Is modern Runescape worth playing? -A look at the version differences and the story of Runescape

[Music] if you've ever played or have seen someone else play runescape before then i have a question for you what does the game look like if you asked me that i'd tell you that it's a very old looking game with a black skybox and an isometric kind of perspective like something from the early 2000s well there definitely is a version of it which follows those parameters jagex sponsored me to do a whole video about it and i had a blast as i was grinding through the witcher jagex approached me again and said hey that was a cool video how do you feel about covering modern runescape i'm not going to lie and say that i didn't know it existed but i didn't expect it to look like well this i think the last time i tried runescape 3 it was back in 2013 or so for me it lacked the charm of old school and i really couldn't bring myself to keep playing it but hey it's been about 8 years since then and the game looks a lot more polished after years of constant updating jagex is a fantastic group of individuals who have let me express my honest opinion about their games even the bad bits so i really didn't see a reason to not accept their invitation in this video i'll be covering whether or not the modern client of runescape is worth playing giving my feedback on what it does well and what could be improved in my eyes comparing it to the old school client and evaluating a sizable chunk of its storyline before i start i've got some limited time merch for this video as has seemingly become the tradition it's ironically old school based but only because i have more nostalgia for that personally and also i stream on twitch nearly every monday tuesday and friday alright let's tear into this thing so first off we've got our character creation which is uh so you got your basic stuff like choose your hairstyle but the preview of the hair is a lot wider and flatter than what the actual model looks like for example i like this hair the most but when i go to pick out some new threads my guy goes super sand too every hairstyle is thinner and taller on the actual model so i had to settle for something else not that it really matters i'm gonna have a helmet on in like 10 minutes this kind of thing also applies to stuff like shoes where the icon looks one way but the actual shoes look completely different again not a huge deal i just thought it was kind of funny in its own way anyways from here it's worth noting that you can create your standard iron man or hardcore iron man character in the same way that you can in old school i won't get super detailed but basically the standard mode lets you play the game as intended with access to everything iron man restricts you to being self-sufficient meaning no trading to other players and a limited amount of bonuses from in-game events and hardcore is only for the bravest of souls or for sitting in town and staying low level like me basically if you die in the game jagex dispatches an assassin to kill you in real life wait no it just means you stop getting the hardcore icon next to your name same difference though really i'm just gonna stick to the standard mode so i don't get somehow more embarrassed than usual as i go to make my character i initially forget my login information as seems to be the tradition with runescape for me thankfully jagex offers some helpful substitutions such as 62 fort 2992 or 78 mule arm which let's be honest are better than anything i could have come up with but anyways from here well at a glance the game is the same as old school it's actually kind of strange in that regard because i'm almost certain the game didn't look like this at the start when i tried it out eight years ago but tutorial island the tasks that you have to complete the skills that you have access to all of it is nearly identical to old school so far so what's new beyond graphical improvements well we've got the ui which is obviously updated to fit a more modern aesthetic the music has been updated to fit a more orchestral vibe rather than the familiar beeps and bloops of the older soundtrack npcs are a little more expressive and talk like this one of the more noticeable changes is the way that mining works yeah you still strike at a rock while spinning around in your chair and reading a book but there's a bigger reward for being more proactive than you could be in old school every here and there a rock will start glowing striking it nets you a critical swing which fills the bar much faster and makes collecting ore that much quicker you also have this little energy bar above your guy's head if it hits the bottom you start swinging a lot more slowly which basically inadvertently punishes afk farming but still gives you the experience regardless if you intend to do just that the way that you fill this bar back up is by simply clicking again plus not only do rocks not run out of minable ore they also save your place so that you can come back to them after clicking one of the glowing rocks from before which altogether is an amazing improvement to the old system in my eyes but somehow it gets even better than all this so one of the absolute worst parts about old school for me was the inventory management you mine ore fill your bag then run it somewhere else and either store it or smelt it you repeat this process over and over with much of your time being spent traveling from the rocks to the bank and back it's a tedious slog that really weighed on me sometimes and it's the entire reason that i love the gathering perk in the league system well in the modern version you have an entire storage system specifically for your smithing materials this means that if an anvil happens to be near a patch of rocks you can run over to that instead of all the way to a bank which is an incredible quality of life change additionally you can craft an ore box specifically for storing more ore in your inventory than the usual 28 slots that might be dedicated to other items and on top of all of this you can now directly smith bars which have been deposited without having to hobble between a bank and a forge i have never loved mining and smithing more than when i first started playing this version of the game this brings us to our next major change which involves how smithing works in general so you can sit here and just forge away as usual maybe tab out browse youtube take a phone call make dinner learn a new craft and as long as you come back to shake your mouse around or click or whatever you can do that ad nauseam but if you want to be a little more proactive you can heat up your bar of chocolate in the furnace and really start smashing it at an increased speed i also like this because while nothing gets me more titillated than watching my little man raise his arm up and bring it back down sometimes i want to click things more and this little improvement gives me just that the last major part of tutorial