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What Made 05-07 runescape so amazing to me
I believe it was the lack of greens, blues, soul-bounded items in general. In Runescape mining and crafting actually mattered. The fact it wasn't soul-bounded made the economy amazing. You could lose all your items if you die, What you had to do? Hope you had extra items in the bank, or go gathering/crafting/buy it from other players. That is lost in modern day MMOs, most of everything you get will be given to you in quests, totally eliminating the need of socializing with other players for gear/gathering and crafting. In Runescape, I had to work hard for my first full set of Steel armor, and I was damn proud of it. I was happy when I had a lot of Gold, and when I had a lot of gold, I could show it off. Even when I was level 10 in Runescape, gold mattered alot, lvl 10 in Wow and Rift, gold doesn't matter at all.
The only two games that made me want to gather and craft was Runescape and DarkFall.(I am pretty sure Eve would've convinced me too). So when most of the items in-game are soul-bounded, I don't even bother with gathering and crafting.
So do you think that good soul-bounded quest gear was a huge influence of the single-player minded themepark MMOs as of now?
Comments
I didn't really care about soulbound items and such, since there were non-tradeables that I thought didn't hurt the game. However yeah, but it's not just the lack of *definition, but the freaking VARIETY!
WoW has how many different named greens and blues as quest rewards? And yet, unless you're a transmog hunter, how long does that uniqueness last, with all of its flavor text and redundant unique name? RS defined things as they were and made every time in the game *actually* feel unique.
Halberds? No problem. Spear? Good to go.
If anything I think games should copy the free form weapon use and just make different types of weapons with different effects for the sake of variety. There doesn't have to be a freaking individual skill line for every single weapon.
But what I really think made RS was the questing, the glorious questing that actually felt like a quest. This is just like the items argument; quality over quantity. WoW may have what is probably hundreds of thousands of quests, but I'd gladly trade all of them for the 100 or so quests from that time. The only thing I'd like to add is to give personal choices in quests that we have to make.
The crafting system in Runescape I liked but disliked. I liked it because, like you said, early on it felt important. More than that it felt immersive. I remember running clan events in 07 where all we had was basic crafting items and nothing else, and would go into the Wilderness on an empty server, and we had an hour to prepare anything we could to survive. It felt real, because things were just *appropriately placed* moreso than any other game.
Runescape sounds a lot like Ultima Online when it first came out.
Evequest also had items that weren't colored and were not soul bound. I don't think they added soul bound items until around the planes of power. This was mostly to stop people from giving their items away to other people in the game (handing them down). That doesn't mean I agree with it at all. I preferred being able to trade any items as many times as I would like and to whoever I liked. This was also before they started having items that scaled to your level and items that required a certain level to use. in all honesty even the high level equipment in the first few MMOs were so underpowered compared to an enemies attack damage it didn't really matter if a level 1 had a an item found on a level 50 boss.