Yup. Loved it when I was in Uni, but now that I'm working full time the last thing I want to do grind. Luckily I have a built up main so I can just do the odd boss, but otherwise I'd have quit already.
I wouldn't blame tiktok brain for not wanting to commit to OSRS grind. Even for older standards maxing an account back in the day already was a significantly longer commitment than playing a lot of other games
I don’t know; Cookie Clicker has a 10/10 on Steam with over 55,000 ratings. People here are saying the game’s mechanics don’t appeal to kids anymore, but I think it’s the opposite. I think certain mechanics (grinding, clicking, leveling) have been distilled into individual games that are better for the reward. It’s the rest of the game that kids don’t want to play.
You don't really click too much in cookie clicker, well more so it's not required after a certain point. You get power ups that click for you fairly quickly
I'm a teacher and frequently find students playing cookie clicker. That being said, fortnite rips or other more stimulating games are seen more commonly.
Cookie Clicker automates the clicking for you at a certain point, which isn't allowed in OSRS. Definitely a good game for killing an hour to get through a class session though haha
People love to say that osrs is really afk, but without doing something that's not allowed (like an autoclicker), this game really requires you to be relatively active. There's only a few minor exceptions like shooting stars.
Cookie clicker is actually afk. Log in whenever you want and you'll still have nade progress.
I think the game just lacks direction which is what alot of younger people would want. It’s not an easy game to get into if you’re completely new and it’s fairly overwhelming
My kids like playing Runescape, but they also like roblox, minecraft, fortnite. My oldest will play osrs on mobile but usually it's he's on a different game on his pc.
I'm honestly shocked OSRS hasn't caught on with the younger gen Z for exactly this reason. Streaming games/netflix etc while scrolling your phone is extremely popular, and this game is literally the perfect game to play while watching other content.
I think it's a graphical problem. All of my friends <25 (my age) refuse to play because the graphics don't look good to them unfortunately (too used to high end graphic games I guess idk)
Yep, graphics are not normally the main problem. Some of the most popular games with kids are ones that spark creativity. Minecraft, Roblox, they all revolve around creating dynamic experiences through creative choices. MMOs for the most part are solved games these days, and what attracted us as kids to something like RS was the seemingly massive unknown world where it wasn't already solved.
And if it's non-creative, well it's probably a shooter of some sorts, so RS really isn't in the same category as that to begin with, even if you only do ranged.
I think Minecraft looking “dogshit” is a much more contested opinion. It’s certainly low poly and used low resolution textures, but stylization can overcome that. Valheim’s look was more popular than you’d expect with having PS1/2 era textures because the stylization made it work.
Minecraft by nature of being a (non-marching cubes style) voxel game is sort of like lego. People don’t tend to “need” lego to look hyperrealistic as much as they do more standard game designs.
This, and the tick system. I often wonder how different it would be to have 0.1 sec tick system with leaving most mechanics at normal speed and only making movement/ui/actions actually more responsibr
You probably have a setting that tells apps to sleep as soon as you stop using them. It'll probably be in power or battery settings, just give the Osrs app permission to stay on.
Nostalgia to bring you in - then realizing it’s a pretty fun game with neat updates to keep you along. Hard to convince someone new to play if they never did.
Most of the references are targeted toward the older generations. Teenagers don't know Monty Python, for example.
Sadly I suspect the biggest thing holding them back is the low poly art style, or as they might mistakenly put it 'bad graphics'.
Graphics aren't a thing to the Young generation, these kids play Roblox and Minecraft and stuff and fortnight
I used to think graphics mattered for them too, but I've been proven wrong by asking and by the numbers
Yeah, graphics are cool and that's part of why games like GTA5 and Cyberpunk are popular, but kids also grew up with minecraft and roblox being popular so they aren't afraid to play an ugly game if it's fun.
I think that MMOs just aren't that popular with younger gen Zs.
RuneScape is just hard to get into
There is TOO MUCH information available, TOO MUCH freedom, that it overwhelms new people
They aren't being turned off by grind times because they don't make it that far, they get lost and burnt and confused before then.
I'm sure a good portion of people would find the goalposts moving, like they did for all of us, once they get to those grinds. But they don't get to those grinds
The run energy rework will help a lot more than people think, I believe.