island that i'll mention is melee combat which has also gotten a complete overhaul first off it isn't a matter of you attacking then your opponent attacking back and forth over and over your opponents can hit slow you can hit fast and vice versa this lends a little more depth to the combat in my eyes which is much appreciated though it is worth noting that the game's melee combat skills have been condensed down a bit whereas before you would often have to change your stance in order to switch between training your attack and strength instead both of those in addition to defense can be trained all at once this is dependent on which options you have ticked under your combat settings by default your xp is evenly split across all three fields when melee training but if you want to you can funnel all of that xp into a single stat as well beyond this combat can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be and i really mean complex maybe my brain is too minuscule to fully grasp the combat at a glance but holy [ __ ] this game has a lot of abilities almost immediately basic abilities threshold abilities ultimate abilities all of which have their own cooldowns adrenaline requirements or specific gear requirements and oddly enough if you explained a single facet of that system i would totally get it but the issue is that it's all thrown at me at once here's your melee ability pool it's called adrenaline it charges when you fight threshold abilities use a certain percentage of this adrenaline to activate here's four abilities this one causes bleed damage this one does more if the target is stunned this one just does more damage in general this one does the same thing here's a couple threshold abilities this one causes bleed this one causes stun you can't use the stun yet we'll give you different abilities if you use a different weapon loadout oh also here's an ultimate ability guess what it does loads of damage but wait we haven't gotten to the strength abilities which is all of that but using strength holy [ __ ] [ __ ] to say i'm overwhelmed is like saying water is wet now like i said the combat doesn't have to be this complex if you don't feel like memorizing this absolute slew of new moves and trying to figure out when to hammer them you can set the whole thing or just part of it to be automated for example you can set your basic abilities to trigger an order on your bar as you can with threshold and ultimate abilities or you can mix and match so that you're only worrying about one or two sets of abilities i imagine that i can get by with automating most of the combat for a good chunk of the basic game but if i need to fight a particularly tough boss then learning how these abilities work and which order to run them in might be a requirement to make the battle go the way that i want it to it's not a bad system by any means it's actually pretty well thought out my issue is that it just gets dropped on the player in a very quick time window there's a lot of boxes to mouse over and information to read and while you might be better off just playing the game and worrying about things only when the going gets tough i can definitely see this overwhelming someone new to the game interestingly enough though there are actually quite a few different strategies which stem from this automatic rotating bar system the wiki has a lot of optimal builds with various contingencies based on how you want to play or what you're trying to accomplish which i made sure to take advantage of after a bit that said the elite veteran players can still sniff out my newness to the game and love taking advantage of runescape diplomacy to get me to move away from their mobs if they feel i'm in the way when you finally make it off tutorial island you don't wind up in lumbridge like old school instead we find ourselves in the town of birthorp looking at the map is uh an experience as in holy [ __ ] why is there this much information at once it's the same thing as combat albeit a little less aggravating i get an experienced player is going to be able to access what they want pretty quickly but without filtering things out it takes me a solid minute of staring just to understand exactly what i'm looking at at any rate the map is generally the same if you played old school you'll recognize towns landmarks various layouts and the like though there's definitely a lot of new stuff too for example heading west from lumbridge usually had you encountering tons of swamp instead you've got uh jesus what is all this oh yeah there's definitely some stuff to chip away at here i will say that for as much grief as i initially gave the map it's definitely got some handy information obviously it tells you the same kind of stuff that the old school map told you but it also lets you mouse over mining sites and like just to get the info on what kind of stuff can be found there in addition to letting you figure out which quests are what which i absolutely love but most importantly there are these things called load stones that would be your fast travel system the big thing here is that you can use it as many times as you want with no cool down i think this might be my absolute favorite change in the game honestly because i tried the whole level up my magic so i can teleport thing and it takes a long ass time to get it up to the levels which have those teleports in fact that was one of the only things if not the only thing that interested me about magic as a whole i know some people still prefer magical teleports just because they tend to drop you in more convenient locations but i'll take being slightly placed outside of varrock after the amount of times that i ran from lumbridge or draenor and back in old school one of the cooler things that you can do is mess with the ui as i find out upon landing in birth orb you can drag the bars around resize them and choose what to display and i can't wait to make runescape look like a plague of bars just like the add-ons in world of warcraft my only gripe is that tweaking things isn't always the most intuitive for example i have this achievement path box which is cool because it plots out and tells me what i need to do to rack up achievements but i've got no earthly clue how to collapse it after it's been expanded after some googling it turns out that the place to collapse it is completely in a different location from where i expanded it which is odd there are also a lot of little features like these which aren't always completely obvious when it comes to tweaking them and it makes me think that instead of complaining about them people tended to just go google them like i did and go oh i guess that's how that works so after fiddling around with everything and getting more comfortable with the game's interface and systems i figured i'd get to it now i'm not going to run through everything the same way that i did in my old school video since there's really no use in repeating the same stuff in a new