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Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20

Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.

Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.

There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)

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AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Man, you mentioning pirates online had a reboot was news to me. I played it for like an hour as a kid and always wondered how good it was. Long story short I mastered fishing yesterday and am enjoying the experience even if it did derail my entire day.

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- Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Dude it has no business being anywhere near as fun of a game it is. Personally I find the ship to ship combat unmatched in any other game. Super satisfying, and nicely scales if you have more than one person on the ship!
  
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  - AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’d love to have more people on my ship but setting it to public doesn’t do much and gods help me if I think I can swing pitching this game to my gaming group
    
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    Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Very real! I’ve only convinced my wife to play with me some so far lol
    
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mika_mika@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Vintage gaming?? Runescape??

I played during the height of it’s Runescape 2 popularity in middle school and I don’t think I’m that antique yet. 😭 Minecraft released while I was a high schooler playing alpha and the kids still like it!! I’m not old!

RuneScape’s age shows more I think because it was entirely playable in a browser window (which came with its limitations). Aside from having a hefty chunk of free content, this is what I credit its success to.

My poor self was happy to be playing anything on the, even at the time, old family PC. A choppy fps low polygon RPG on a java game, because that’s all I could afford, was quite swell after school with my friends online. Anyone could just pull it up on theirs, no DL.

It was accessible and didn’t require a lot of machine power. It’s got a player base today not because it’s a fantastic game, but because there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for it.

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- Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I said vintage in reference to Runescape Classic, so the version of Runescape that was live from 2001-2004. When I played RSC (back when Jagex stood up an RSC server around the early 2010s) it really reminded me of trying to play DOS games in terms of the lousy UI, lack of QOL fixes, general jankiness and unforgiving gameplay. It felt like a game that was about a decade older than it actually is because of that.
  
  Personally as much as I enjoy playing various older games, I’ve found there’s absolutely limits to what’s still enjoyable and for me it’s around the mid-90s where before that point the gameplay is too unforgiving for my taste, and the controls and UI tend to be way too janky
  
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  - mika_mika@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh yeah, I didn’t think RS was very popular before RS2 so I wasn’t aware they made an original RS server later on.
    
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