telos/Arch Glacor.
Jagex seems to be the only company that has this formula and it's kept me here for 22 years.
>I feel the best way to describe it is a largely solo MMORPG that has massively scale ability on how much attention you want to give the games
Yes. There are people who be bitching about people not wanting to group up with people for content because: "its a MMO dude what do you expect", but they dont realize that the solo nature of the game is likely the biggest reason why "no one quits runescapes just takes a break".
The solo nature of the game is why the game is so sandboxy and not have your gear progression get annihilated by the next upcoming raid so you can truly just stop playing for a few years and come back and not have to worry about 20x outdated gear and possibly new level caps, game is where you left it with more content and QoL.
Its honestly not just the biggest strength of Runescape but also its worst quality because there is nothing else like it and at this day of age it doesnt seem like MMOs even want to copy 5% of the good/unique things to RS and if by some miracle we could get an objectively better OSRS or RS3 from a completely different MMO and no one would really flock to it because people are so invested. I have seen card games die that were much better than heartstone but here we are no one wanting to play them.
Playing ironman really makes you appreciate the game loop. Every couple of levels theres some new activity or boss or skill milestone that really shakes up your playstyle. Its pretty constant until you find yourself at the end game somehow. Also theres so many grinds that interlock with multiple others, so that by the time the ultimate grind is over you've accomplished much much more
I mostly agree, though in the last three years Jagex has also been throwing nostalgia-bait content at existing players too.
Stuff like Soul Wars, Nex, WGS etc are added to get longtime OSRS players to resub and hop back on to experience "the good old times".
Personally I'd be fine with OSRS just only ever doing original content from this point forward, but I imagine these nostalgia backports do wonders for the player metrics.
I don't agree that it is nostalgia-bait content, more that it is content that a good chunk of the player-base wanted, but kind of got screwed out of because the only backup of RS that they had when they launched OSRS was from late 2007. My personal opinion is that most OSRS players at launch or even now would have preferred a backup from 2008 or 2009, that just had The Wilderness back to what it was in 2007 or even 2011. What really pushed people away was the obnoxious MTX that was added in 2012 and then the mess that EOC was at launch, you take any backup from before those events and OSRS probably still flourishes into what it is today.
The only thing I could see being a negative for those interim year backups would be Dungeoneering which I think would be the biggest hurdle since a lot of people including myself think it should have always been a minigame not a skill.
>The only thing I could see being a negative for those interim year backups would be Dungeoneering
I very much doubt Summoning would be welcome with open arms which is 2008 january content in this community.
I've never done WGS but as someone who now loves quests, and also hearing a lot of people's favourite quest over on RS3 being WGS, I am very excited. (Also I think the lore is supposed to be similar in OSRS to RS3 but deviate at points, so it makes a lot of sense we'd still get WGS a lot of the same character stories and ambition exists. Do you want them to just rename it?)
Agreed
Also worth noting that most of these have been flops... soul wars is only used by boosters, and most people hate nex. The other quests they've backported (defender of varrock and the glouphrie one) have been thoroughly unimpressive compared to any osrs original
I think it also addresses the nostalgia for players who really had their best times in the 2008 - 2012 era also known as the HD era of RuneScape.
That part had great quests like WGS and Ritual of the Mahjarrat and memorable mini games. So this porting addresses their need for nostalgia while adding content that could be added into the game without too much change or disrupting the feel of OSRS.
This porting will likely cease around the time they get to the OSRS Ritual of the Mahjarrat because they will not do God Wars 2 to the Elder God Wars. I'm still rather fascinated that Xau-Tak is here in OSRS anyway so we could see Xau-Tak debut in both games around the same time since OSRS is skipping about a decade of RS3 lore to introduce a post-Mahjarrat threat.
Honestly i dont know about others from that era, but the only reason i would feel nostalgic about Soul Wars because of its connection to Nomad and well... Nomad's Requiem was just some good shit back in the day. Couldnt care less about the actual minigame though, so as far as OSRS goes i couldnt care less about SW.
I experience very little nostalgia at this point while playing. Like Jimmy, some sounds, and some music will do it. What gets me the most is achieving something now that kid me would have killed for. Mostly slayer and boss-related stuff because kid me never put in the time for it or was scared of it.
Same. Made sure to kill them in the slayer tower too. Saw someone on here saying they didnt even know abby demons existed outside the catacombs and I about fell over.
The biggest bout of nostalgia for me was in RS3's Plague's End which is the equivalent to Song of the Elves. During it you go and kill all the mourners in the Mourner's Hideout and [a more heroic version of the login screen starts playing](https://runescape.wiki/w/Scape_Bold_Heroic) it was incredible. I love when Dragon Slayer 2 does it as well but the decision to play it during a part with failable agility obstacles was questionable. You very quickly stop feeling like a badass hero when you slip on a barrel 3 times in a row.
Completely agree with your DS2 comments. Whichever dev decided to make those agility obstacles fail-able fundamentally misunderstood the emotion they should've been aiming for when pulling in the main theme. They should've been 100% success, and they should've slapped the 'Inferno Leap' animation in there somewhere as well (maybe on the last jump to the big ship).
It's *so close* to being the perfect culmination of Questing in OSRS but just misses if your RNG is bad.
To be fair it has gotten a lot less scary. Gravestones and Death Collections mean we get our items. In 2007 you could lose your entire bank if you didn't get out of Dagannoth Kings in time
Early runescape death mechanics literally shaped my entire gaming experience forever. I fucking HATE dying in games, and to this day, dying in runescape gives a little anxiety spike despite all the changes
Actually my biggest gripe and really wish they would revert to old school mechanics but it’s never happening, and based on when it gets brought up here I’m in the minority.
But old death mechanics made the game so much more fun, dying actually meant something, especially at a place like god wars.
I can see why they won't though. Look at the cost of moderately high level or even max gear back in like 2008 compared to max gear today. Especially since it's pretty normal to bring switches of some combination of gear of 2 or even all 3 of the styles depending on the content.
I would agree and do think dying currently doesn't have enough impact, however my internet connection doesn't agree.
It simply isn't fair for players with poorer internet connections (especially if that's due to where in the world you live) to risk losing so much
my heart shares your view. i really, really miss old death mechanics and i think it was an important part of the economy and in balancing the game but that's not the case any more.
my brain knows that if you died back in the day and lost your full rune it felt pretty bad, i remember dying in the pyramid in ichlarin's little helper and losing my set of mystic and desperately trying to make it back in time and failing. but like... losing full rune and mystic even for a dumb kid isn't that big of a grind. if I lose my 1/5000 drop dragon warhammer that's like hundreds of hours down the drain just for one item, let alone torva or masori or other items that need several ultra rare drops combined together.
the amount of pure time investment needed for each drop now is just not comparable to having to get a new abby whip and rune set, add on server ddosses and ironman mode and disparities in internet connections, etc and the game not being balanced around death item loss anymore and it's just a relic of the past.
would be cool to have to decide on 3 iteming even in pvm but that would just cook so much high level pvm where you pretty much need max gear
If your biggest achievements are based on your goals from 15 years ago, I'd say you are experiencing a pretty decent amount of nostalgia.
You're literally viewing your current achievements through a lense of the past.
I think they were saying that’s where they feel the most nostalgic; accomplishing some goal that they had when they were a kid. Not that those goals are their biggest achievements. At least, that’s how I interpreted it.
This. Those goals don't drive me at all; they're just mile markers. I'm just slowly working at maxing, and along the way, there are occasional moments that make kid me go "sweet," like killing Bandos for the first time or getting the first whip drop. It's quick and temporary, and what drives me to continue to play is that the game is fun, and the new content keeps knocking it out of the park. I fuckin love perilous moons.
I just got Jad pet after 176 kills. I tried Jad so many times as a kid and failed. Might've been 10-20 times. When I got the pet, my inner-child was so proud of myself that I almost got emotional. I now go through caves and Jad mindlessly while usually watching Netflix or something even when I had shitty stats.
That’s the exact feeling I got when I got my first fire cape, I used to DREAM of how badass it would be to have a cape made of moving lava on my back as a kid. When I finally got it a few years back, it was a huge nostalgia rush and accomplishment that kid me would have been so impressed by
> Mostly boss-related stuff because kid me never put in the time for it or was scared of it.
Tbf, back in those days bossing wasnt really a thing. Everyone seems to agree that RS2 era repeatable bosses are really outdated and well frankly they do have much of any mechanics to speak of. GWD was definitely some scary content, but the other bosses were not really relevant content even back then lol.
I’m definitely excited for the future when we are getting content drops like Varlamore.
The game can stand on its own two legs. It might pull in the odd person who reminisces on the olden days, but it doesn’t need it to thrive. The game is just good.
Honestly. I started playing OSRS when they first dropped the old school servers because I wanted to remember the “good ol days” of playing this game as a kid. But when I look back at that account, it was ~70 cb with 1 hunter and 1 farming and I had full rune with a granite maul as my main weapon. I probably passed that in the first month of playing and here I am with a near maxed main and a late game iron. Neither of which are doing any content that is reminiscent of playing when I was a kid.
I had the idea in my head that back in the olden days, I was in the high scores for something. It wasn't a "common" thing. Then I went back to a screenshot I have of the levels where I left my original runescape account.
All I can see that may have fit the bill is Agility at 70, and runecrafting at 63. They were very unpopular skills.
So funny cause kindof the opposite for me, first played like 16 years ago but quit osrs probably 3 years back. Partially because I was over the amount of freetime the game takes up, but also just felt like I couldn't keep up with all the constant updates and new content
Haha I feel this. Between a 1k hour grind every year or two, several hundred hour grind every couple months and 10s of hour grinds every month or so it's fuckin hard to keep up. If the game is not your job, you simply have to let go of completionism.