script instead we'll focus on the differences between the two and how i feel about them as a whole oddly enough the first thing that the game has you doing is talking to a slayer master which i generally didn't encounter until i was around level 40 in old school though that may have been due to me choosing to grind before approaching them this slayer master gives you some starting objectives much like i forgot his name but i'm pretty sure it's like tutorial greg or something in lumbridge and yeah i can tell tutorial greg the second here to [ __ ] off but i like a bit of structure at the beginning of my games personally so i kill the bunnies over here and holy [ __ ] there's mass looting we did it boys game of the year four bodies one click let's [ __ ] go what marvels 2021 has brought upon us from here i learned more about the intricacies of mining smithing and combat but i obviously don't need to go more into detail than i already have on those i'd tell you what the rest of the tutorial looks like but i gotta be honest here i accidentally leveled up my mining and smithing up too much and outpaced it so hard that the game told me that i was done playing the tutorial whoops so where does that leave us well the game still guides you along nicely if you let it but i got distracted by shinies i had my twitch prime linked and suddenly i had like 73 keys that open chests that i've never seen in separate chests which granted me weapons that i couldn't use and five of these knowledge bomb things [Music] [ __ ] [ __ ] go to lumbridge uh no no wait uh minor yeah the bonus incentives in this game for paying money is what makes it run and the prime stuff netted me a membership for a week in addition to all this random stuff that i suddenly acquired i'll touch on the membership differences and the bonus shop stuff in a bit so i wind up grinding more as is tradition but we may as well touch more on the skills in this game i'm not going to explain what every one of them does just like i did in my last video but i will explain the differences that i haven't covered already the main difference in how skills work is the little improvements which are unlocked at every level or nearly every level depending on the skill whereas before getting your smithing up only changed what you could craft now you gain stuff like speed increases when forging and smelting in addition to eventually unlocking those new materials it makes every level feel that much better and i appreciate this immensely but as far as specifics go we've already covered mining smithing and melee combat we can toss out quite a few others which don't have any major changes beyond small quality of life fixes and slight additional benefits from here we can work our way up from moderately changed skills to the major ones embarrassingly enough i didn't realize until quite a lot later that the tool belt in this game can be swapped out so i was lugging around my iron pickaxe as i was used to but it turns out that you can just pop it onto your tool belt which is [ __ ] fantastic anyways fire making isn't completely dog [ __ ] in that you can gain access to lighting incense sticks which have a bevy of benefits from gaining a chance to nab additional logs when cutting trees to reducing poison damage to increasing potion timers and that's just a couple of them prayer has an interesting new function in that you can repair a player's gravestone so that its timer refreshes or even extend the timer at later levels magic and ranged each have their own ability loadouts which caused them to be fundamentally different from one another which is definitely a nice change construction is about the same as always but for some reason i can really get into it in this game more so than i did in old school i just really like setting up new rooms and plotting out decorations for my home like i said most of these skills are pretty much the exact same from a functionality point of view the main differences are the aforementioned bonus perks like the agility skill has a bit of overlap with thieving in that you can get bonus loot from pickpocketing certain npcs or gardening allows you to construct farm buildings at your constructed house or a higher end hunting skill eventually requires the summoning skill for certain traps which leads us nicely into new skills which old school doesn't have at all there are five new skills in total summoning dungeoneering divination archaeology and one that's actually locks behind a skill cap invention summoning is an absolute [ __ ] show so most of the footage that you've seen at this stage has been my first 14 hours or so of the game i know that's not a lot in terms of runescape i know that a handful of skills at level 30 plus isn't really a high bar but i felt that i've been advancing quickly even if i really haven't this game does that really well makes you feel like you're blowing through levels i mean for a comparison it probably took me three times as long to get these levels in vanilla old school but summoning takes that quickness and laughs in your face throughout the game i've noticed these little charms being dropped by a lot of different enemies i didn't really know what they did so i only grabbed them when i wasn't paying attention well turns out that they're used for summoning but that's only one part of the problem next you need a metric load of these spirit shards which i had a handful of from random geodes that i found during my mining adventures then you need a certain element from whatever you're trying to summon you want to summon a wolf you need wolf bones you want to summon a rat rat meat how about a minotaur a bar of metal so basically you need a lot of time and money to make summoning work out for you but what does it do well it's all about creating familiars to help you out with a variety of tasks there are familiars for fighting alongside you or healing you ones for boosting your skills others for carrying items for you as a means of additional storage a handful for teleporting you to specific places others for foraging particular items a couple for helping you see in the dark and even ones that allow you to remotely see through their eyes as a means of scouting out an area it's hard to overstate their usefulness which is probably why they're such a [ __ ] to level up dungeoneering is in contention for my favorite skill in the entire game i wasn't quite sure what it was just from the name but i kind of assumed it had something to do with either creating or running through dungeons well turns out that it's the latter and i [ __ ] love it basically you show up on this island talk to some [ __ ] and they go hey man you want to go on a dungeon crawl uh hell yeah i want to go on a dungeon crawl so it works like this you don't get any of your items you get plopped into a random dungeon and you need to obtain items throughout it by killing creatures and generally looting the place your end goal is defeating the boss at the