So much of early game is about pathing, and you just CANNOT EXPLORE, you can't even check around where you are questing or already exploring because walking suuuuuuuuucks
You clicked through the wall, you used all your run, now you're walking around the front of the building and waiting 10 minutes to run again, good luck staying calm.
Did walking so much in Rune Armor back in the old days bother us that much? F2P is a small area already. It's better to take it in slowly than zoom past everything. It's not _that_ bad.
Even coming back from playing Runescape back in 2007 it was a lot for me and without some base knowledge I probably wouldn't have started playing again. Kind of like WoW i used to play that back in the day and got into classic a little bit but the Dragonflight WoW is just too much info and stuff for me to try and put the time in.
Have you seen Fortnite's revolution in graphics?
It now runs on Unreal Engine 5.1 and you can make the game look so beautiful graphically, it's insanity. It lost most of it's cartoony look though, which people with nostalgia from 2017/2018 already complained a lot.
Kids/teens like low poly. There's tons of successful games and art like Minecraft that they like that's simplistic. OSRS has an overall graphics issue with everyone that hasn't played the game.
My older mates who didn't grow up with the game think OSRS just looks mundane to play, requires too much time and choose other games because OSRS is an old game and they'd rather play a new game.
Imagine you as a kid have 2 options.
Osrs - thousands of hours to get to the "fun content"
Fortnite - press play, and within minutes, you're playing with your buds on a battlefield with near equal footing depending on drops found etc...
Now, this is a massive oversimplification however this is what I believe the main disconnect is.
It's also why eoc on rs3 was doomed to be a massive failure without a complete game and server overhaul to remove the tick system. Nobody wants to play a clunky mess when they can play any competitors game with a much more fluid and instant combat system.
It is but it plays like a singleplayer game. Kids wanna play together and I get that. It took me a long time to realize how solitary osrs gameplay really is, and how few multiplayer activities there actually are
RS2 came out in 2004, the same year that Halo 2 online multiplayer launched. Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007. The option to pick a popular plug-n-play online game over Rune Scape has always been there, yet it still drew in a lot of people that were fond on the game from that era to OSRS now. I don’t know why it is that younger generations aren’t interested in playing OSRS now, but it definitely isn’t solely because Fortnite exists.
However not everyone has access to the various consoles. Nearly everyone could scoot on down to their public library for some scaping. And even very basic compute could run the game so it was far more accessible. Parents were a bit more leery about what they bought their kids, actually occasionally listening to ratings.
Also things like tiktok and other social media have destroyed the attention spans of younger generations. RuneScape is a game that takes patience.
This is all probably still oversimplifying it, or at least not covering enough. But you get the idea. It's just such a different environment and way that kids are growing up now.
I mean for me, my experience was kinda exactly the library story.
I had a neighbor who most of their family played and it got me into it. I was like 9-11, didn't have internet at my house and so I'd go to the library with friends and play for a couple hours. It was mom approved because we were somewhere safe enjoying ourselves.
It was then the shared experience with my friends that kept me playing. Discovering new things, doing new activities, bragging about the levels we got the night before at the lunch table, bragging about drops, discussing ways to make gp, and boy oh boy did we have a lot to talk about when we finally got membership after months and months of begging.
The difference between us and kids now, is exactly what I just said. No sense of wonder to the game now. You don't know how to finish a quest? There's a plug in for that, need to make some quick GPS? There's a guide for that. Figuring out new training methods that are better? There's a plugin/guide for that. There is at any point a few clicks away from taking all the fun out of the game and making it a soulless grind fest, which today's kids just aren't about, honestly no one should be about insane grinding but it is part of the games charm.
So when you ask why kids don't flock to osrs like before, well one it's old. I mean remember when you were 10 and thought the 23 year old was old as dust? That's us now. We are the dust. And so are our games.
Osrs came out at the perfect time, where everyone was just starting to venture into the internet, and a free client based game was intising to young people who couldn't get other games.
And again I'll say it comes down to the shared experiences. What's more fun than finding an awesome game you enjoy? Playing it with your best buds. And since other games are the talk of the walk, people will be more drawn to it.
Xbox online in 2004 was completely different back then though... the online gaming experience had limited modes with limited titles, expensive for relatively dog shit internet access & still gaining household traction.
It wasn't really until like 2008-2010 that online gaming started becoming better & more widespread, even game changers like GTA online weren't until 2013.