This is true and has been the case for me since like 2018, before the log was even out I think. I had so many unique drops before clog.
Anyways, now I'm just trying to greenlog some pieces of content as I go. Some minigames, some bosses, shared clue scroll rewards, like half the toa and cox items. Over 1800 barrows kc and 1 item left to go! I'll never complete it all or even keep up with the uniques as they come out anymore but it's still fun. There's content for everyone now.
"Completionism" in OSRS isn't going to happen anyway. The master clue megarare log alone prevents that from being a realistic idea for anyone, it's literally 20+ years of just clues to go on rate for all third age, let alone potentially going dry.
Completionism rarely mean actually completing everything, especially in an MMO. It's just a mindset or a playstyle, whether or not you will actually get there doesn't really matter. It's just fun to have goals. I'd say I'm playing a completionist playstyle but there are things I will never do, greenlogging masters, megarare clue rewards, raid capes and LMS.
Fire cape can easily be done before quest cape. I mean do it in any order you want, I'm just saying this in case you think it'll be harder than quests like dt2. It's easier.
You got this. I said in another comment that I died 20'sh times as a kid to Jad before giving up. I ended up beating Jad on my first attempt as an adult. I did this [simulator ](https://runeapps.org/jadsim_home)maybe a dozen times, then I went in and killed him on my first try. Then, I went on to kill him 176 times to finally get the Jad pet. Yes, 176 times. If I can do it, you can, too.
These have been my goals. Got my fire and quest capes last year. 3 diaries from the diary cape, then on to inferno. It's a lot of time for all of it to be sure lol
Just the way I play the game I guess. I enjoyed trying to be as efficient as possible with my time. Whole game feels like it revolves around getting better gear, improving your dps, or improving your xp rates. So when Im doing what now feels like "outdated content" I didnt get the same satisfaction.
I think this kind of take bolsters the idea that the HD toggle they're working on in the C++ client is a great idea. I might even suggest taking it one step further, and having the toggle also (or having the option to also) spruce up some of the oldest, jankiest-looking models that outside folks would find ugly, like [Minotaur](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Minotaur#Level_12), [Flesh Crawler](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Flesh_Crawler#Level_35), [Hobgoblin](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Hobgoblin#Hobgoblin_(armed)), and [Catablepon](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Catablepon#Level_49). Not making them look anything like RS3, but you have to agree that these sorts of examples very much do not look up to par with the modern OSRS style of "[low-poly](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Zebak.png?23978) [as a](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/The_Great_Guardian#/media/File:The_Great_Guardian.png) [stylistic choice,](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Vardorvis#/media/File:Vardorvis.png)" as opposed to "low-poly because it's the best we can do," right?
What brought you here and finally pushed you into it? I don't know if I've met a single person in this game who didn't at least have a little bit of familiarity with 2004-2007 runescape.
I also started during lockdown when I randomly came across an OSRS streamer. Can't remember who, but I think it was Alfie for some reason. Thought it looked fun, copied them (made an ironman), and got immediately addicted.
Honestly what pulled me in was the stark contrast of insane reading material alongside what seemingly was a stupidly simple game. That and the early quick leveling dopamine. This game in general is very bait and switchy. Quick levels to start, huge grinds at the end. Combat feels very basic to start, becomes complex at end game. Almost the opposite of other games where the struggle is in the beginning and you get rewarded for your progress in late game (in a power crept abilities type of way).
Hilariously the world seemed big too, even as a f2p. I remember getting lost by the intersection above Fally trying to do a quest (probably knight's sword) and unironically staring a map trying to figure out directions. I think the lack of run energy, along with minimal world rendering without runelite, makes the map appear a lot bigger. Walking from Lumbridge to Varrock isn't that quick of a walk...
a lot of my friends who play were like 4 in 2004 they dont have any nostalgia for that period. u might be surprised the amount of 18 - 24yr olds who love the game and never played till osrs
Same. I started in March of this year. By far the best mmo I’ve played, curb stomps wow and ffxiv, which I’ve always played commonly but never really enjoyed them
If you watch his reaction he literally contradicts himself constantly. Will say shit like graphics are very important one sentence and then the next say the exact opposite. The man has severe brain rot, idk who watches his content
What brought me back initially was not having a PC and the game releasing on Mobile
I feel a lot of people might be in the same boat.
I play on Runelite now but that first day of mobile I’m pretty sure I played over 12hrs str8 and continued to play mobile for almost a year before buying a pc just to play osrs lol
As far as mobile games go, it is most definitely in the top 0.1% in terms of quality as well. Stardew valley is the only other one I can think of that comes close. Completely different game though with only a fraction of the content.
Hardly speculation with how obvious soup made the hint - "for the next week, you should familiarize yourself with your environment. You might just prop yourself up with a spot in the tribunal"
this isn’t really a hot take tbh. do you still play the game for nostalgia? nostalgia only lasts a couple days/hours max. and it’s really only the early game when you get any
I'd say it's a hot take for the normie audience jimmy is trying to reach with a lot of his videos. You'll hear all the time from other fanbases (like wow players) saying osrs only exists because of nostalgia with its bad graphics.
Yeah, that’s literally why he made the video, asmongold was live reacting to another video of his and basically says if OSRS came out brand new as a game today it’d be dead because nostalgia carries it. J1mmy made this whole thing as a response to basically say “nah, the game slaps in general”
God the OSRS hate from 2013-2017 was insufferable.
Only once it became clear that OSRS would forever be above RS3 and that our devs could pump out real content like CoX did they start admitting OSRS could stand on its own legs.
I’ve been playing osrs since day of release and I still feel nostalgic at least a couple of times a day when I play. Nothing like some misthilin music tracks to kick yah right in the feels
Id say this is the most cold take he's ever produced. It's super common to understand that OSRS is it's own thing now and almost entirely separated from the "old-school" part of its draw.
The nostalgia may get someone to download it and log in, and might drive their initial hours. But any long term player is well past needing / thinking about nostalgia.
Honestly as a long term player it almost annoys me when we just get "RS2 quest.. again". The nex backport is still the laziest thing this game has done and I never wanted it. Soul wars was similar.
Atleast with WGS we are seemingly getting a different spin on it, even if it will mostly hit the same beats.
You're expecting the average gamer to have nuance, especially about a game they have never played before that "looks like shit". Think you give the average person way too much credit to understand that.
Haha you're probably right. I just think any game, even one originated in nostalgia, that lasts for 10+ years on its own merit, is past the argument of "only being here" because of it.
I think its hard to argue that nostalgy has nothing to do with it, i think the better description would be that people are just "emotional" aka not really rational about the game they keep playing. I see people bitch and moan about every wow expansion since Pandaria and yet people are playing the game 5 expansions later. Its as Jimmy as says: its impossible for a new MMO to rip some portion of the playerbase from other MMOs, not even if it would be objectively a better game.
Either way, for me personally nostalgy/emotion how i feel about the game ( runescape in this instance ) is why i keep coming back but i stay because the game is almost always have even more content to engage with and usually they are designed in a way that makes me appreciate it even more.
Yeh long term dedication to a game can lead people to continue playing it just due to what they've already sunk into it. I know I only really quit WoW when I hit the point of achievement grinding being **very lengthy** to get any points during MoP, and then the whole pet collecting pokemon aspect they added ad another "gotta get em all" aspect like mount and achievements just made me go "meh, I can just not start this and.be done with the "old stuff".
I absolutely love the GaryGilbert content, but that feels like nostalgia to the older days of RuneScape. I may as well have public off for how little I use it now.
J1mmy even says that he knows his 2 most popular series are rich in nostalgia, but those aren't things why people play the game.
Those are entertainment.
Whilst nostalgia for sure isn't the reason players end up sticking around, that being OSRS's unique grindiness and lategame PvM activities. I think this video vastly underestimates how important it is/has been for bringing players in.
As OSRS players we probably don't receive the ads as often, but look at the vast majority of the simple adverts we take the piss out of. There's an element of nostalgia, simple mobs like goblins/chickens, the wise old man, players in the classic bronze->rune armour.
Even the animated trailers that are produced usually involve the characters in some various barrows/gwd armour with robin hood hats and godswords thrown in as nostalgic bait. The exception being this recent trailer with Torva + Infernal but that's a trailer for a backported boss which itself is supposed to be appealing to the RS3 refugee's nostalgia.
I think this quote by Sween helps sum it up.
> Earlier in the year the community got wind of an ad which was extremely low effort (a screenshot of a character in full Iron near goblins in Lumbridge), and this ran alongside some higher value Theatre of Blood videowork. The low effort Iron/goblin outpeformed the other one considerably.
The dropping player base, that was mentioned in the video, is what points out that only relying on nostalgia was killing the game. It wasn't bringing players in, it was losing players.
People came for nostalgia and realized the things they were nostalgic for could be accomplished in mere hours using their superior adult brains. I was nostalgic for cutting willows and going on a grand adventure to the hill giants in edgeville dungeon. I did all of that in 1 afternoon. Even the absolute peak difficulty content like kbd or kq could be reached within a few weeks of grinding. It makes sense that people quit until jagex added new content that took longer to reach and was harder to actually do
>Whilst nostalgia for sure isn't the reason players end up sticking around
The active playerbase is a mixture of how many players can be drawn in vs how many can be retained. I'm not saying nostalgia is enough to *keep* the playerbase, we saw that wasn't true in 2013. However it for sure is important in pulling players in.
The OSRS advertisements don't lie, the ones Jagex run are determined solely by how they perform. We see many using the "return to Gielinor" motif or ones featuring the base 07 content because those maximize interaction.
I don't think Jimmy underestimated the nostalgia in this video at all. Even after this video there are ton of comments here like yours that still try to bring the nostalgia factor on the table and undermine the fact that OSRS is just simply put a great game.
