This is an interesting perspective, I hadn’t thought of it this way before.
The issue I have here is that while OSRS does have challenging endgame bosses, everything else has been watered down in comparison.
Between new and better methods/areas/minigames, mobile/afk skilling, increased quest xp rewards, RuneLite plugins, and the like, the only thing you have left in OSRS that’s “hard” is PvP and endgame PvM.
And really, the endgame PvM is only mechanically difficult. With Death’s Office being so forgiving on OSRS, it’s still nearly impossible to experience actual consequences for failure.
Gone are the days of setbacks and rebuilds. Gone are the days of brutal death mechanics. This is what I look for when I consider what’s easyscape or what’s not. How likely is it that the game will let you fail and that you will incur materially damaging consequences to your account as a result?
In 2004, this is a core component. The game has a chance to randomly grief you every 5 minutes (literally!) via random events. Dangerous randoms are kind of arbitrary but the example extends to every activity in the game (questing, bossing, skilling, trading).
With Death’s Office in OSRS, it is nearly impossible to ever experience a setback or negative consequence. You’d have to lose a UIM deathpile, wipe a deathbank, die risking in the wilderness, or somehow manage to die as a non-iron with several hundred million gp worth of unprotected items.
That might sound like a fair amount of ways to lose progress but 99% of players will never fall through any of those cracks. Personally I don’t like feeling forced to play as UIM in order to get my sense of cause-and-effect back.
Wow, just realized how off-topic this was for this thread. Whoops! I ain’t mad about it though.
It typically is (or at least that’s the public perception we like to maintain). That’s not to say punishments can’t be overturned on appeal!