end and getting out as fast as possible there's a vendor that has a random stock of stuff and coins which you can collect in order to buy these things it's a rogue-like game within a game and it's amazing what's even cooler is that you can actually party up with people to go delving with and you can constantly unlock bigger and more complex dungeons complete with puzzles resources and doors which require certain skills to unlock at first i kind of wondered what the point of dungeoneering was in the grand scheme of things but really the same can be said for quite a few skills depending on how you view them to me the fun of running through dungeons is reward enough and i wholly appreciate this facet of the game divination oddly enough is a gathering skill to me it sounded like it could be more of an enchantment based holy skill but instead your goal is to poke these little bubbles of light called wisps after bopping them a small crater opens up in front of the player so that they can begin slurping up some delicious vitamin water of course as with the nature of vitamin water most of the vitamins are going to be pissed out instead of doing something useful but in runescape you can piss these vitamins into a receptacle which recycles them into various piss-soaked rewards for example you can take that piss energy and use it to upgrade your resources three sardines become a trout three silver ore become a gold ore three maple logs become u-logs [ __ ] like that you can charge up these things called engrams which affect your skills permanently in various ways when fully charged if you happen to find and charge them you can also conjure up something known as a portent which is used to automatically heal when your health falls below a certain threshold my personal favorite though is the creation of signs which also automatically do things albeit with a lot more variety for example you can create a sign which automatically teleports items to your bank or one which res is the player on death but the oddest thing that you can do is create something known as divine locations these are basically resource nodes like rocks trees fishing bubbles herb patches hunting spots and weirdly enough a place to harvest divination energy you can only harvest so much a day from these spots but they do last the entire day if you don't exhaust them and you get bonuses if other players jump in to harvest your piss rock you thought we got away from piss didn't you all in all i do enjoy divination as a jack of all trade support kind of skill although it is very slow to level up at later levels but it is pretty nifty when i can do things like harvest a load of logs from divine trees nearly instantly like it's weird but it also fills a pretty interesting gap archaeology is a pretty damn cool little skill it goes almost exactly as you think it might but it's still pretty fun call me a big [ __ ] archaeology nerd but i like the idea of uncovering ancient treasures from long gone civilizations and that's exactly what the scale does you find a pile of sand chisel at it sink your big meaty claws into it snap up some ancient chunk of metal from 1996 and eventually find your prize of some ancient sword or another you can then sift through whatever dirt piles you grubbed up for more junk bits and then use them to restore your main prize back to working order but again you might be asking what the point is besides dumb fun well in this case you can actually exchange these ancient treasures for something called relic powers which are permanent buffs to your character for example completing the tutorial nets you a slick 500 health bonus but later on you can snag some powers which encompass the likes of bonus luck when getting random drops infinite run energy the automatic burning of logs when cutting them down and gaining more experience for various skill sets there are six different dig sites besides the initial archaeology area and quite a few other bonuses which affect your skills like herb lord dungeoneering invention summoning and combat skills you can also choose to hire on researchers to go around and do some of the work for you much like hiring helpers for construction i hate to be a broken record but [ __ ] it i like this skill a lot too it brings a lot to the table and could have easily flopped had it not been executed the way that it was and finally we have invention which as mentioned before has a skill gate to unlock as in you need 80 smithing crafting and divination i don't think that this requirement is unreasonable in fact it's kind of a cool way to lock progression in a way so that players can familiarize themselves with the game before getting to the late game skills it'd be like if slayer was locked until you reach level 20 in a combat skill or something now that said grinding to level 80 in all three skills is a [ __ ] nightmare when i'm trying to get a video out i spent hours upon hours trying to maximize my xp gain trying to make sure that i was getting my levels as fast as possible i looked up some fantastic tutorial videos i read up guides on the wiki i taught my wife how to play so that i could shower while she got my smithing up for me i had this game up and running for practically 14 or so hours of the day for two days or so which i know is a filthy casual amount of hours but it's a lot to me man and you know what i got to 80 smithing that's it i mean i got like 60 something in the other two like 65 or 66 or something two days of non-stop grinding from level 40 or so to level 80 in a single skill you know what's even more [ __ ] level 80 is nothing in this game i mean not nothing per se but it's do you know how many times i saw the game tell me that someone reached level 99 in a skill level 120 in a skill 200 million experience in a skill much much more than i ever thought that i would i mean it's relatively non-stop you know how much experience it took me to get to level 80 just shy of 2 million and there are people out there that are multiplying that by a hundred that is absolutely mind-boggling to me but i also kind of get it my style of play is more along the lines of level up my combat to a certain rank and then mind my way up to a stage where i can smith new armor and weapons for myself with the ore that i gather i'd do that every 10 levels or so maybe focus on archaeology or divination or construction or whatever in between just pick a skill grind till i'm bored and then move on to the next one but say i did that all the way to level 99 or 120 on a big amount of my skills i could see myself going for that extra credit but alas this doesn't have anything to do with the actual invention skill so without first-hand experience here's what i gathered about invention so basically invention is used to break down items to gain new materials these materials have different rarities and the like and are ultimately used to invent new items in addition to augmenting equipment this augmented equipment has the