Old School Runescape just made new players' lives much easier without immediately killing the spirit of the classic MMO

With even the BBC and MSN kicking off the new year with talk of Old School Runescape, it’s only a matter of time before one of the most beloved and best MMORPGs around closes in on its highest concurrent player record yet again. And in a likely attempt to retain an influx of people who weren’t even born in time for its 10th anniversary, the franchise’s 25th anniversary has begun with… a minor simplification of what oldies like myself would claim was the heart and soul of the game. Time erodes everything.

Log into the Jagex Launcher today, and you’ll probably skip over the Old-School Runescape blogpost titled New Player Improvements Round 2. I speak from experience here, dear reader. It was only through a login text in-game that I thought to log out and read up on what’s new. When was the first round of these tweaks? I couldn’t tell you. If anything, my ignorance is proof that OSRS still has the sauce. I was eager to jump in, brushing aside everything else along the way. I’m mining coal right now.

So, what’s new? What’s old, of course! This apparent second round of tweaks focuses on making the lives of our resident newbies a little less strenuous for the ol’ noggin. The in-game guides available for each of its 24 skills now properly explains how to level them, how they interact with other skills, and even shows a handy list of quests that award EXP for said skill.

The overview page now clearly explains the purpose of each skill in a way that has me realizing I didn’t have a clue back when I spent too much time whacking guards outside Falador and picking flax in the fields south of Seer’s Village in the mid 2000s. Attack is accuracy? Strength is max hit? News to me. Or did I just forget all of that once I quit after spending two weeks roasting lobsters in the Rogues’ Den for a cape with a cooking pot on the back? At least I got a nod of approval from a friend for the feat (the 99 skill, not the quitting). That made it all worthwhile.

One potentially contentious area of tweaks relates to the Quest Guide. Correct me if I’m wrong here, fellow ‘scapers, but much of our admiration for the game stems from its obtuse gameplay and purposeful obscurity – its reluctance to walk and talk you through every little thing.

In today’s world of mobile MMOs literally playing themselves and entirely omitting a reason to interact with any other player – you know, the reason for them being MMOs in the first place – OSRS’s vague questlogs remain a breath of fresh air. A reminder that games weren’t always so mindless and demanding of bright paint to keep us moving forward. You had to explore, discover, and likely die trying.

But, then again, how many of us actually took on its quests without pulling up what we’d now call a Wiki? Death means losing most of your inventory in OSRS, with the only way to get it back being sprinting right back to where you died, potentially leading you to lose the rest. Why wouldn’t you go in prepared with a map and the wise words of someone on the internet who’s done it before? Well, you still can – but the in-game Quest Tracker now does a better job of keeping you on the right road, which might just be enough to have you think for yourself and appreciate its writing instead of glancing at a memory-hogging Wiki page for hours on end.

Asking questions and accidentally making friends with a random person who would give you “cool loot” but was, in hindsight, likely just using you to offload their packed bank, was a big part of the joy of spending countless hours wandering around Geilinor. New players have all this enabled by default, but anyone can toggle it through the Settings menu.

The post states, “If you’ve got friends that you want to get into Old School, there’s never been a better time!” And that’s probably true. Will the tweaks be enough to convince my housemate – someone who grew up with Club Penguin as opposed to Penguin Chat – to become the fifth and final member of our Group Ironman troupe? Probably not while Jagex still charges more for membership than Final Fantasy 14, no. But with the OSRS Reddit constantly flooded with simple questions despite being perhaps the most thoroughly documented MMO on the planet, any additional in-game context is welcome at this point.

Want to see what else is new? With talk on Sailing and even revised hardware specs, the New Player Improvements post covers far more than its headline would suggest. For example, it’s now recommended that you have 8GB of system memory for the 25-year old game you used to run through the browser of your gray Windows XP machine with 256MB of the stuff. Again, time erodes all.