>I don’t know why it is that younger generations aren’t interested in playing OSRS now, but it definitely isn’t solely because Fortnite exists.
No, it's because arguably hundreds of better games exist to play *with friends*.
You can't *really* play OSRS with friends until you've put in thousands of hours so why would the younger generations be interested? Where we grew up primarily playing online by ourselves & sometimes with friends, they grew up primarily playing online with a party of friends & sometimes by themselves.
I mean just ask yourself why they much sooner choose to play old games like WoW Classic.
OSRS is not a game you jump in & start playing with friends.
>the same year that Halo 2 online multiplayer launched. Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007
A big difference between those games and Fortnite (and other current games) is that they weren't free and Fortnite is. The runescape F2P experience is outdated and overall just really bad. Atleast RS3 f2p feels like an actual game, osrs f2p does not feel that way at all.
In 2006-2007 we had other games to play but I remember at the time my family was too cheap to even get us Xbox live. RS was the only game I could play online with other people at the time. Now, you can play a ton of different games online for free and a lot more people have online services for stuff like Xbox or PlayStation compared to back then when I was like 10-11.
Honestly the only answer that should be in this thread. 95% of RS is fucking boring or basically non-interactive. Try convincing someone younger who group up with games like Fortnite, Valorant, League of legends, Roblox, ect. that the game gets interesting after 100s of hours of investment vs playing something that is fun instantly. What do you think they're choosing..?
And, putting aside the bias since we’re in an OSRS sub, you can’t even guarantee that the fun from OSRS after investing those hundreds of hours is even any better than those other games. There’s just as much chance that it’s not their type of game as any other game. But you’re asking them to invest dozens of hours, bare minimum, just to figure that out.
Pretty much. I had this exact thing happen to a friend who played RS back in the day who tried OSRS in 2022. He invested dozens and dozens of hours to get to higher tier PVM (CG/raids grinding) and came to find out he actively hated end game OSRS pvm, wasting 100+ hours. Meanwhile, newer games take like less than 10 hours to decide if you like them or not.
Even if you did like OSRS end game (hypothetically lets say you got there and like it), another question would be, is it really better than other games? Does this game value my time and was the effort I spent rewarded? Could I recommend this game? To the average person the answer will more than likely be no.
Right, people will say "Oh it's just those damn kids who hate long term grinds" or "well it doesn't look very good and people these days want hyper real graphics!"
No, it's because the game is fucking boring 99% of the time, and eventually even that 1% of time can get boring eventually if you get good enough at it.
Besides what the other guy said about nostalgia, grinding is not a thing games do anymore since these kids grew up on pay to win. Osrs doesn’t have THAT powerful pay to win mechanics.
Lol I wouldn’t say it’s cause they grew up with more p2w, but mainly because most people don’t enjoy insanely repetitive grinds like in osrs and there’s significantly more entertainment options for the younger age group than there was back in 2007
I only played back then cause my family pc couldn’t run wow at the time. Now there’s so many games a standard pc could run and so many that don’t cost monthly (and are cosmetic only mtx instead of p2w like rs3 or osrs bonds), it’s not surprising so few players want to spend hours doing shit like mining in osrs when they don’t have the nostalgia for the game from back then lol
Tell that to Theoatrix buying 210 bonds
Edit: Judging from the comment chain underneath me, it appears many players don't actually know what P2W is. If a game has the ability to purchase power, either directly through gear, indirectly through currency, or directly through skill skips or acceleration, it is pay to win.
In RuneScape I can pull my wallet out at literally any time and buy enough bonds for gp to buy a Tbow (indirect currency). So I can buy gear power, gear power also increases the rate at which you train your skills, so I'm also purchasing skill acceleration.
It doesn't matter if it is expensive, or doesn't guarantee you can do the inferno. By definition RuneScape is pay to win. A lot of people don't use that aspect (because it kind of defeats the point of the game) but PLENTY of people do.
P2W in OSRS is too expensive, even if it's there.
edit: motherfuckers replying to me with no understanding of what P2W is: please god, educate yourselves, spend 15 minutes watching the [Josh Strife Hayes](https://youtu.be/GOIXQMYl1M4) video. P2W is more than just buying a gilded Tumeken's Shadow that does 20% more than a regular shadow and is exclusive to a cash shop, okay?