capability to gain levels depending on how high your invention is and depending how much combat it's used in it can be broken down again for more invention experience if you so choose the various machines which can be invented range from turning herbs into potions logs into planks hides in the leather and casting high level alchemy and disassembling items all automatically these machines are the counterpart to devices devices are much more plentiful and do stuff like transform junk bits into components allow you to gain experience for every missed chop of a tree while wood cutting or a crit on a rock while mining create a portable light source and so on i'm 100 sure that i'm missing details here but like i said i got no first hand experience with this particular skill it sounds neat though definitely its own thing all in all i honestly didn't think that the new skills were going to bring anything revolutionary to the table over the already massive amount of skills involved in runescape but i gotta hand it to jagex every single one of these skills does a great job at adding variety that i hadn't even noticed was missing with my personal favorites being archaeology and engineering i think one of the more interesting decisions with the various perks that you can gain from getting your skills up is the fact that you can also unlock so many quests which give you access to new items to craft new equipment to wear and new skills to use hell questing in general is an interesting experience in and of itself you've got your pretty standard stuff which has you delivering items or crafting certain things most all of these were in old school in some way or another and they all hold pretty true to what they were in that but some of them have been revamped take the rune mysteries quest for example from my memory i believe you went into this tower had a few different chats and then wound up in an area where you can mine rune essence from so that you can eventually craft runes in this version of the game you can do that immediately making rune mysteries a different quest entirely and you know what's weird i hated it at first but then i wound up really enjoying it the whole thing has voice acting which surprised me but let me briefly walk you through it so that you can decide how interesting it is to you so there's this lady named ariane outside the wizard tower who's been expelled for talking to a demon she wants you to deliver a message to the archmage for her when suddenly the tower is attacked by this vortex thing i'm not equipped for magic in the slightest but i'm too distracted into the light beam in the middle here to banish it afterwards i'm to go to try to talk to the other wizards in the tower to see if they can give me any info about this vortex this is all boring as hell and i was mashing to get through with it well after gleaning the info that these things are probably coming from the old buried wizard tower that this one was built on top of i go to tell ariane outside and she tells me to figure out how to get inside that old wizard tower i grill one of the wizards who tells me about a rumor where students have repeatedly tried casting a certain spell at the locked door to the old tower but that it never worked out for them he then suggested the old archmage had a penchant for linking music to his spell casting which is why this gigantic pipe organ is chilling out at the bottom floor here when i mess with it i get yelled at if i hit any keys that belong to the bottom two rows so after digging through the library i find two books one which links the rune types to different musical notes and another which spells out which runes are necessary for that spell which the students were trying to cast at the door so i play the notes and out pops a key from here we head down into the tower before running into a sentry which thinks i'm a new student depending on how i answer its quiz questions i gain one of four colors as a title in my name after this we venture down to the bottom which involves me having to tip a statue over to form a bridge when we make it to the old chamber at the bottom we find the source of the vortexes which were formed using fragments of old wizard souls i have to kite around a vortex for ariane who wants to study it before she comes to that conclusion well earlier when i asked the archmage what he was going to do about the invading vortexes he explained that he was going to gather up some wizards and perform a massive spell purge to get rid of them aryan realizes this and sends me up to stop him however i can while the old man won't listen to me but he does tell me to be quiet so that he can focus this of course means i have to hop on that pipe organ and start slamming some keys to break that focus as the girl finishes resealing the enchantment which prevented the vortexes from leaving a burst of magical energy gets sent upwards into the main chamber where the archmage is he smugly tells me that the girl didn't need to worry about the vortexes anymore since he solved the issue thinking that his spell purge was the thing that sent the magical energy up and that's the end of the quest is this a game of the year balls to the wall todd howard's number one choice in quest design no obviously not but like i said i enjoyed it pretty thoroughly after the more tedious stuff was out of the way it reminded me heavily of old point-and-click detective games and i like trying to piece together the next bit of puzzle to accomplish my task now i'm not going to bother covering every little quest that i can hell i don't think i'll cover any more quests with that kind of detail i guess i just wanted to point out that as with quite a bit of the writing and design in old school there are some clever and interesting choices with questing hair and i enjoyed them a lot more than i thought i would but all of this did get me to wondering something that i've honestly never really fully investigated before what is the story of runescape there's definitely been constant mention of certain figures and entities throughout my rampage through gulenore or at least like 25 percent of gylnar but what exactly is going on here well let me give a brief overview a kind of summary of what i've gathered strap in now because i'm going to be letting loose with a lot of info alright so the universe starts right as is tradition except it doesn't start with a big bang or anything like that it starts with four gods deciding to just destroy everything except their homeworld then they start creating things various racism worlds are breathed into existence before gulenore itself is created then those gods said hell yeah this place is perfect and then just went to sleep on it then a bunch of filthy mortal [ __ ] happens in other places that are away from gulenore some peoples find artifacts to attain godhood some elves get enchanted to permanently extend their lifespan you know universe building [ __ ] to clarify there are actually