RuneScape

Part Four: Other Players

After losing everything, and gathering it all up again, I begin to feel philosophical about life in RuneScape. My understanding of the cow that is the world has been deepened by drinking the sour milk from its resurrected teat, if you will. And my understanding of the world's working has also been bolstered by the fact I've been squinting for hours at Sal's excellent Realm of RuneScape.

One thing has eluded me so far, though. Other people. My interaction has been close to zero, and everyone around is well out of my level range - a natural consequence of accounts having only one character each. With less popular games like Ryzom, which has a similarly open levelling system, there's a desire to help each other that's borne from new blood being valuable and welcome. The opposite seems to be true here. In the members-only servers I logged onto, there was no response to my polite requests for help, and no-one willing to join me in a cheeky underground adventure.

Perhaps that's my fault for saying "does anyone want a cheeky underground adventure".

So, I set about trying to make a friend. I've never had a problem with this before. I'm a charming sod, my amiable winking could win over the most fundamentalist terrorist. But RuneScape is beyond my skills. Every "hi" was ignored. When I did get a response, it was quick and efficient. From my limited experience, it's a brutal and lonely world for the low-level adventurer.

Stories of noob abuse are rife. You hear about people leading you into the Player Killing PVP areas, just to steal your stuff. You're warned about trade scams. I wish I had an interesting story to tell: I would have loved to have been scammed out of my dozen burnt chickens.

And Finally

Despite my largely confused feelings about RuneScape, I can't deny that it's needled itself under my skin. Perhaps it's the retro appeal tugging at the long-dead teenager inside me, or the nagging feeling that true understanding of the game's mechanics and... purpose... were within a few more hours' reach. If my character hadn't been called EurogamerOli by the Jagex admin, there's every chance I'd continue playing. I still might, just to give Oli a reputation as a sex pest.

But, the graphics: I've left it this long before mentioning them just to sound deep. I mean, you don't tell someone you're dumping them because they're ugly, do you? It's not the low polygon count; that's a valid constraint of the medium, and despite Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, browser gaming is still young enough for the creation of a 3D world this large to be hugely impressive. The problem is that those restrictions extend to the controls. On one occasion, I nearly died because some wonky pathfinding sent me around in a circle, back into a bear's arms.

I wouldn't have minded, but I had a backpack full of burnt shrimp at stake.

No, I think my time with RuneScape has come to an end. And the worst thing about that is that I'll never know why those penguins are disguising themselves as sheep and rocks. Or why I wasn't allowed to kill them.