It’s been one week of RS3’s first ever “Leagues” event, and the reception has been a mild, monotone, mixed, malaise-induced “Nice, kind of.” There are definite strengths to Jagex’s first attempt at an RS3 Leagues, to the point that even naysayers are coughing up some praise here and there, but ultimately the game that is acting as a canvas for the League is still Runescape 3, which means that all of the problems present in the game normally, are still there. And I feel a little bad for the RS3 devs because of it.
It’s a widely held belief that RS3’s incredible showcase of “content bloat” comes not from the developers’ desire to lessen the quality of their game, but from the shareholders’ necessity for a certain amount of content to exist purely to extract cash from the dwindling player base. Content that revolves around hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly resets, treasure hunter keys, and XP purchases, for example, all stand as content that is designed purely to extract cash from the RS3 player in exchange for a worsened game-state. As of recent times, steps have been taken to reduce this paradigm, but it’s all still there as of writing this article.
More importantly, the gameplay of RS3 itself is a wild mix of strong PvE design, vacant PvP, and a mixed-quality of overworld skill leveling and content “uselessness”. Every other hour, a new player will find an unused eye-sore that houses some content that doesn’t seem to be connected to the area it’s placed in. In stark contrast to old-school, the level of immersion fights with itself from one area to the next and what should be a normal town appears very much like a gamified, goofy location that only exists to house 6 months worth of dev-time that’s been abandoned after release.
More to the point, Jagex and the Runescape 3 team seem to consistently work hard to put out update after update, one step forward, one step back. All of that hard work into content and changes fights vigorously with the open-world bloat and cash-extract facets of gameplay to make a confused title that struggles to come close to OSRS in terms of player-count.
In my view, this is a struggle of dev vs. shareholder: talent vs. profit: a tale as old as time. Looking at some of the comments the RS3 team is seeing on their latest X post, I can’t help but feel bad for the Runescape 3 devs. They clearly work so very hard to make a game worth playing on a canvas that is not friendly for such endeavors.
Let’s hope for a cleaner canvas in the future, eh?