five elder gods with one of them thought to have been stillborn at first that supposed stillborn god later awakened to give birth to several races and gods also well eventually one of the newly spawned human gods decides that he's not being worshipped enough by a particular race and destroys one of their cities this destruction attracts another god who begins fighting with god number one while just decimating entire cities of people while god number one feels bad about the destruction now in what can only be described as i only wanted to destroy them a little bit near the end of it this conflict bleeds over into the house of a mortal named guthix this guy's important because i took the time to tell you his name at this stage the mortals in this part of the universe are all but dead and an entirely different god is now fighting the rampaging god from before weld gothics has his house destroyed by accident during the fighting and takes one of the god swords he blinds the rampaging god with it and then kills the other god with his own sword before ascending to godhood himself a lot of god stuff going on doesn't even sound like a word anymore then he starts wandering through the universe meeting gods discovering planets and just hanging out well eventually he stumbles upon gileanor and he's like those elder gods were right this place is [ __ ] snazzy but guthix is a cool guy he wants to share the planet with mortals so he creates a big old portal and starts inviting in races from all over the universe humans dwarves gnomes fairies some others guthix even invites the goddess who extended the elven lifespan to bring her elves over runes are created humans are colonizing places life is good i mean here everywhere else there's crazy [ __ ] happening that sounds like hell but we're not focused on other places we're focused on this lovely sphere well as time went on people came to worship gothics i mean why not dude was a very cool guy who just wanted to see humans prosper and life lived after gods destroyed his own world well guthix wasn't too happy about being worshipped figured it would go to his head and he'd become like other gods who he despised so what does our guide do he goes to sleep good call i do the same [ __ ] when i don't want to deal with things anymore unfortunately this meant that it was open season on gulenhar as other gods began pouring in to try to get a piece of this place kingdoms were established more races were brought in lines were drawn to divide land well one of these gods named zaros was late to the party and was absolutely pissed about all of these other gods kicking around he claimed that they weren't real gods and decided that he was going to start taking the planet over with demons and vampires along with a few other races which included humans their expansion took quite a while in which the elves did a little expanding of their own and other gods continued to do their thing more lands were established under their separate rule and zaros continued to march and take over key points of interest such as the gate which guthix established to portal in new races well after some time passes with things going the way that they have a general in zaros's army grows discontent with zaros being a big meanie head to everyone including his own people so he winds up buying an ancient staff which was once wielded by a god off of a thief who had no idea what the value of the staff was worth after he stole it after wielding the god rod and getting empowered by another powerful stone zamarak here revolts against zaros before striking him down zaros escapes death by severing his own soul from his body and floating back to the elder god homeworld zamarak then goes on to take over most of zaros's former army while continuing to wage war on other gods now all of this was a brief summary of the first and second age of gileanor along with some preamble before those ages we're currently on the sixth age of the game and the events between now and the second age are a good four to five times the amount of content that i've covered so far so instead of droning on for another 25 minutes i'm gonna catch us up as fast as possible to where we stand first off the main players that we need to know about are all things that i've mentioned in some caliber there's zaros and zamarak there's the elder gods and then there's two which i haven't mentioned by name yet sarin and saratoman saren is the one who guthiks befriended the one who extended the lifespan of the elves when she did this sarin unknowingly bound the elves to her if they get too far away from her they basically start to wither from how i understand it serotonin on the other hand is someone who becomes a lot more prominent from the third age onward this prominence stemmed mostly from his very active participation in the so-called god wars which were launched after zamarak started his onslaught these wars went on and on for thousands of years each side winning and losing small and large battles claiming territory in some areas and being driven out from others as gods piloted their followers like a gigantic rts game well eventually guthix reawakens after a particularly devastating attack is unleashed to create the wilderness area of the map which is the dangerous battle scarred pvp area in the game guffix is pissed so he sets about trying to drive away all of the other gods from his precious world and i mean all gods those from sirotamin's side those from zamarak's side even those from his friend seren's side after all of this is over guthix has accomplished what he set out to do having driven away all other gods from gulenore our guy then creates a gigantic barrier to stop any other gods from returning to the planet and then he does what anyone else would do cries himself to sleep god i love guthix from here things start to heal races re-emerge from the chaos of the god wars they begin rebuilding discovering new technology and studying new knowledge i mean yeah there's still some fighting here and there some battles the occasional annihilation of entire cities you know normal [ __ ] but most of the fourth age is an era of discovery of learning and settling that is until it's not a lot of this stuff was covered in the game through questing little factions rising up which may or may not follow the various gods despite their presence being minimal due to guthix's big beef and barrier plotting and scheming and all sorts of treacherous acts being undermined or coming to fruition i know i'm being vague here but you have to trust me that there is just way too much stuff to cover here overarching plot points and isolated incidents it's all well it's a lot man imagine me trying to explain the chaos that is world of warcraft's plot and then remember that runescape started even earlier than that the point is that after all of this building and rebuilding one race winds up standing supreme humans you see when guthix created runes he created a very