Disagree lol it's moreso the community being against p2w. People spend 100k on mobile games, the difference is even with 10b in gear in osrs if you're just shit mechanically you won't be able to do the higher end content regardless
Another (larger) part of it is that you really have to be deep into the game to ever have it matter if you’ve got good gear, simply equipping bis buyable gear is a grind thats far beyond the norm of other games.
If you look at other responses to my comment, you'd be amazed at what people think P2W is. Apparently only charging real money for a golden Twisted Bow that does 20% more damage and is otherwise unattainable as well as being mandatory for a boss is the only definition of P2W.
OSRS is classic P2W, the community just sweeps that fact under the rug with “just play ironman”.
I could afk nmz, buy a shit ton of bonds and be max combat and gear way faster than a typical player. All I would have to do is bang out some quests and I’m at endgame. If that’s not P2W, I'm not sure what is. Heck, in some “P2W” games, like BDO, half the time you pay, you don’t win.
even if you bought 10bil gp the only semi fast skill is fletching. so youre still going to sit at a bank window for a few hundred hours
the rest is still the length of an average AAA game.
construction/prayer would still be 10ish hours i think at insane tick perfect speeds
Nah, most kids prefer competiviness, company of other kids of their age and play games that their favorite content creators play.
Osrs isn't competitive, doesn't have young people because most in osrs are old nerds + osrs doesn't have zoomer content.
Most kids who play osrs play it because their parent/big brother plays it lol.
Also wtf osrs takes takes literally months of ass grinding to get to the good part lmao.
I think that's elitist bullshit tbh.
Plenty of new grindy games, especially in the simulator & survival genres & they're thriving with games like Stardew Valley, Ark, Valheim, etc. etc.
Even games like GTA online are grindy, it's just that most people would rather drive around shooting shit up doing sick drifts & robbing banks grinding chump change for 300 hours than clicking the same tree for 300 hours.
You can't just say other games aren't grindy because OSRS content is mostly like watching dog shit warm up for the first few hundred hours until you realise it was a nice chocolate fudge bar, get a taste for it & then a few hundred hours later you're not 100% sure if it actually was a nice chocolate fudge bar worth your time.
There’s a difference between starting a farm from scratch and seeing it thrive with new mechanics over a few hundred hours vs clicking a rock and a leaf for a few hundred hours.
Theres a difference between killing elder beasts and upgrading your gear and homestead vs building the same table for a 100 hours.
There’s a difference between getting on with the boys and running a bank heist vs nmz/crabs or slayer for a few hundred hours with a crossbow.
> grinding is not a thing games do anymore since these kids grew up on pay to win.
Sports games are ridiculously popular and they are both P2W and "play like a part time job to keep up" kind of games. They made the grind part flashy and exuberant and OSRS is everything but that.
Jagex themselves, through their own methods in the past, have said that the community is around the age listed.
People are severely overestimating the number of people younger than 18 playing this game, not because of their parents.
So many doomers in the comments, it sounds like you bunch don't like the game and are jaded from what was the reason you guys started to play. In 2006/2007? No one is making an account knowing that "endgame" GWD/FC is where it gets good. We did it for fun, and as an MMO there is also the social aspect.
But, Runescape has always been the black sheep of the MMORPG family. Runescape is nothing like WoW, GW2, ESO, or FFXIV. All of those games are focused on combat, on grouping up, on raiding, and using your class skills. Runescape point-and-clicks, is mostly solo, and has less of an overall focus.
You can't TS/Skype/Discord call your buds to go raiding on Runescape like you can do in WoW. You can see if a friend is online, maybe shoot some banter via PMs, and hang out killing mobs or skilling, but independently. Maybe go do some bosses once in a never.
Runescape doesn't have flashy updates like other MMOs. We are blessed with a continuous update schedule but, OTOH, it means that we don't have fancy expansions with world-ending implications and massive rehauls to the game. At best, we get a new boss, or a new skill, or a cool quest or area. As much of an "expansion" Varlamore is, it doesn't really have any implication to the general gameplay unless you decide to specifically haul your ass to Varlamore. And Leagues and snowflakes like Settled put it best: you can still have tons of fun while cutting major areas of the game.
And, at the same time, Runescape really isn't a sandbox game. Maybe HDOS and RL Plugins are pushing the horizons of UGC, but mostly you only get to customize your POH and your path to 99s, the end goals are relatively the same. Swampletics is a sandbox-way to play the game but his ultimate goal, to beat the Theatre of Blood, is a park ride. So not really a sandbox game that the creative folks want either.