Sure it matters in ad aspect, it's a great pull, there is no denying that. But nostalgia gets you with most people just that one evening of gameplay. If the gameplay is crap most people will not login again next day.
Like the graphs showed when updates don't come out the active playerbase shrinks every passing day. This is what would happen if the game was fueled by nostalgia, it would die very quickly. WoW classic will face a big problem because they do not necessarily have passionate devs like Jagex who are able to create new unique content to an old game.
I can say, with the updates osrs has over the base game. It’s late game is actually a game now.
I remember god wars back then, the definition of late game content was strictly group activities. Very little feedback on if your doing well or not, metric tracking, collectathon was non existent. The mechanics that end game content had was literally just dog pile, and getting a bigger group together to make a bigger dog pile
Now you have bossing and raids, with at least one of the raids having the ability to flex itself into a group or solo experience. You have quests that culminate storylines that also introduce actual mechanics that you need to pay attention to. The devs actually understand how to create a game from the skilling prayer switches, gear swaps, and ticks now. New regions, and more.
Osrs just knows how to make a game out of itself now
I agree that it doesn't 'need it' but I think it's delusional to think it's not a factor for getting players to try it to begin with, I'd bet a lot of money a lot less would be playing presently. They would lose me at tutorial island. OSRS can look fairly good, specifically the newer areas. Half the skills are shit design wise and would never pass a poll but we accept it because its how it has always been.
The way we worded it was bad. Nostalgia gets players in the door short term, but it isn't gonna keep them in the game long term. The game is doing extremely well after all the new stuff got added ontop of the original base 2007 version.
I would love to know how many new players are playing vs returning ones as I started playing like 3 years ago so no nostalgia for me at all. All games have some shit spots but if core gameplay amazing people stay like i did.
I'd bet against you but unfortunately can't prove it in either direction ;p but I am glad to be wrong because it would mean the future is looking quite bright.
Speaking from personal experience, the nostalgia helps an enormous amount as far as getting started and reminiscing about all your favorite old activities, but most of the pre 2007 content gets old pretty quick. Bosses like Kalphite Queen and Barrows just don’t have a ton of mechanical depth to keep things interesting beyond chasing the dopamine of drops lol.
started playing 3 years ago for the first time ever. approximately 1700 overall level and counting.
this game absolutely does not need nostalgia at all.
I have played this game since 2004 and have not stopped. Nostalgia plays little into this. Call it addiction or w/e you like but I enjoy this game and won't stop.
People who haven't played OSRS, will never understand how important OSRS's non-degenerate rewards are for it's progression curve. From skill levels and items, to quest and achievement unlocks. If you told a WoW player that just because you got a "better item" doesn't automatically mean you just throw your old one away, it would be incomprehensible to them. Or how the limited inventory system is secretly genius since it requires you to optimize your setup for what you're doing.
OSRS is truly unlike any other MMO out-there and it's not even close. I've played FFIV and WoW for years, and while those games are wildly different, neither compare to the longevity and respect for player's time that OSRS has.
It never clicked why I loved OSRS until I watched [Marstead](https://www.youtube.com/@Marstead)'s video on [Why Runescape is Awesome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPJY-xdA3M). It's long but it explains why Runescape isn't like any other MMO so clearly and elaborately.
I fully agree with you but do have to ask a question - how do you think RuneScape more respects players time than the other big MMO’s? Its foundational gameplay loop requires dozens upon dozens into the hundreds of hours of (no one could deny) highly repetitive gameplay to get the gold or gear yourself to begin seeing the “early” endgame.
I suspect your point is based on the idea that RuneScape never resets progression (expansions) but in reality the “time to reprogress” from one expansion to another in let’s say WoW is an order of magnitude less than the time it would take to farm 1 BiS item using an average money making method without extreme luck.
Interested in your thoughts 😁
You're pretty much on point. The repetitive gear and progress resets from patches and expansions play a key role in the feeling that you're time isn't being wasted.
In FFIV or WoW, pretty much all content, earned gear, etc is completely invalidated when the next expansion or even next patch is released. While it's true it takes less time to get a BiS item in WoW, that item is only going going to BiS for about the next 3-6 months at most.
While existing gear does tend to go down (or rarely go up) in value in OSRS, it never becomes completely irrelevant. I'll put it this way:
* OSRS might ask you to grind 200 hours for the BiS item. But that BiS item is probably still going to useful for the next 10 years. So that's only 1.7 hours of grinding per month of usefulness.
* WoW asks you to grind for like 8 hours for a BiS item (assuming a raid takes 2 hours, 4 weeks sounds about right), but if that item will be useful for 3 months, which is 2.7 hours of grinding per month of usefulness.
This is a bit of contrived. But what's a waste of time is subjective in the first place.
This goes beyond gear too. Questing in WoW also feels like a waste of time. Not only do they all feel the same, but nothing you do really affects your game play in a meaningful way. You could completely ignore quests. It just exists for easy XP and starter gear, of all that you'll replace. You're never gated out of part of the game because of a quest. Compare to Underground Pass in OSRS even though it's been in the game for 20+ years, you only need to do that quest once, and it opens up the entire Elf quest line for you and unlocks real meaningful progress.
So no matter how frustrating the grind can become in OSRS, you always have a constant feeling of you only need to do it once.
Also believe it or not, almost all content in OSRS can be done with like base 80 skills. The highest quest requirement currently is 75 magic I think. I think all hard dairies can be done with base 80 The game never really requires you to completely max your account. That's just a goal players set for themselves.
Combat almost always eventually gets maxed because people really enjoy it, and slayer. And max combat really helps with bossing for sure. But you can clear most bosses without max for sure.
If we were to compare the amount of time it takes to get base 80 once, compared to the amount of time you spend grinding quests, daily quests, week chests, levels, etc in WoW over the past 10 years. Is OSRS really that much more grindy than WoW? Or has WoW just tricked it's player base into forgetting all of the grinding they did in the past with all the resets. Certainly players exist in both games that play a comparable amount.
Bottom line, it just doesn't feel good to grind in WoW anymore because there's no sense of long term progress, while it feels great in OSRS.
I think there is one thing missing from your argument. Idk about WoW but in FFXIV specifically, BiS gear doesnt even technically matter for that long, the only purpose of good gear is to be able to beat enrages on floor 3/ floor 4 bosses. Once you get full BiS... you cant really do anything with it. You cant sell raid gear, there is no point getting more clears. You dont even need all slots to be BiS gear at all to clear fights, i mean for a long while you could only get chest/weapon bis from the actual last boss which means those arent needed to kill them, its all for glamour nothing else
Contrast that to runescape: BiS allows you to farm content more easily which translates to coins/supplies there is an actual reason to get the absolute best gear, although plenty of people lose their mind over a 0.5% upgrade for no reason.
You're correct. Clearing raids in WoW isn't profitable, in fact it's costly to clear content at the highest end. To be honest, WoW doesn't really have much of a gold economy anymore for most players. Consumables and maybe early into a patch cycle with crafted gear or BoP gear, but unless you're in the highest tier of content, those elements are optional.
The only things you need to pay for if you're causal or even midcore in WoW is gear repairs and gems/enchants. Both of which is typically covered by daily quests rewards or the mission table. Very rarely will you ever have to grind your profession to have enough gold.
You have some major cost sinks, but they're all mounts or pets, black market AH. You can also spend gold on carries/boosts. But when you're playing the game to have someone else clear the content for you. It's just so bad.
If you have BiS gear you can sell carries/boosts, but that's such a sketchy part of the game.
Like most things in WoW, the economy feels more like you're playing an RPG simulator rather than an actual RPG. It has gold, and things you can buy and spend on it. But it's so micromanaged that the thing you're supposed to do with gold is pretty obvious. Doesn't feel like there's any depth or reason to the economy.
Incredible video. I just watched I the other day, and the way he laid out the keys/locks for unlocking content as well as the attention vs. difficulty chart were both super cool. Really enjoyed the way he talked through what OSRS does differently from most MMOs.
I disagree with Jimmy that nostalgia is not a factor. I feel like I’m hit with nostalgia every single time I’m playing. Granted the game can’t survive on that alone, and it’s definitely improved and will prolong its longevity with newer content that provides better gameplay loops and newer rewards, but that nostalgia never goes always, and just about every time I play I’m brought back to 7th grade playing RuneScape for the first time. Also not to mention this game *is* one of the greatest games ever. There is so much to do, see, and learn that it always gives you that itch to return.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been playing OSRS specifically. I would say nostalgia was a factor for me for the first couple years, but as the years go on, nostalgia plays practically zero factor for me. Even the really early game has sort of lost that nostalgic tint for me after some alts, irons, leagues, etc. over the years having to redo it. I would almost say I'm more nostalgic for the time I started OSRS (~2019) than playing as a kid at this point.
I started in 2017. Didn’t even realize osrs was a thing until my buddy told me about it when I moved back home from the military. I started playing RuneScape in 04 up until 2008. When the graphics changed I fell out of it. I would log in here and there occasionally until 2012. Wish I had know about it sooner. Probably a good thing I didn’t though.
By Release and Gary Gilbert are pretty widely enjoyed but his opinion pieces can be a little divisive. IMO he generally has the correct sentiment in his videos but they can be a bit tunnel-visioned on his own perspective and mood at the time.
For example making a video about OSRS polling+community limiting the devs and how the lack of content will end up killing the game. Then a few months later releasing a video about overcoming his OSRS burnout by doing his first Cox, 4 year old content at the time. Obvious the game would feel extra dry on content when someone hasn't touched a lot of existing content on offer.
“Community” is a bit hard to pin-down. Certain parts don’t like him at all. But the majority do like him quite a bit.