finite amount of them well that [ __ ] ran out a while ago and the mortals had to relearn how to get by without them while humanity discovered a seemingly infinite source of them and established the process of runecrafting shortly after propelling them into the fifth age as the dominant race on gilinor although this age was very short in comparison to its predecessors tons of events happened which really molded and shaped humanity into what it is now if the fourth age was an era of discovery the fifth age was an era of genesis for humanity knowledge flowed freely like a wellspring into the collective minds of humanity and their growth spread like wildfire technology manifested itself into sewer systems arenas ports and other helpful additions to humanity's quality of life magic was now a common theme with the infamous wizards tower being constructed to further the knowledge of this resourceful tool of course it wasn't all good as seems to be the theme that wizard tower burnt down in the middle of a powerful spell as we found out earlier a crusade against runecrafting started somewhere towards the beginning of the era large and small battles are fought both between different factions and between people under the same banner over disputes ranging from anti-piracy campaigns to claims of diminished political power this is where a lot of the quests in the game stem from including the one that i did earlier involving the wizard tower and the girl named ariane well the culmination of these events led to the discovery of guthix's resting place by an archaeologist as soon as it's discovered worshipers of various gods assembled to try to kill guffix in his sleep with the hopes that his death will lower the barrier preventing other gods from interfering with gulenor after a bit of a struggle this plan comes to fruition when a follower of zaros uses the staff that i mentioned before to assassinate guthix the end result marks the start of the sixth and current age with saradomin being the first god to make it back after guthix's barrier falls followed shortly by zamarak and a few others meanwhile zaros has been slowly plotting plodding away to make it back to gilinor after being out of the picture since zamarak's uprising he recruits a couple of loyal henchmen to assist him in this endeavor one of which is known as azanadra this is right about where we're at in the story with a lot of events excluded like i said this was a very very condensed version of the story so far where we stand currently is as such the elder gods have once again decided yeah [ __ ] this [ __ ] let's destroy the universe and rebuild it again let's start a new minecraft world let's prestige our call of duty character let's mass effect reaper the [ __ ] out of this place you get it basically there are these eggs which are very close to hatching that contain the next iteration of these elder gods and if they do hatch its game over for the universe while saren the elf master has decided to assemble who she can to thwart the ending of the universe but it's not going so well seeing as zaros has finally regained his body and is doing his best to seize more power for himself this power trip has led to the elder god eggs getting that much closer to hatching armies have been amassed on each side with you as the player character being thrown into the middle of it on one side you've got ariane who's seen visions of elder gods dancing and destroying in her head you've got azanadra who was rewarded with godhood after freeing and restoring zaros and is now in the process of trying to figure out how to set things right you've got saren who's actively doing her best to channel her power to prevent the eggs from hatching you've got serotomon who's been combatting his own pride to try to help everyone else with this dire situation and oddly enough you've got zamarak who seems to be a lot more reasonable after his banishment from gulenore by guthix and then on the other side you have the elder gods themselves who have deemed their creations to be a failure after all this time and have set out to set things right in their minds and start over and finally we've got our wild card zaros after seeking out more power the god was last seen disappearing inside of an elder artifact known as the monolith his allegiances to anyone beside himself completely unknown and this conflict is what's about to culminate into events which the players can play through over the summer i've gotta be honest here there's something about runescape which has made me historically completely disregarded story like you ever look at a game and just assume that its story is probably going to be less than interesting that's pretty much how i felt without looking into the actual background lore but after spending hours pouring over loads and loads of events which this game's story has been built on i'm actually pretty damn impressed it's a pretty intricate and well-written plot that i had a lot of fun immersing myself in and it's kind of cool knowing that even now the next stage of the story is getting ready to be revealed though i gotta imagine that the heroes went out over the elder gods right imagine the balls on jagex to suddenly snap their game out of existence and then suddenly runescape 4 shows up with completely different races and locations after the elder gods win or if the elder gods win and wind up fighting each other over control of guillenore instead of going through with the plan to destroy the universe and the end result causes seasons or something like that to be added to gulenore based off of each elder god all right let's snap out of the story stuff here and focus on wrapping up the stuff that i haven't gotten to i brought up this shop thing earlier which i quickly learned to take advantage of after a bit you've got these events which last a predetermined amount of time like right now it's this yak track thing which is a reoccurring event that allows players to advance up the track and unlock different rewards kind of like your standard battle pass kind of thing there's the free track obviously and then there's a premium track which nets you more rewards as you progress you can choose one of two paths to earn your next prize usually based around choosing to skill up or to fight enemies and earn combat xp then you've got the shop stuff which lets you buy cosmetics i had 400 from i don't know twitch prime or something maybe jagex just loves me it's hard to tell but i got me some wings with that they don't do anything but they kind of stick on my back like birdman you've also got loyalty points which are gained from subscribing every month that you're a member earns you more and more points per month which is a cool extra way for people to get rewarded for being a member i just bought a title with it because [ __ ] it why not and finally you've got these keys which are interesting like you can buy them sure but you can also learn them you remember that part where i