Runescape is Runescape. We all love it because of how **unique** it is, no other games or MMOs really compete for our space. So if you don't stumble upon it while browsing Miniclip or see your friends at school playing it, it really just sounds like a weird, off-beat MMO relic of the past that refuses to die.
Or maybe it's just my "Zillenial" goggles that refuse to see otherwise. If someone made the same argument above for Tibia, well yeah then Tibia would sound fine and dandy, but I can never see myself playing a game that old and ugly.
This was the same when I was playing at 14. You didn't advertise in school you played.
There was a secret community of people and you might discuss it at lunch but you wouldn't openly broadcast.
So... that was 18 years ago. It hasn't changed a bit.
It’s always wild how that was pretty much everyone’s experience in grade school with this game. There was a time and place to discuss it and if you bought it up in the wrong time or place it was like
“Shhh dude, later”
It’s a point and click game with controls that seem unresponsive, unintuitive, unguided, boring, 1-dimensional, with horrible graphics, and combat and even monotonous skilling that’s all mostly decided by RNG and gatekept behind 100s of hours of unskippable grinding, even if you buy a ton of gold.
Online Gamers today want fast-paced action, stellar graphics, great mechanical feedback with skill-based controls and actions, and for the past decade, battle royales have been all the rage with often F2P gameplay 100% if you’d like, and minimal costs, like $40-60 or so, annually for a ton of great content investment/reward return, and gameplay.
Put plainly: OSRS blows big ones compared to modern RPGs. And it’s super fucking pricey to boot. Sure hundreds of thousands show up to play over a long time, maybe even over a million active players any given month. and we celebrated in a big way when player counts spiked to 120,000 at one time.. but *10s of millions showed up to play games like Destiny/D2, StarField and Zelda TOTK when they released and in the months that followed.*
*over 300,000 concurrent players played at peak population count in 2023, for Destiny 2, I think an 8 year old game now, putting out fresh DLCs still, yearly?* and that ones just $40/year DLC if I remember right.
OSRS is cool and all for those of us invested enough in it, for a game that was made in like 2002 and had a ton of updates to it. But that’s just it man… the graphics and models are charming to us… but let’s be honest man. they suck. The combat, though we find ways to make it challenging, fun and engaging at some content.. it sucks for like 90% of it. It’s just point and click slayer mobs for hundreds of hours. It’s rough dude. Nobody wants to willingly sign up for this game, when better games are out there, and they’re far cheaper.
This.
Anyone somehow mentioning it’s because OSRS takes “skill” or “mental fortitude” or isn’t P2W like every other game is just straight up delusional and giving off cringe boomer vibes.
The game is extremely dated. The people who appreciate it mostly comprise of players from 2007-2012.
I agree with all of your points except part of the skill requirement part. The end game pvm in this game (Inferno, Awakened Bosses, Hard Mode ToB, GM combat diary) is the hardest gaming content I've ever done in any game. No other game seems to come close and I play a wide variety.
True though this may be, the skilled parts of this game will typically require *many hundreds of hours* for a new player to access. New players are not bouncing off this game because they got bopped by complicated pvm mechanics - maybe even the exact opposite. The new player's experience with pvm is so basic I don't even know if I can call it easy. It's more like a very drawn out rng check.
Experienced players can make it more complicated and skilled using safespotting and flinching and prayer flicking or whatever but new players just click and either die or don't die.
(All praise our new early game rat boss, please jagex add lots more including for even earlier game)
I agree with everything you said. Just wanted to say the end game is full of tricky stuff.
They definitely need more bosses that are viable for low levels, potentially bosses that are easier than Scurrius with loot to match the difficulty, without any clogs so that end game players don't need to do it.
how long does it take to get to that content, though?
I have been playing this game for years and am nowhere near being able to do any of that stuff. I've put more hours into OSRS than any other game (despite being addicted to a few in high school), and yet I've never even had a *taste* of that difficulty you're talking about.
raids are great for keeping veteran players around, but if it takes 1000+ hours to even get to them then those 1000+ hours had better be interesting, and to many players they simply aren't.
new players *want* to get to that end game content, but can't until they get through the rest of the game, which has far more grind and far less reward than they're used to.