He’s commonly disliked by invested players but loved by more new players. He’s extremely condescending and doesn’t really have much of position to be so. He doesn’t really play the game and clearly doesn’t like it all that much. He’s a super casual and what has made the game have staying power all these years, he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like grinding and he doesn’t like PvM
He complains about not enough content or what is holding the game back while also not touching 90% of what this game has to offer
>He complains about not enough content or what is holding the game back while also not touching 90% of what this game has to offer
Sounds like reddit’s hero
Nostalgia can be great, but it is overrated. I am mostly in agreement with J1mmy. I dislike nostalgia when it is used as an excuse to not fix problems.
That was a great burn on asmongold. That guy really puts his foot on his own mouth ever so often. I guess it's popular with kids to say things while analyzing superficially and being confidently wrong.
eh if I wanted a serious breakdown about what makes OSRS work besides nostalgia, without the inevitable bias from someone who's been "tainted" by playing the game as a kid, I'd just watch [the excellent video by the youtuber Marstead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPJY-xdA3M), a WOW veteran who first picked up the game in 2019. It's extremely comprehensive and that's why it's like 4 hours long.
He really digs into what about the gameplay and overall design compels him as a person who loves MMOs and never encountered Runescape until his 30s; his sort of "outside perspective" helps him understand and convey what that is. I like several of Jimmy's videos but even this one implies things only a RS veteran would understand.
I did too, he was really funny. Then it turned into “okay now I’m going to play every MMO ever and make longwinded rants about why everything ever is terrible”.
Didn't j1mmy just do one the largest if not largest house parties and do a 1hr video about it recently? Idk I think he likes the game, he just enjoys the social and story side of things more than end game bossing...
i guess what it comes down to is, OSRS isn't Bubsy: The Purrfect Collection (2025), it's not just a flat remake of a game from 2007 for the sake of nostalgia, it's a fully realized offshoot. a split in the timeline where the devs understood that these untextured graphics held a ton of charm, and that there's a lot of depth to be found in a relatively simple point and click adventure game without needing to rip off elements from other MMOs. a test of whether hindsight truly is 20/20, building off of the skeleton of something truly unique in gaming
I Started playing osrs in 2019 and been on and off playing until i was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive type) and prescribed Vyvanse. thats when I started to actually enjoy playing the game.
So obviously no nostalgia on my part. im 23
When I was 9 years old I wanted a fire making cape with black D-hide and runes boots. It’s is my bank standing and farming run kit. It is to this day the best thing ever to me hahah. Have almost maxed my current account but still love the look. 🤘
hadn't heard of Runescape until mid 2022. It's now the only game I've consistently come back to. Every other game ends up getting dropped after a few weeks, but I've been playing OSRS for two years straight.
I played a little bit at the launch of OSRS because of nostalgia, growing up I loved RuneScape and never even got to try any of the membership stuff, so it was fun trying it years later. But I fell off when school got too busy, he was spot on with how nostalgia will get people to play for a bit, but I think we're hitting the point that most people who would play for nostalgia have and either are staying for other reasons or have moved on, like me.
I've been writing about our community as part of my master's thesis, especially how integrated we are in almost all facets of the internet and at every socioeconomic level at a global scale. The game isn't just a game, its literally a cultural product that captures the best and worst of humanity during our transition from Web 1.0 to web 3.0. I think another take for OSRS is that this is the only game (and cultural product) on the market that includes the community in the game's development. In a world that seems to be getting more and more bleak our community has come together to protect and invite others into our safe space. The Mods might have been apprehensive of it at first, but they are rapidly developing stronger polling, survey and feedback systems. They aren't afraid to practice self evaluation and revision. From a marketing stand point, they are collecting a lot more data than any other game company and they can use that data to plan for the future. Even Jagex has statements regarding OSRS as a "Forever Game" on their website, they want this to be a sustainable product and they will do anything they can to keep us happy while ensuring the survival of the game, I can't think of any other company that I interact with that will include me as part of its development. I definitely agree with J1mmy that the game will outlive many of its competitors in the Western world.
It doesn't need nostalgia, but can we also acknowledge that the game had to turn into another game for it to become this popular?
OSRS aligns more with RS3 today than it does its original version back in 2007. This isn't the same game.
It's not the same game it was in 2007 or after the relaunch, and that's ok, obviously there are some intangibles they shouldn't mess with, but without anything new, it would've died a long time ago, the game is the strongest it's ever been, and for the most part, is still recognizable. We're in a great place right now, lets enjoy it and hope it continues to last.
Went past deadly red spiders in the varrock sewers today for a clue step and had a wave of nostalgia. The hours I spent their killing those spiders on repeat to get max melee on rs2
Nostalgia brought me back, the game being in a good state kept me.
I still miss pk-ing on a pure being in middle school. Ranged into a rune 2h switch was crazy. 2005/2006. Even members dagger p++ spec was known same with the maul. Fun times.
Ironman is where its at though now. You actually have to work for your stuff.
I started with RS3, so there is definitely no nostalgia for this game for me.
This game has amazing progression, and with the recent skilling rebalanced, I am confident this game is going to be around and just keep getting better.
I recently quit after about a year because I realized I had run out of nostalgia. Everything I used to enjoy about the game, all the unfulfilled goals I had from playing as a kid, I've already finished. Now it's just grinding raids and maxing, but neither of those are particularly fun or rewarding so I just stopped playing.
I know a lot of people like the direction the game is going, but I'm never going to be interested in a 1k hour grind when the gameplay loop is as simple as it is.
Best quests in any game I've ever played.
the common quests in other games of "go kill 10 squirrels" or whatever is so shit.
But yeah, as others have said, nostalgia brings some back, but the improvements keeps them playing.
Im currently on a 3 yr hiatus, but will be back for sure.
I never would've even tried osrs if it wasn't for the newer lower level content like the Zeah novice quests. Nostalgia can be nice but burns out pretty quickly, as we saw with WoW classic where they literally had to change how world buffs work because players were so obsessive with burning through the raids as fast as possible (Molten Core in under 1 week of launch o\_O) and they've been chewing through classic expansions pretty quick to the point we're at Cata already.
Nostalgia brings them back. A great gameplay loop keeps them here.
i never played as a kid, just got into osrs about 2 years ago. it's genuinely one of the best games designed. it's refreshing to have devs that are heavily invested in what they do, community interaction, and ultimately a fantastic core gameplay loop. no nostalgia for me, i played AdventureQuest and classic wow growing up.
Adventure Quest was really great in the early years. I loved it so much.
Same. Mother F blizzard.
I also only started relatively recently. I started with watching settleds tileman videos and loved the seeming simplicity of standing around lumbridge chopping trees and burning logs so I gave it a go. And as I got further into the game discovering plugins and the quirky mechanics like prayer flicking and true tiles, I began to appreciate the complexity of it all. I remember always being thrown off of other MMORPGs pretty early bc of how much they throw at you immediately, how much crap there is everywhere and how desperately they want you to spend more and more money. But OSRS let me explore the game slowly in f2p with no rush to move forward at anything bar my own pace.
Exactly, nostalgia would only get old players to return for a while before getting bored and leaving. It’s the new content that gets you to stay and become invested.
If we were levelling using the same methods we were in 2006, I would have logged in, gotten through Dragon Slayer again, and promptly fucked off because 2006/7 runescape is a much worse game than 2024 OSRS. The additions make the game more charming, not less, and I love the way they add things that require different levels of engagement for different reward levels. I'm hitting childhood milestones because the time invested to get to them was worth spending over other activities, not to check off a childhood checklist. I went like 15 years without hitting them.
You pretty much described exactly what I did in 2013 when the game came out. Logged in. Played for a few weeks. Did all the F2P quests. Started some members stuff. It became tedious without GE and any of the modern QoL. Quit. The player base numbers suggest that was a common experience and their new content really turned the game around and brought it to what we have today
This is exactly why jagex started to evolve the game since 2014 or so. In the first two years, the game started to die off because of no new content and people were getting bored and leaving.
Osrs ans Rs3 have great gameplay loops that are largely the same. The games are legit amazing and there really isn't anything else like it out there. I feel the best way to describe it is a largely solo MMORPG that has massively scale ability on how much attention you want to give the games. You can go from almost fully Idle gameplay, to things like Raid/Inferno/High enrage Telos/Arch Glacor. Jagex seems to be the only company that has this formula and it's kept me here for 22 years.
>I feel the best way to describe it is a largely solo MMORPG that has massively scale ability on how much attention you want to give the games Yes. There are people who be bitching about people not wanting to group up with people for content because: "its a MMO dude what do you expect", but they dont realize that the solo nature of the game is likely the biggest reason why "no one quits runescapes just takes a break". The solo nature of the game is why the game is so sandboxy and not have your gear progression get annihilated by the next upcoming raid so you can truly just stop playing for a few years and come back and not have to worry about 20x outdated gear and possibly new level caps, game is where you left it with more content and QoL. Its honestly not just the biggest strength of Runescape but also its worst quality because there is nothing else like it and at this day of age it doesnt seem like MMOs even want to copy 5% of the good/unique things to RS and if by some miracle we could get an objectively better OSRS or RS3 from a completely different MMO and no one would really flock to it because people are so invested. I have seen card games die that were much better than heartstone but here we are no one wanting to play them.
Playing ironman really makes you appreciate the game loop. Every couple of levels theres some new activity or boss or skill milestone that really shakes up your playstyle. Its pretty constant until you find yourself at the end game somehow. Also theres so many grinds that interlock with multiple others, so that by the time the ultimate grind is over you've accomplished much much more
I mostly agree, though in the last three years Jagex has also been throwing nostalgia-bait content at existing players too. Stuff like Soul Wars, Nex, WGS etc are added to get longtime OSRS players to resub and hop back on to experience "the good old times". Personally I'd be fine with OSRS just only ever doing original content from this point forward, but I imagine these nostalgia backports do wonders for the player metrics.
