RuneScape: The Single Player MMORPG

I have played RuneScape on and off for the vast majority of my life, starting around 2006. It is easily the game I have the most amount of hours in and has left an indelible mark on my life, my sense of story, and my continuous watch against Killer Gentoo Penguins. It is the MMORPG that I most associate myself with, even as I have played countless others: RIFT, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV, Wizard 101, and likely a few others I’m forgetting. None of these have stuck with me, nor have I stuck with them, for as long as RuneScape. And in considering why this is so, I have come to a rather interesting conclusion: RuneScape is a single player MMORPG.

For any unfamiliar, an MMORPG is a massively multiplayer online role playing game, and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin: an RPG but played online with thousands upon thousands of other players. For the most part, these games bank heavily on the Massively Multiplayer aspect, encouraging social interaction through game design and structure. World of Warcraft is essentially built around dungeons and raids that are meant to be played with others and, as they get harder, rely heavily on strategizing with your fellow players. Guild Wars 2 has its World Events which see players work together on real time events happening on the main world map, and Final Fantasy XIV gives you the duty tracker, allowing you to party up with other players to tackle various challenges. Mechanics such as these are present in nearly every MMO that I have ever seen. Yet RuneScape, while it has them to a certain degree, largely eschews such content.

The only features similar in nature in RuneScape are the raid, The Liberation of Mazcab, added in 2015, and the Elite Dungeons, four instanced areas similar in nature to a typical MMO raid. They also have the Sanctum of Rebirth, a similar encounter but without the title of raid. Those are, for lack of a better term, rookie numbers. There are bosses in the world of course, but they can, for the most part, be fought solo if you choose. They also are primarily late game content, whereas dungeons in World of Warcraft start incredibly early. There are minigames that require playing with others and, at least in Old School RuneScape are fairly active on their dedicated worlds, but these are a fairly small part of RuneScape as a whole. There simply aren’t many parts of RuneScape that mechanically encourage playing with others, and in fact many that encourage the opposite.

One of RuneScape’s core gameplay mechanics is skilling. As opposed to other MMO’s where your character really just has one “level,” that being their overall class level (typically centered around combat) RuneScape has 29 skills that each level up individually, only 7 of them strictly combat related. The closest any other game comes to this is Final Fantasy XIV with its ability to swap between jobs and its more extensive gathering and crafting systems, and even then it’s not very close. With these skills, they are for the most part, solo activities. Some of them can be enjoyed with other people in the same location, such as fishing and divination, while others can encourage you to find a spot isolated from others so as to not have to compete for limited resources, such as woodcutting and, up until the Mining and Smithing Rework of 2019, mining. While there is something to be said about getting to be social with others while skilling, it certainly wasn’t required, and could even harm your ability to efficiently skill. 

Perhaps the most significant place this single player design can be seen is in RuneScape’s Quests. In RuneScape you’re not liable to find a great many “Go kill x amount of goblins” quests or the like. Quests in RuneScape are much closer to story missions from a single player RPG like Dragon Age or God of War (Specifically the Norse versions). Many of them, especially the higher level ones, can take several hours to complete, require solving a variety of puzzles, and involve some of RuneScape’s most challenging and interesting boss fights, all of which must be accomplished solo. There is no real group questing in RuneScape aside from maybe doing the same quest as someone else at the same time completely separately. Even then, you have to hope it’s a quest that doesn’t involve instanced areas, which many of them do. Unlike Star Wars: The Old Republic, you can’t bring your friends into your instanced story zones with you.

These quests are the primary method by which players interact with the lore of RuneScape, unlock new areas like Tiranwn and Morytania, and progress in the game. They are, in my personal opinion, either the most or second most important part of the game as a whole, right next to or even exceeding skilling. And they are, without exception, a solo affair. The only two that required a friend, Shield of Arrav and Hero's Quest, no longer require any social interaction. It is entirely a single player experience. In WoW you fight Arthas, Kil’Jaeden, and Argus with a group of loyal friends. In RuneScape you face Nomad, Elvarg, and Lord Drakan alone.

None of this is to say RuneScape is not an MMO. It obviously is, and there is a great deal of fun to be had in playing with a group of friends and meeting people online. But the structure of the game, with its grind based skilling and solo quests, does not encourage group play anywhere close to the same level that other MMO’s do. Which, for a teenager whose friends didn’t want to play and who wasn’t online enough to forge online friendships with others in the game for a while, made it a pretty ideal MMO to play. It was really easy to just treat it as a single player RPG that other people just happened to be playing at the same time who you could trade stuff with. In fact, it still is.

To bring it to something more current, this is part of why I was so confused by RuneScape Reignited, Jagex’s now scrapped idea to essentially reset the game for new players. It would have created a new type of account that would have no meaningful interaction with veteran accounts, cutting off all trade and having new skill leaderboards and “First to do x” style achievements. The idea was that it was allowing new players to join without having to compete with players who have been playing for years and benefited from RuneScape’s Treasure Hunter pay to win era. It sounds great until you remember: this game basically doesn’t have players competing with each other. Someone else leveling faster than you has no impact on your gameplay. Veteran players have no meaningful way to “dominate” newer players except in PvP which like…yeah. PvP has kind of always been the realm of the super high leveled. That’s why World v World in Guild Wars 2 forcelevels you to max level to participate. Aside from the fun of a bunch of new people starting at the same time, the whole premise always confused me because this is essentially a single player game with some MMO elements. Why does a fresh world cut off from the veteran world benefit anyone? 

But, my slight gripes and confusion with RuneScape Reignited aside, I do think all of this is what makes RuneScape continue to stand out amidst a sea of MMO’s. There simply is no other game like it on the market. It is the one and only Single Player MMO. And frankly, I kind of love it.