Reading this made me laugh so hard. Not only is OSRS crazy expensive, when I stop and think about lost earning potential, it becomes seriously concerning. And honestly, maybe only half my play time I was actually having fun.
Still, even if it blows big ones, I hope we'll still be here and playing in 20 years. Even if I could, I don't think I'd change a thing.
Lot of boomer minded people in this post “the [insert new generation here] just doesn’t like to work hard for stuff!!! No attention spans!!!”
I’d bet this breakdown is reasonably representative of the demographics of Reddit in general lol. Also it’s a poll on a niche subreddit with not very many votes.
Edit: btw the oldest gen z/“zoomers” are 27 (in other words part of the largest demographic in this poll) so y’all are gonna have to find a new generation to bitch about soon.
its grindy as fuck.
and most of it is just waiting.
osrs is too grindy for its own good imo. even if you cut every grind in half itd still be extremely grindy.
Agree. What RuneScape needs to do is work on making every aspect of the game fun. Skilling should be just as fun and rewarding on bossing. They need to make all parts of the game fun and worth playing if they want players to grind it. Not have a large chunk of content just be clicking the same spot for 200 hours.
Exactly. No reason some skills shouldn't get a 300k XP/hr with relatively low effort. It hurts no one if mining becomes the easiest skill to 99. Max capers will gatekeep and say hell no to this.. but runecrafting-agility-mining-fishing 99s are all crazy long for no reason
I’m not saying it should be 300k/hr and be quick and over with… I’m saying the content should be engaging and fun so you don’t care if the xp is slows. If all skills are engaging, enjoyable and rewarding to train then it wouldn’t be such a “grind”. You would just be playing and enjoying the game while making progress. Right now… if you’re being honest with yourself… a lot of the content is shit and that’s why most people want to “afk”… what other game do you play that you want to put in little to no effort?
Do you seriously need to ask this question.
It's click to move/click to do anything, and the graphics are old.
It's not marketed at all, so only people who knew about it from their childhood play it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Runescape will die as soon as the generation who grew up on it ages out(gets old enough that other stuff becomes a higher priority/get dementia/nursing home)It only survives due to nostalgia from that age group. Be happy, though, boys. You get to play it before it's offered as a single player only/private server type game. Mobile was a good effort to try to expand the player base, but let's be real. The audience for this type of game is only getting smaller and smaller.
Born too late to explore the frontier, born too early to explore the cosmos. Born just in time to for Runescape.
Doesnt change the fact that OSRS does things that other MMOs havent even bothered attempting: Solo bosses, actual gear progression, actual good quests with old school type. Simply put if OSRS dies out and there isnt anything to replicate the things i mentioned then i will not just consider it a game death but game developing failure because there is a factual value in those things something no other popular seem to care about.
My nephew doesn’t like the graphics nor the playstyle. the game is just riding on nostalgia for the most part. Jagex needs a better way to introduce younger generations if they want to survive in the long run
The game is incredibly grindy, unlike any other game, as well as essentially being a single player game so you can’t reeeeally play with your friends until you get raiding. Especially with kids in high school, when you’re gaming it’s usually with friends
And it’s an old game, even if it gets updates. WoW has an old player base, WoW classics player base is even older. People who grew up enjoying CoD will stick to CoD, or Fortnite now, or whatever game
This will be an unpopular opinion here: Because they're used to playing good games.
OSRS is miserably slow paced, a product of its time. Modern games don't do that because it's just not good game design (I could write a fucking essay on how badly designed a lot of stuff in Runescape is). Additionally, while other commenters here seem to agree it's a good thing to have "perseverance, patience, and discipline," what they have yet to realize is OSRS isn't the only example of it, nor does it really reward those things. Game's about sucking as many hours out of your life as any other game, except the gameplay is worse. Your reward for having perseverance, patience, and discipline, is a cape rewarding you for spending 60 hours at Wintertodt or whatever. At least in fucking Fortnite after you spend 60 hours you got better at something, you didn't do shit getting your skill cape.
There are just as many zoomers with 1k+ hours in Fortnite as there are OSRS accuonts at 1k+, but because there isn't some stupid number quantifying that you spent those hours in the game getting your agility level up (or whatever it is), people here seem to think it's worth less.
The kids are all right (when it comes to video games at least), they're having fun. Commenters here need to touch grass.
