Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Character customization revolves around choosing a predetermined set of hair, faces, bodies, and clothes; very similar to the sort of customization options you get in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, albeit with the detail. However, character customization, at least in this point of the game, is not a huge concern in the entire scheme of things, as your view of your character will not be “close up” like other mass market MMOGs. When you gain levels and acquire more gear, the general scheme of your outfit will be visible, but small details will not be present. You will know, however, the difference between wearing a set of plate armor or a simple robe.

Simple as an Easy-Bake Oven

Despite the sub-heading for this section, RuneScape isn’t an incredibly easy game. Like many MMOGs, there’s an element of the game that is rather difficult, and the team member at Jagex have created a very thorough and well-thought out tutorial. Instead of just unleashing the players in an unforgiving

The tutorial is very thorough and gives you a very reasonable grasp of the game.

world of PKings (yes, you can kill other players in RuneScape), the developers have the player start their adventuring in a small “newbie” area, where the gamers will play through various tutorials, learning the basics of the game.

The tutorial itself has an advancement bar, showing you how much longer before you’re released into the actual world. Controlling your character in RuneScape is a combination of left-clicking and right-clicking, with no hot keys being present for gamers to have to worry about. Most of the objects in the game can be accessed in a similar fashion, although in crowded areas it becomes a pixel hunt to find a spot where you can actually interact with an object. You’ll spend a lot of time mousing over items, trying to determine whether they’re a viable object to interact with or not.

Even from this point in the game, the world of RuneScape is incredibly easy to fall into. In the tutorials, you learn that you can chop down trees, light fires, catch fish, cook fish, make dough, bake bread, and kill monsters. Really, the options available to you in the game are rather enormous. You can choose to back bread all day long or - as a friend’s son does - chop down trees till the end of the world. Nearly all of the objects in the world can be interacted with in some way, whether that’s destroying them, picking them up, or using them. In the game it’s sometimes fun just to see what you can do with the environment.

By interacting with the environment you also gain experience in the particular action that you’re taking. As a skill based game with “levels”, RuneScape offers players the constant thrill of leveling various skills as they complete a variety of activities. With twenty-three different skills – everything from hit points to slaying - that you can level up, players will constantly be vying to achieve that next level in their skill set, hoping for an increase in their characters overall power.

Run-Escape?

As I said earlier in the article, player killers are a prominent part of RuneScape. With the number of players on each server, you’ll see your first player killer very early on in the game. However, RuneScape has integrated a certain number of safety measures to keep new players safe from wandering PKers. For example, when entering particular zones, players won’t be able to kill other players unless they are a single level away from their own, giving the player being PKed a fighting chance.

Adventuring in the wilderness could lead to an encounter with a Player Killer.

Other measures include branding players that attack other players without provocation. Players with skulls over their heads represent player killers that have ambushed another player, setting them apart from the regular crowd. These are the player killers you’ll see in towns, as most other PKers won’t be set apart in such a drastic fashion.

That said, player killing is a fairly large part of RuneScape, those making some players dub the game, Run-Escape instead of RuneScape. However, in my early play sessions I didn’t encounter any PKing, and the only thing that I found at all annoying was the general chatter that would go on around me when my chat filter wasn’t set on “Private”. Luckily, the developers of the game create the chat filter with the Private mode already enabled, keeping players from being driven to insanity by the hundreds of players talking around them.