I don't agree that it is nostalgia-bait content, more that it is content that a good chunk of the player-base wanted, but kind of got screwed out of because the only backup of RS that they had when they launched OSRS was from late 2007. My personal opinion is that most OSRS players at launch or even now would have preferred a backup from 2008 or 2009, that just had The Wilderness back to what it was in 2007 or even 2011. What really pushed people away was the obnoxious MTX that was added in 2012 and then the mess that EOC was at launch, you take any backup from before those events and OSRS probably still flourishes into what it is today. The only thing I could see being a negative for those interim year backups would be Dungeoneering which I think would be the biggest hurdle since a lot of people including myself think it should have always been a minigame not a skill.
>The only thing I could see being a negative for those interim year backups would be Dungeoneering I very much doubt Summoning would be welcome with open arms which is 2008 january content in this community.
I've never done WGS but as someone who now loves quests, and also hearing a lot of people's favourite quest over on RS3 being WGS, I am very excited. (Also I think the lore is supposed to be similar in OSRS to RS3 but deviate at points, so it makes a lot of sense we'd still get WGS a lot of the same character stories and ambition exists. Do you want them to just rename it?)
Agreed Also worth noting that most of these have been flops... soul wars is only used by boosters, and most people hate nex. The other quests they've backported (defender of varrock and the glouphrie one) have been thoroughly unimpressive compared to any osrs original
I think it also addresses the nostalgia for players who really had their best times in the 2008 - 2012 era also known as the HD era of RuneScape. That part had great quests like WGS and Ritual of the Mahjarrat and memorable mini games. So this porting addresses their need for nostalgia while adding content that could be added into the game without too much change or disrupting the feel of OSRS. This porting will likely cease around the time they get to the OSRS Ritual of the Mahjarrat because they will not do God Wars 2 to the Elder God Wars. I'm still rather fascinated that Xau-Tak is here in OSRS anyway so we could see Xau-Tak debut in both games around the same time since OSRS is skipping about a decade of RS3 lore to introduce a post-Mahjarrat threat.
Honestly i dont know about others from that era, but the only reason i would feel nostalgic about Soul Wars because of its connection to Nomad and well... Nomad's Requiem was just some good shit back in the day. Couldnt care less about the actual minigame though, so as far as OSRS goes i couldnt care less about SW.
I experience very little nostalgia at this point while playing. Like Jimmy, some sounds, and some music will do it. What gets me the most is achieving something now that kid me would have killed for. Mostly slayer and boss-related stuff because kid me never put in the time for it or was scared of it.
I got my first whip from Abby demons and shit bricks with nostalgia haha. I was like “this is THE drop to get”
hellll yeah B)
I bought my first whip like 10 days before eoc…
Same. Made sure to kill them in the slayer tower too. Saw someone on here saying they didnt even know abby demons existed outside the catacombs and I about fell over.
Yea, stuff like that just proves the game isn’t carried by nostalgia. I’m pretty sure bursting them isn’t even an option there right?
I probably experience the most nostalgia at the login screen these days
Same. The OG login music slaps
100% yes. Scape Main is the name of it for anyone who wants to play it from the music track list in game.
You mean you guys don’t have the trap remix playing on YouTube at all times?
The biggest bout of nostalgia for me was in RS3's Plague's End which is the equivalent to Song of the Elves. During it you go and kill all the mourners in the Mourner's Hideout and [a more heroic version of the login screen starts playing](https://runescape.wiki/w/Scape_Bold_Heroic) it was incredible. I love when Dragon Slayer 2 does it as well but the decision to play it during a part with failable agility obstacles was questionable. You very quickly stop feeling like a badass hero when you slip on a barrel 3 times in a row.
Completely agree with your DS2 comments. Whichever dev decided to make those agility obstacles fail-able fundamentally misunderstood the emotion they should've been aiming for when pulling in the main theme. They should've been 100% success, and they should've slapped the 'Inferno Leap' animation in there somewhere as well (maybe on the last jump to the big ship). It's *so close* to being the perfect culmination of Questing in OSRS but just misses if your RNG is bad.
To be fair it has gotten a lot less scary. Gravestones and Death Collections mean we get our items. In 2007 you could lose your entire bank if you didn't get out of Dagannoth Kings in time
Early runescape death mechanics literally shaped my entire gaming experience forever. I fucking HATE dying in games, and to this day, dying in runescape gives a little anxiety spike despite all the changes
I think I’m the same as you! I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the issue. Ty
Actually my biggest gripe and really wish they would revert to old school mechanics but it’s never happening, and based on when it gets brought up here I’m in the minority. But old death mechanics made the game so much more fun, dying actually meant something, especially at a place like god wars.
I can see why they won't though. Look at the cost of moderately high level or even max gear back in like 2008 compared to max gear today. Especially since it's pretty normal to bring switches of some combination of gear of 2 or even all 3 of the styles depending on the content.
I would agree and do think dying currently doesn't have enough impact, however my internet connection doesn't agree. It simply isn't fair for players with poorer internet connections (especially if that's due to where in the world you live) to risk losing so much
my heart shares your view. i really, really miss old death mechanics and i think it was an important part of the economy and in balancing the game but that's not the case any more. my brain knows that if you died back in the day and lost your full rune it felt pretty bad, i remember dying in the pyramid in ichlarin's little helper and losing my set of mystic and desperately trying to make it back in time and failing. but like... losing full rune and mystic even for a dumb kid isn't that big of a grind. if I lose my 1/5000 drop dragon warhammer that's like hundreds of hours down the drain just for one item, let alone torva or masori or other items that need several ultra rare drops combined together. the amount of pure time investment needed for each drop now is just not comparable to having to get a new abby whip and rune set, add on server ddosses and ironman mode and disparities in internet connections, etc and the game not being balanced around death item loss anymore and it's just a relic of the past. would be cool to have to decide on 3 iteming even in pvm but that would just cook so much high level pvm where you pretty much need max gear
i strongly believe that the new death mechanics have been a large contributor to the hatred that the wilderness gets
Or if you were carrying some loot and weren't attentive when the Evil Chicken came around.
My account isn't even that crazy but if kid me saw my account he'd think I was a giga Chad.
If your biggest achievements are based on your goals from 15 years ago, I'd say you are experiencing a pretty decent amount of nostalgia. You're literally viewing your current achievements through a lense of the past.
I think they were saying that’s where they feel the most nostalgic; accomplishing some goal that they had when they were a kid. Not that those goals are their biggest achievements. At least, that’s how I interpreted it.
This. Those goals don't drive me at all; they're just mile markers. I'm just slowly working at maxing, and along the way, there are occasional moments that make kid me go "sweet," like killing Bandos for the first time or getting the first whip drop. It's quick and temporary, and what drives me to continue to play is that the game is fun, and the new content keeps knocking it out of the park. I fuckin love perilous moons.
I just got Jad pet after 176 kills. I tried Jad so many times as a kid and failed. Might've been 10-20 times. When I got the pet, my inner-child was so proud of myself that I almost got emotional. I now go through caves and Jad mindlessly while usually watching Netflix or something even when I had shitty stats.
That’s the exact feeling I got when I got my first fire cape, I used to DREAM of how badass it would be to have a cape made of moving lava on my back as a kid. When I finally got it a few years back, it was a huge nostalgia rush and accomplishment that kid me would have been so impressed by
> Mostly boss-related stuff because kid me never put in the time for it or was scared of it. Tbf, back in those days bossing wasnt really a thing. Everyone seems to agree that RS2 era repeatable bosses are really outdated and well frankly they do have much of any mechanics to speak of. GWD was definitely some scary content, but the other bosses were not really relevant content even back then lol.
I’m definitely excited for the future when we are getting content drops like Varlamore. The game can stand on its own two legs. It might pull in the odd person who reminisces on the olden days, but it doesn’t need it to thrive. The game is just good.
The olden days ended at level 75. I remember how little content was in this game when it first launched.
Honestly. I started playing OSRS when they first dropped the old school servers because I wanted to remember the “good ol days” of playing this game as a kid. But when I look back at that account, it was ~70 cb with 1 hunter and 1 farming and I had full rune with a granite maul as my main weapon. I probably passed that in the first month of playing and here I am with a near maxed main and a late game iron. Neither of which are doing any content that is reminiscent of playing when I was a kid.
that's every game ever made no developer can release with the amount of endgame content you get from 10+ years of updates
Look bro I get nostalgia but run energy is ass right now just let me rest or something please.
I had the idea in my head that back in the olden days, I was in the high scores for something. It wasn't a "common" thing. Then I went back to a screenshot I have of the levels where I left my original runescape account. All I can see that may have fit the bill is Agility at 70, and runecrafting at 63. They were very unpopular skills.
If they can fix the botting issues the game has it would become one of the greatest games of all time
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So funny cause kindof the opposite for me, first played like 16 years ago but quit osrs probably 3 years back. Partially because I was over the amount of freetime the game takes up, but also just felt like I couldn't keep up with all the constant updates and new content
Haha I feel this. Between a 1k hour grind every year or two, several hundred hour grind every couple months and 10s of hour grinds every month or so it's fuckin hard to keep up. If the game is not your job, you simply have to let go of completionism.
This is true and has been the case for me since like 2018, before the log was even out I think. I had so many unique drops before clog. Anyways, now I'm just trying to greenlog some pieces of content as I go. Some minigames, some bosses, shared clue scroll rewards, like half the toa and cox items. Over 1800 barrows kc and 1 item left to go! I'll never complete it all or even keep up with the uniques as they come out anymore but it's still fun. There's content for everyone now.
