Extreme punishments & second chances

[NotaWolf]

This statement is so true, but it has always been that way. If you have the time to drop 15 hrs a day you can succeed over those playing 10.

[Maria]

True overrall, if you’re not playing against new players. The progress done now by high EHPs shows how inefficient it was back in the day.
One of the best aspects of 04 is the avarage player age and experience with the game. And I agree with both you and Brannon in that RS experience never was about mechanical skills but mental resistence. Grinding and death fear. Those who think OSRS bosses are hard need to have some fun playing FPS and MOBAs with solid players. Except if not HCIM or UIM, you basically have a load file saved.

[Espionage724]

@Maria

And I agree with both you and Brannon in that RS experience never was about mechanical skills but mental resistence.

That was a cool part of 99 Firemaking prior to WT; not many people would burn rows of money for hours nowadays

[zzg]

@branon

@fuckall59

its not easy, I lack the skill to do Zuk and the hard raid bosses, I think 2004 Runescape is EZscape, no skill required, no impossible bosses or goals. Just good old braindead grind.

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.

Irrespective of how easy it is, the game time is mostly the same, just methods to train have expanded.