It’s fairly processor-intensive, for the one processor it uses, so it’s rather hard for us to upgrade the intensity, like increasing the draw distance.” Hands-free This means we can’t use the full capacity of your computer. One of them is render orders, another is that it can’t use multiple cores because in 2004 you probably didn’t have one. “One of the tech problems we’ve got operating this old game is that it was written in this form in 2003 to run in the browser on low-spec computers,” explains Ash Bridges, Old School RuneScape’s principle content developer. There was no worrying about if you could run it or not, or if you’d come back the next day to find it uninstalled. RuneScape was the kind of game you could play on a rubbish school computer between classes, on a browser. When it’s not the players ensuring that much of Old School RuneScape remains the same, it’s the tech. “I might look at something and think I can improve it-improving its functionality, getting an artist to work on it, adopt loads of modern UI design principles-but that’s not what the players want.” “It’s always interesting for me, as a designer,” Ogilvie says. Even the menus have to be made out of existing sprites, while extra NPCs and buildings are often made from decade-old, and often older, assets. Maintaining the nostalgia often means leaving exploits and quirks and regrettable design choices alone, even if fixing them can easily be done. “The route-finding has always been quite odd in RuneScape, but when we try to change it the players always beg us not to, so we haven’t.” “This is where quite a lot of players start their early ranging career, by sitting behind one of these little fences and shooting the goblins with their bow and arrow,” he explains. They don’t look happy about it, but from where I’m standing, they can’t get near me. The little ne’er-do-wells are having a bit of trouble getting past the obstacle. They’re also the most completed quests in the game, being the first things new players come across, so it’s even more important that they match players’ memories of them.Īs I run around, hunting down flour and eggs, Ogilvie points out some goblins lurking behind a fence, menacing farmers. Generally, Jagex creates content aimed at the average player level, so most of the low level quests were already considered old in 2007. These early quests go all the way back to 2001, when the very first iteration of RuneScape was born. You might remember that there are rats in the kitchen cellar (of course there are), along with a quest from the Duke’s chef that will send you all over the surrounding area to find ingredients for a cake. When you leave the tutorial island, with its basic lessons on how to move, fight and level up your skills, you’re dropped in Lumbridge, outside a castle, and you just pick a direction.

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