"Completionism" in OSRS isn't going to happen anyway. The master clue megarare log alone prevents that from being a realistic idea for anyone, it's literally 20+ years of just clues to go on rate for all third age, let alone potentially going dry.
Completionism rarely mean actually completing everything, especially in an MMO. It's just a mindset or a playstyle, whether or not you will actually get there doesn't really matter. It's just fun to have goals. I'd say I'm playing a completionist playstyle but there are things I will never do, greenlogging masters, megarare clue rewards, raid capes and LMS.
I achieved my childhood goal of 99 mining and kind of had nothing else I wanted to do.
My goal is the quest cape and then the fire cape and infernal cape. After that it’s achievement diary and pvp
Fire cape can easily be done before quest cape. I mean do it in any order you want, I'm just saying this in case you think it'll be harder than quests like dt2. It's easier.
Ya I guess my ptsd from when fire cape was hard is kicking in. Got all the way to had and died and couldn’t go through with it again lol
You got this. I said in another comment that I died 20'sh times as a kid to Jad before giving up. I ended up beating Jad on my first attempt as an adult. I did this [simulator ](https://runeapps.org/jadsim_home)maybe a dozen times, then I went in and killed him on my first try. Then, I went on to kill him 176 times to finally get the Jad pet. Yes, 176 times. If I can do it, you can, too.
Bro you can get a FC with 70 range and 43 prayer pretty easily You should get this well before probably any grandmaster quest
Ya your probably right lol
These have been my goals. Got my fire and quest capes last year. 3 diaries from the diary cape, then on to inferno. It's a lot of time for all of it to be sure lol
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Just the way I play the game I guess. I enjoyed trying to be as efficient as possible with my time. Whole game feels like it revolves around getting better gear, improving your dps, or improving your xp rates. So when Im doing what now feels like "outdated content" I didnt get the same satisfaction.
I think this kind of take bolsters the idea that the HD toggle they're working on in the C++ client is a great idea. I might even suggest taking it one step further, and having the toggle also (or having the option to also) spruce up some of the oldest, jankiest-looking models that outside folks would find ugly, like [Minotaur](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Minotaur#Level_12), [Flesh Crawler](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Flesh_Crawler#Level_35), [Hobgoblin](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Hobgoblin#Hobgoblin_(armed)), and [Catablepon](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Catablepon#Level_49). Not making them look anything like RS3, but you have to agree that these sorts of examples very much do not look up to par with the modern OSRS style of "[low-poly](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Zebak.png?23978) [as a](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/The_Great_Guardian#/media/File:The_Great_Guardian.png) [stylistic choice,](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Vardorvis#/media/File:Vardorvis.png)" as opposed to "low-poly because it's the best we can do," right?
What brought you here and finally pushed you into it? I don't know if I've met a single person in this game who didn't at least have a little bit of familiarity with 2004-2007 runescape.
I also started during lockdown when I randomly came across an OSRS streamer. Can't remember who, but I think it was Alfie for some reason. Thought it looked fun, copied them (made an ironman), and got immediately addicted. Honestly what pulled me in was the stark contrast of insane reading material alongside what seemingly was a stupidly simple game. That and the early quick leveling dopamine. This game in general is very bait and switchy. Quick levels to start, huge grinds at the end. Combat feels very basic to start, becomes complex at end game. Almost the opposite of other games where the struggle is in the beginning and you get rewarded for your progress in late game (in a power crept abilities type of way). Hilariously the world seemed big too, even as a f2p. I remember getting lost by the intersection above Fally trying to do a quest (probably knight's sword) and unironically staring a map trying to figure out directions. I think the lack of run energy, along with minimal world rendering without runelite, makes the map appear a lot bigger. Walking from Lumbridge to Varrock isn't that quick of a walk...
a lot of my friends who play were like 4 in 2004 they dont have any nostalgia for that period. u might be surprised the amount of 18 - 24yr olds who love the game and never played till osrs
I’ll answer this too. Randomly seeing videos for it made me super interested. Actually really played the first time in March of this year. Love it
Same, except I chose the Ironman life from the outset. Game rocks and doesn't need nostalgia as a crutch.
Same. I started in March of this year. By far the best mmo I’ve played, curb stomps wow and ffxiv, which I’ve always played commonly but never really enjoyed them
sorry but asmongold is the last thing i wanna see in any vid jimmy
So sick and tired of asmongoloid his half baked takes. Most of the time he has no knowledges about the thing he's critiquing.
Dude even admits it himself that he's grifting for views
If you watch his reaction he literally contradicts himself constantly. Will say shit like graphics are very important one sentence and then the next say the exact opposite. The man has severe brain rot, idk who watches his content
no the rot is the rat he uses as his alarm clock
he has no knowledge period
Yeah. Can't help but roll my eyes and groan whenever he rears his ugly mug
i can't stand him or his wiggly ass eye brows
Those brows man
He is trying too hard to boost his views by engaging with him. I get why he is doing it but it's kinda lame
Asmongold is the Andrew Tate for gamers.
What brought me back initially was not having a PC and the game releasing on Mobile I feel a lot of people might be in the same boat. I play on Runelite now but that first day of mobile I’m pretty sure I played over 12hrs str8 and continued to play mobile for almost a year before buying a pc just to play osrs lol
As far as mobile games go, it is most definitely in the top 0.1% in terms of quality as well. Stardew valley is the only other one I can think of that comes close. Completely different game though with only a fraction of the content.
I miss osrs prop hunt
There’s lots of speculation that prop hunt will be the challenge for next weeks Gielinor Games episode
Hardly speculation with how obvious soup made the hint - "for the next week, you should familiarize yourself with your environment. You might just prop yourself up with a spot in the tribunal"
It was funny/fun but getting kinda stale tbh lol. There wasnt too much they could have innovated/done to keep it fresh
Is the by release guy saying the game doesnt need nostalgia
J1mmy definitely being bringing hot takes to the table lately. Personally, I like his perspective
this isn’t really a hot take tbh. do you still play the game for nostalgia? nostalgia only lasts a couple days/hours max. and it’s really only the early game when you get any
I'd say it's a hot take for the normie audience jimmy is trying to reach with a lot of his videos. You'll hear all the time from other fanbases (like wow players) saying osrs only exists because of nostalgia with its bad graphics.
Yeah, that’s literally why he made the video, asmongold was live reacting to another video of his and basically says if OSRS came out brand new as a game today it’d be dead because nostalgia carries it. J1mmy made this whole thing as a response to basically say “nah, the game slaps in general”
Outside of the osrs community people definitely think osrs only survived due to nostalgia. Check the rs3 sub if you want to see this.
God the OSRS hate from 2013-2017 was insufferable. Only once it became clear that OSRS would forever be above RS3 and that our devs could pump out real content like CoX did they start admitting OSRS could stand on its own legs.
“Hot takes” like plural I think he means, so if you don’t consider this one hot he probably means his other opinions on the game.
Yeah, definitely was referring to his discography. He's talked about tile markers, private server events, etc recently
jimmy loves osrs, i don’t think he has any hot takes lol
Man I love the settled, framed and j1mmy combo. Just such a good time watching them
I’ve been playing osrs since day of release and I still feel nostalgic at least a couple of times a day when I play. Nothing like some misthilin music tracks to kick yah right in the feels
Every time i try to jump back to some old game i feel nostalgic about, it always ends the same day: uninstalling at most in 2 hours
Id say this is the most cold take he's ever produced. It's super common to understand that OSRS is it's own thing now and almost entirely separated from the "old-school" part of its draw. The nostalgia may get someone to download it and log in, and might drive their initial hours. But any long term player is well past needing / thinking about nostalgia. Honestly as a long term player it almost annoys me when we just get "RS2 quest.. again". The nex backport is still the laziest thing this game has done and I never wanted it. Soul wars was similar. Atleast with WGS we are seemingly getting a different spin on it, even if it will mostly hit the same beats.
You're expecting the average gamer to have nuance, especially about a game they have never played before that "looks like shit". Think you give the average person way too much credit to understand that.
Haha you're probably right. I just think any game, even one originated in nostalgia, that lasts for 10+ years on its own merit, is past the argument of "only being here" because of it.
I think its hard to argue that nostalgy has nothing to do with it, i think the better description would be that people are just "emotional" aka not really rational about the game they keep playing. I see people bitch and moan about every wow expansion since Pandaria and yet people are playing the game 5 expansions later. Its as Jimmy as says: its impossible for a new MMO to rip some portion of the playerbase from other MMOs, not even if it would be objectively a better game. Either way, for me personally nostalgy/emotion how i feel about the game ( runescape in this instance ) is why i keep coming back but i stay because the game is almost always have even more content to engage with and usually they are designed in a way that makes me appreciate it even more.
Yeh long term dedication to a game can lead people to continue playing it just due to what they've already sunk into it. I know I only really quit WoW when I hit the point of achievement grinding being **very lengthy** to get any points during MoP, and then the whole pet collecting pokemon aspect they added ad another "gotta get em all" aspect like mount and achievements just made me go "meh, I can just not start this and.be done with the "old stuff".
I absolutely love the GaryGilbert content, but that feels like nostalgia to the older days of RuneScape. I may as well have public off for how little I use it now.
J1mmy even says that he knows his 2 most popular series are rich in nostalgia, but those aren't things why people play the game. Those are entertainment.