went oh draenor looks like this now and then pointed aggressively at the screen with all the circus [ __ ] on it well i mean you didn't see me pointing but i did anyways the reason why it looked like that was because i happened to be playing during a weekly event known as a distraction and diversion every week some [ __ ] goes down somewhere and you can take part in the mayhem while earning keys additionally players get two keys for every quest they complete members can get more keys every day by completing specific challenges monsters and skilling resources both have a chance at dropping them and both free players and members earn keys for logging in every day albeit at different set amounts but what do they do well there's this interface thing and you can spend your keys there to get tons of rewards the themes to the rewards rotate but ultimately range from cosmetics and promotional items to experience boosting items which really help to take away some of the sting of grinding i'm kind of split on this entire system i mean let's face it runescape is a free-to-play game you can play it for a very long time without paying a dime and even then you can earn money to buy bonds on the grand exchange so that you can be a member without having to give up your precious credit card info i mean these options are kind of what need to be in a free to play game in order for it to survive that said these loot boxes are well they're loot boxes while i personally don't have an issue with gambling i've definitely met some people who have and this stuff can be rather addicting so while these keys and premium tracks aren't necessary to enjoy myself i completely understand why this kind of content in a game might set off some red flags for some people to me it is what it is and jagex is pretty damn transparent about the odds of winning anything which is about the most they can do without outright removing a source of income from their game i've always felt that if i have extra money and want to support what i feel is genuinely a good game company especially one that's been working on their game for 20 years then there's nothing wrong with me dropping a couple bucks to have a little fun while supporting them that said if you have an addictive personality with stuff like this it might be wise to either avoid this section of the game or the game outright if it's going to bring harm to you financially the last thing i really want to mention before i wrap everything up is something directly from our benevolent overlord [Music] all right let's see uh they want me to let you know that after the incident on friday live weapon testing of in-game weapons will no longer be happening despite every safety precaution it seems that todd from qa managed to lop off a finger with the necronium battle axe when opening a letter with it and they're very disappoint oh oh yeah that was the wrong card hang on okay yeah they wanted me to tell you that runescape is making its debut on mobile like the entire game oh [ __ ] do you know what this means instead of sitting at my computer wasting my life grinding away while chopping trees i can actually now make sure that i keep chopping trees while making dinner going to the store talking to my wife and spending time with my family and if i instead want to order takeout get all my packages from online retailers and ignore my wife and family i can just play the game on pc and do [ __ ] that takes more concentration and precise controls like leveling can you take out the archaeology i i gotta focus you you're just watching your character dig it's about to happen there it is go go go this game is an absolute boon of quality of life changes like there were so many instances when i evaluated old school where i went yeah this is cool and all but it could have been so much easier or faster well it turns out that oftentimes the devs thought the exact same things that i did i mean how many times have i went this is an improvement in my eyes or i love this feature i mean i i reading back this script is has been like man am i saying that too much i don't know and that's not to discount old school the previous version of this game is the way it is for its nostalgic feeling for the feeling of accomplishment when you do things the harder way it fills a pretty sizable niche and i salute the devs for asking the community if they wanted it back but for me personally old school and modern both fill a separate hole in my big gamer heart and i can see myself being in the mood for either so is modern runescape worth playing absolutely the amount of love poured into this game over the years is astonishing at times so many new skills and events and changes that are so well thought out and are very welcome improvements in my eyes and honestly after all this i'm gonna have a hard time putting the game back down i want to investigate the story i want to grind the skills that i'm interested in and show off my cool new upgrades i want to rope my friends into the game to run dungeons with them because i'm an awful person who wants to sap their time away this game and its counterpart hit all these desires in me that i wasn't sure that i had and it's been a very fun time despite some of the grind if you can't stand grindiness or don't understand how people can plug away at something while watching a video or the like then the game probably isn't for you and that's completely fine and the inverse of that is true i've seen a lot of old school players get upset and [ __ ] on people for liking the modern client but it really brings its own thing to the table whether you think it's dumbed down or bloated or whatever you think people are allowed to enjoy different things i don't think they're hurting anyone so if you have a part of you that really enjoys that sensation of earning your place in an mmo of always having something to do then i would definitely give runescape a try trust me i never thought i'd be interested in any other version besides old school thanks for watching i wanted to get this one out quick and i think i did an okay job even though i got sucked into the grind at times thanks again to jagex for giving me this opportunity i had a lot of fun with the game next video should finally be me getting to that fallout 4 dlc so hang in there for that until then i've got shirts and probably other things that constitute as merch or whatever what a salesman i am i've also got a twitch where i stream most mondays tuesdays and fridays i've got a twitter where i tweet most like a couple times a month or something i've got a discord where people scream at their keyboard until it makes something cohesive appear on screen and i've got a patreon which might be getting an update on the tiers so check that out if you want to support me and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 463,325

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Id: 01a_CdlqlDA

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021