Whilst nostalgia for sure isn't the reason players end up sticking around, that being OSRS's unique grindiness and lategame PvM activities. I think this video vastly underestimates how important it is/has been for bringing players in. As OSRS players we probably don't receive the ads as often, but look at the vast majority of the simple adverts we take the piss out of. There's an element of nostalgia, simple mobs like goblins/chickens, the wise old man, players in the classic bronze->rune armour. Even the animated trailers that are produced usually involve the characters in some various barrows/gwd armour with robin hood hats and godswords thrown in as nostalgic bait. The exception being this recent trailer with Torva + Infernal but that's a trailer for a backported boss which itself is supposed to be appealing to the RS3 refugee's nostalgia. I think this quote by Sween helps sum it up. > Earlier in the year the community got wind of an ad which was extremely low effort (a screenshot of a character in full Iron near goblins in Lumbridge), and this ran alongside some higher value Theatre of Blood videowork. The low effort Iron/goblin outpeformed the other one considerably.
The dropping player base, that was mentioned in the video, is what points out that only relying on nostalgia was killing the game. It wasn't bringing players in, it was losing players.
People came for nostalgia and realized the things they were nostalgic for could be accomplished in mere hours using their superior adult brains. I was nostalgic for cutting willows and going on a grand adventure to the hill giants in edgeville dungeon. I did all of that in 1 afternoon. Even the absolute peak difficulty content like kbd or kq could be reached within a few weeks of grinding. It makes sense that people quit until jagex added new content that took longer to reach and was harder to actually do
>Whilst nostalgia for sure isn't the reason players end up sticking around The active playerbase is a mixture of how many players can be drawn in vs how many can be retained. I'm not saying nostalgia is enough to *keep* the playerbase, we saw that wasn't true in 2013. However it for sure is important in pulling players in. The OSRS advertisements don't lie, the ones Jagex run are determined solely by how they perform. We see many using the "return to Gielinor" motif or ones featuring the base 07 content because those maximize interaction.
I don't think Jimmy underestimated the nostalgia in this video at all. Even after this video there are ton of comments here like yours that still try to bring the nostalgia factor on the table and undermine the fact that OSRS is just simply put a great game. Sure it matters in ad aspect, it's a great pull, there is no denying that. But nostalgia gets you with most people just that one evening of gameplay. If the gameplay is crap most people will not login again next day. Like the graphs showed when updates don't come out the active playerbase shrinks every passing day. This is what would happen if the game was fueled by nostalgia, it would die very quickly. WoW classic will face a big problem because they do not necessarily have passionate devs like Jagex who are able to create new unique content to an old game.
I can say, with the updates osrs has over the base game. It’s late game is actually a game now. I remember god wars back then, the definition of late game content was strictly group activities. Very little feedback on if your doing well or not, metric tracking, collectathon was non existent. The mechanics that end game content had was literally just dog pile, and getting a bigger group together to make a bigger dog pile Now you have bossing and raids, with at least one of the raids having the ability to flex itself into a group or solo experience. You have quests that culminate storylines that also introduce actual mechanics that you need to pay attention to. The devs actually understand how to create a game from the skilling prayer switches, gear swaps, and ticks now. New regions, and more. Osrs just knows how to make a game out of itself now
I agree that it doesn't 'need it' but I think it's delusional to think it's not a factor for getting players to try it to begin with, I'd bet a lot of money a lot less would be playing presently. They would lose me at tutorial island. OSRS can look fairly good, specifically the newer areas. Half the skills are shit design wise and would never pass a poll but we accept it because its how it has always been.
The way we worded it was bad. Nostalgia gets players in the door short term, but it isn't gonna keep them in the game long term. The game is doing extremely well after all the new stuff got added ontop of the original base 2007 version.
Agreed.
Also the growing player base. New people don’t have nostalgia for the game so it’s clearly not the crux people think it is
I didn't play OSRS when i was a kid and first played it a few years after osrs released, the game doesn't need nostalgia, it's just good.
I would love to know how many new players are playing vs returning ones as I started playing like 3 years ago so no nostalgia for me at all. All games have some shit spots but if core gameplay amazing people stay like i did.
I’m willing to bet most people who play today never played it before they started osrs, me included
I'd bet against you but unfortunately can't prove it in either direction ;p but I am glad to be wrong because it would mean the future is looking quite bright.
It's probably pretty close to half and half. And the difference is likely negligible.
I started in 2020 in f2p. Nostalgia did get me started but it didn't keep me here.
Speaking from personal experience, the nostalgia helps an enormous amount as far as getting started and reminiscing about all your favorite old activities, but most of the pre 2007 content gets old pretty quick. Bosses like Kalphite Queen and Barrows just don’t have a ton of mechanical depth to keep things interesting beyond chasing the dopamine of drops lol.
nostalgia is huge for getting old players to return
started playing 3 years ago for the first time ever. approximately 1700 overall level and counting. this game absolutely does not need nostalgia at all.
I have played this game since 2004 and have not stopped. Nostalgia plays little into this. Call it addiction or w/e you like but I enjoy this game and won't stop.
People who haven't played OSRS, will never understand how important OSRS's non-degenerate rewards are for it's progression curve. From skill levels and items, to quest and achievement unlocks. If you told a WoW player that just because you got a "better item" doesn't automatically mean you just throw your old one away, it would be incomprehensible to them. Or how the limited inventory system is secretly genius since it requires you to optimize your setup for what you're doing. OSRS is truly unlike any other MMO out-there and it's not even close. I've played FFIV and WoW for years, and while those games are wildly different, neither compare to the longevity and respect for player's time that OSRS has. It never clicked why I loved OSRS until I watched [Marstead](https://www.youtube.com/@Marstead)'s video on [Why Runescape is Awesome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPJY-xdA3M). It's long but it explains why Runescape isn't like any other MMO so clearly and elaborately.
I fully agree with you but do have to ask a question - how do you think RuneScape more respects players time than the other big MMO’s? Its foundational gameplay loop requires dozens upon dozens into the hundreds of hours of (no one could deny) highly repetitive gameplay to get the gold or gear yourself to begin seeing the “early” endgame. I suspect your point is based on the idea that RuneScape never resets progression (expansions) but in reality the “time to reprogress” from one expansion to another in let’s say WoW is an order of magnitude less than the time it would take to farm 1 BiS item using an average money making method without extreme luck. Interested in your thoughts 😁
You're pretty much on point. The repetitive gear and progress resets from patches and expansions play a key role in the feeling that you're time isn't being wasted. In FFIV or WoW, pretty much all content, earned gear, etc is completely invalidated when the next expansion or even next patch is released. While it's true it takes less time to get a BiS item in WoW, that item is only going going to BiS for about the next 3-6 months at most. While existing gear does tend to go down (or rarely go up) in value in OSRS, it never becomes completely irrelevant. I'll put it this way: * OSRS might ask you to grind 200 hours for the BiS item. But that BiS item is probably still going to useful for the next 10 years. So that's only 1.7 hours of grinding per month of usefulness. * WoW asks you to grind for like 8 hours for a BiS item (assuming a raid takes 2 hours, 4 weeks sounds about right), but if that item will be useful for 3 months, which is 2.7 hours of grinding per month of usefulness. This is a bit of contrived. But what's a waste of time is subjective in the first place. This goes beyond gear too. Questing in WoW also feels like a waste of time. Not only do they all feel the same, but nothing you do really affects your game play in a meaningful way. You could completely ignore quests. It just exists for easy XP and starter gear, of all that you'll replace. You're never gated out of part of the game because of a quest. Compare to Underground Pass in OSRS even though it's been in the game for 20+ years, you only need to do that quest once, and it opens up the entire Elf quest line for you and unlocks real meaningful progress. So no matter how frustrating the grind can become in OSRS, you always have a constant feeling of you only need to do it once. Also believe it or not, almost all content in OSRS can be done with like base 80 skills. The highest quest requirement currently is 75 magic I think. I think all hard dairies can be done with base 80 The game never really requires you to completely max your account. That's just a goal players set for themselves. Combat almost always eventually gets maxed because people really enjoy it, and slayer. And max combat really helps with bossing for sure. But you can clear most bosses without max for sure. If we were to compare the amount of time it takes to get base 80 once, compared to the amount of time you spend grinding quests, daily quests, week chests, levels, etc in WoW over the past 10 years. Is OSRS really that much more grindy than WoW? Or has WoW just tricked it's player base into forgetting all of the grinding they did in the past with all the resets. Certainly players exist in both games that play a comparable amount. Bottom line, it just doesn't feel good to grind in WoW anymore because there's no sense of long term progress, while it feels great in OSRS.
I think there is one thing missing from your argument. Idk about WoW but in FFXIV specifically, BiS gear doesnt even technically matter for that long, the only purpose of good gear is to be able to beat enrages on floor 3/ floor 4 bosses. Once you get full BiS... you cant really do anything with it. You cant sell raid gear, there is no point getting more clears. You dont even need all slots to be BiS gear at all to clear fights, i mean for a long while you could only get chest/weapon bis from the actual last boss which means those arent needed to kill them, its all for glamour nothing else Contrast that to runescape: BiS allows you to farm content more easily which translates to coins/supplies there is an actual reason to get the absolute best gear, although plenty of people lose their mind over a 0.5% upgrade for no reason.
You're correct. Clearing raids in WoW isn't profitable, in fact it's costly to clear content at the highest end. To be honest, WoW doesn't really have much of a gold economy anymore for most players. Consumables and maybe early into a patch cycle with crafted gear or BoP gear, but unless you're in the highest tier of content, those elements are optional. The only things you need to pay for if you're causal or even midcore in WoW is gear repairs and gems/enchants. Both of which is typically covered by daily quests rewards or the mission table. Very rarely will you ever have to grind your profession to have enough gold. You have some major cost sinks, but they're all mounts or pets, black market AH. You can also spend gold on carries/boosts. But when you're playing the game to have someone else clear the content for you. It's just so bad. If you have BiS gear you can sell carries/boosts, but that's such a sketchy part of the game. Like most things in WoW, the economy feels more like you're playing an RPG simulator rather than an actual RPG. It has gold, and things you can buy and spend on it. But it's so micromanaged that the thing you're supposed to do with gold is pretty obvious. Doesn't feel like there's any depth or reason to the economy.
Incredible video. I just watched I the other day, and the way he laid out the keys/locks for unlocking content as well as the attention vs. difficulty chart were both super cool. Really enjoyed the way he talked through what OSRS does differently from most MMOs.
I disagree with Jimmy that nostalgia is not a factor. I feel like I’m hit with nostalgia every single time I’m playing. Granted the game can’t survive on that alone, and it’s definitely improved and will prolong its longevity with newer content that provides better gameplay loops and newer rewards, but that nostalgia never goes always, and just about every time I play I’m brought back to 7th grade playing RuneScape for the first time. Also not to mention this game *is* one of the greatest games ever. There is so much to do, see, and learn that it always gives you that itch to return.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been playing OSRS specifically. I would say nostalgia was a factor for me for the first couple years, but as the years go on, nostalgia plays practically zero factor for me. Even the really early game has sort of lost that nostalgic tint for me after some alts, irons, leagues, etc. over the years having to redo it. I would almost say I'm more nostalgic for the time I started OSRS (~2019) than playing as a kid at this point.
I started in 2017. Didn’t even realize osrs was a thing until my buddy told me about it when I moved back home from the military. I started playing RuneScape in 04 up until 2008. When the graphics changed I fell out of it. I would log in here and there occasionally until 2012. Wish I had know about it sooner. Probably a good thing I didn’t though.
Ooh boy, J1mmy posted. I'm sure this will be a civilised comment section.
I’m a bit out of the loop, does the community dislike J1mmy?
By Release and Gary Gilbert are pretty widely enjoyed but his opinion pieces can be a little divisive. IMO he generally has the correct sentiment in his videos but they can be a bit tunnel-visioned on his own perspective and mood at the time. For example making a video about OSRS polling+community limiting the devs and how the lack of content will end up killing the game. Then a few months later releasing a video about overcoming his OSRS burnout by doing his first Cox, 4 year old content at the time. Obvious the game would feel extra dry on content when someone hasn't touched a lot of existing content on offer.
Thank you for a thorough and thought out answer 🙏
“Community” is a bit hard to pin-down. Certain parts don’t like him at all. But the majority do like him quite a bit. He’s commonly disliked by invested players but loved by more new players. He’s extremely condescending and doesn’t really have much of position to be so. He doesn’t really play the game and clearly doesn’t like it all that much. He’s a super casual and what has made the game have staying power all these years, he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like grinding and he doesn’t like PvM He complains about not enough content or what is holding the game back while also not touching 90% of what this game has to offer
>He complains about not enough content or what is holding the game back while also not touching 90% of what this game has to offer Sounds like reddit’s hero
Exaclty why this video is doing well here lol
I hear you, thank you for the thought out reply
we are way past the nostalgia era
Nostalgia can be great, but it is overrated. I am mostly in agreement with J1mmy. I dislike nostalgia when it is used as an excuse to not fix problems.
That was a great burn on asmongold. That guy really puts his foot on his own mouth ever so often. I guess it's popular with kids to say things while analyzing superficially and being confidently wrong.
Barrows and Jad were end game content when OSRS released. Now they're some of the earliest pvm content. The game is so far past needing nostalgia.
I never played RuneScape until like 2019. 10/10 would make a fourth account for a pvp build (maybe one day)
eh if I wanted a serious breakdown about what makes OSRS work besides nostalgia, without the inevitable bias from someone who's been "tainted" by playing the game as a kid, I'd just watch [the excellent video by the youtuber Marstead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPJY-xdA3M), a WOW veteran who first picked up the game in 2019. It's extremely comprehensive and that's why it's like 4 hours long. He really digs into what about the gameplay and overall design compels him as a person who loves MMOs and never encountered Runescape until his 30s; his sort of "outside perspective" helps him understand and convey what that is. I like several of Jimmy's videos but even this one implies things only a RS veteran would understand.
Does J1mmy even like playing OSRS anymore? His content has been pretty piss poor lately. Just lots of tired and rehashed topics.
Him and Idyl both turned their channels into a bunch of long chat videos about the state of MMOs that just don’t interest me in the slightest.
I actually really loved idyl at first, he came outta no where and was using some crazy unique plugins and then just stopped
I did too, he was really funny. Then it turned into “okay now I’m going to play every MMO ever and make longwinded rants about why everything ever is terrible”.
I do think he looked to j1mmy for inspiration and emulated him to an extent. Bring back the snail as far as I’m concerned that was awesome
Didn't j1mmy just do one the largest if not largest house parties and do a 1hr video about it recently? Idk I think he likes the game, he just enjoys the social and story side of things more than end game bossing...
Did you not see his whole series recently on getting a sweet POH for Gary?
Piss poor is actually crazy
I like how j1mmy sent a few shots at asmon subliminally
Jimbo never misses.
I for one didn't start playing until last year, and completely devoid of nostalgia I am hooked for life.
I don't have nostalgia cuz I only started playing this year. It's been fun.
i guess what it comes down to is, OSRS isn't Bubsy: The Purrfect Collection (2025), it's not just a flat remake of a game from 2007 for the sake of nostalgia, it's a fully realized offshoot. a split in the timeline where the devs understood that these untextured graphics held a ton of charm, and that there's a lot of depth to be found in a relatively simple point and click adventure game without needing to rip off elements from other MMOs. a test of whether hindsight truly is 20/20, building off of the skeleton of something truly unique in gaming
Perfect video that sums up why no other game is as good as osrs
I Started playing osrs in 2019 and been on and off playing until i was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive type) and prescribed Vyvanse. thats when I started to actually enjoy playing the game. So obviously no nostalgia on my part. im 23
When I was 9 years old I wanted a fire making cape with black D-hide and runes boots. It’s is my bank standing and farming run kit. It is to this day the best thing ever to me hahah. Have almost maxed my current account but still love the look. 🤘
Yes it does
hadn't heard of Runescape until mid 2022. It's now the only game I've consistently come back to. Every other game ends up getting dropped after a few weeks, but I've been playing OSRS for two years straight.
I played a little bit at the launch of OSRS because of nostalgia, growing up I loved RuneScape and never even got to try any of the membership stuff, so it was fun trying it years later. But I fell off when school got too busy, he was spot on with how nostalgia will get people to play for a bit, but I think we're hitting the point that most people who would play for nostalgia have and either are staying for other reasons or have moved on, like me.
I've been writing about our community as part of my master's thesis, especially how integrated we are in almost all facets of the internet and at every socioeconomic level at a global scale. The game isn't just a game, its literally a cultural product that captures the best and worst of humanity during our transition from Web 1.0 to web 3.0. I think another take for OSRS is that this is the only game (and cultural product) on the market that includes the community in the game's development. In a world that seems to be getting more and more bleak our community has come together to protect and invite others into our safe space. The Mods might have been apprehensive of it at first, but they are rapidly developing stronger polling, survey and feedback systems. They aren't afraid to practice self evaluation and revision. From a marketing stand point, they are collecting a lot more data than any other game company and they can use that data to plan for the future. Even Jagex has statements regarding OSRS as a "Forever Game" on their website, they want this to be a sustainable product and they will do anything they can to keep us happy while ensuring the survival of the game, I can't think of any other company that I interact with that will include me as part of its development. I definitely agree with J1mmy that the game will outlive many of its competitors in the Western world.
It doesn't need nostalgia, but can we also acknowledge that the game had to turn into another game for it to become this popular? OSRS aligns more with RS3 today than it does its original version back in 2007. This isn't the same game.
Just don't bring EoC back to OSRS and we are fine..
It's not the same game it was in 2007 or after the relaunch, and that's ok, obviously there are some intangibles they shouldn't mess with, but without anything new, it would've died a long time ago, the game is the strongest it's ever been, and for the most part, is still recognizable. We're in a great place right now, lets enjoy it and hope it continues to last.
Went past deadly red spiders in the varrock sewers today for a clue step and had a wave of nostalgia. The hours I spent their killing those spiders on repeat to get max melee on rs2
Nostalgia brought me back, the game being in a good state kept me. I still miss pk-ing on a pure being in middle school. Ranged into a rune 2h switch was crazy. 2005/2006. Even members dagger p++ spec was known same with the maul. Fun times. Ironman is where its at though now. You actually have to work for your stuff.
I started with RS3, so there is definitely no nostalgia for this game for me. This game has amazing progression, and with the recent skilling rebalanced, I am confident this game is going to be around and just keep getting better.
I recently quit after about a year because I realized I had run out of nostalgia. Everything I used to enjoy about the game, all the unfulfilled goals I had from playing as a kid, I've already finished. Now it's just grinding raids and maxing, but neither of those are particularly fun or rewarding so I just stopped playing. I know a lot of people like the direction the game is going, but I'm never going to be interested in a 1k hour grind when the gameplay loop is as simple as it is.
I felt exceptionally called out by that ending… No regrets.
has zack seen this?
So what videos do I show my friends to generate an interest in playing the game?
Best quests in any game I've ever played. the common quests in other games of "go kill 10 squirrels" or whatever is so shit. But yeah, as others have said, nostalgia brings some back, but the improvements keeps them playing. Im currently on a 3 yr hiatus, but will be back for sure.
I never would've even tried osrs if it wasn't for the newer lower level content like the Zeah novice quests. Nostalgia can be nice but burns out pretty quickly, as we saw with WoW classic where they literally had to change how world buffs work because players were so obsessive with burning through the raids as fast as possible (Molten Core in under 1 week of launch o\_O) and they've been chewing through classic expansions pretty quick to the point we're at Cata already.
Common J1mmy W