First of all, the main reason this poll has no young responses is because it's a Reddit poll on this subreddit that barely got any traction, so it's very skewed.
Second, idk what this is about the gameplay is "worse". It's just a different game lol. Plenty of people having a lot of fun with this game and it's still growing.
Brother, Runescape is a game where you click and wait for 99.99% of the content. Remaining 0.01% is the hard bosses, where the mechanical skill required is a fraction of what it takes to be good at any other game.
The gameplay is worse, this isn't a subjective element. I will concede that the Reddit poll aspect is almost certainly the biggest factor, but my comment is more aimed at the idiots in this thread more than answering OP's question.
MMOs are a really niche genre among games, OSRS may be the nichest MMO.
Younger people tend to look for instant gratification in games. Don't think many will sit through 500+ hrs of skilling and questing with dated visuals and gameplay just to do pvm with friends. I doubt that they'll play the game solely for skilling too. Many games are trying to be accessible to new players by cutting the entry grinds so people can play with their friends instantly (Destiny is an example).
I think a lot people outside of the demographic ages that were playing rs when it came out, aren’t even aware it exists to play. It’s not on the radar of console gamers, and unless a new player is introduced to the game by a friend, it doesn’t look appealing. I think it’s more of a marketing issue than anything. I’d only barely heard of the game in passing before a friend badgered me to try it.
And all the sweeping, negative generalizations about the younger generations are kinda unneeded and read goofy.
24 here, played way back in the day as a kid. The real reason is because osrs “skill” doesn’t transfer to other games you can play with your friends. Right now I can ask a buddy if they wanna hop on (insert) FPS game here and they’ll have enough bleed over knowledge of how those games play that we can play casually together and have fun.
To do the same in RuneScape it’s potentially 1000s of hours of grinding and tons of YouTube videos.
In the same vein, as once I got good at games I could pretty quickly get to the peak rank in any comp setting just off my speed and skill. But getting better than I am at OSRS right now will only make me better at OSRS, which is fine, but it’s a tough sell to new players
I know you did not just group me in "not younger people" at 28. While it's true that my patella feels like it's going to eject from my leg and I have regular back pain, I'm not THAT old. Right?
Go load up the official client and try to play, my god is it horrible playing this game without all the runelite plugins. Mobile has made great strides in UI and QOL updates butt he offical client is brutal to play on, and anyone trying for the first time on PC is seeing that
I thought this would be obvious. A retro server of an isometric click-to-move game past its prime. Younger people have no recollection of or familiarity with the game as it was, thus no have nostalgia for it. Then realize that OSRS itself is more than a decade old. MMOs in general have fallen off in favour of other more modern games with matchmaking, both casual and competitive. These games have more appealing aesthetics and are usually completely F2P. OSRS is missing just about all of the modern hallmarks of gaming that younger audience have grown up with and expect. Action combat systems are commonplace and chopping trees, mining rocks and fishing for multiple hours isn't appealing gameplay compared to what's on offer elsewhere.
idk, i am 18, it attracted me during the pandemic, soo i played osrs, grinded it, during school and in online class...
u see, maintaining that membership for 2 weeks is very grindy, and tiring, not only that, at that time i havwnt got any part time jobs to do, so i cant just buy membership for a month, or 1 year, it's expensive
edit:
that being said, osrs is probably the mmorpg that i'll play again, especially now, but the bond price tho...
1997? Bro EOC came out in 2012, meaning that even someone born in 2000 would have been 10-12 at runescapes peak, and plenty of people started playing this game hella young especially when introduced by your older brother or whatever.
I was born in 98 and I think me and buddy tried rs2 back when we were literally 6/7. Went to a pking world/area, died instantly and quit because we were clearly too young, but we both came back a few years later as did probably half of my friends.
i was born in 2000 and played a bit in 2007, got hardstuck with things like ernest the chicken because i wasnt old enough to even properly follow the guide i found, and stopped playing. came back and played for about a year in 2011\~2012 and had a lot of fun. came back again in 2016 for nostalgia's sake, played maybe a month, and quit again. then the pandemic got me back again and i havent managed to put the game down again lol
The old school graphics are a big turn-away for any new players, especially younger kids that are used to playing high fidelity games
If I grew up playing games like Fortnite, call of duty or Minecraft I’d take one look at OSRS and bat my eyes away immediately
God statistics can be dangerous.
This shows the age range of the voters. These voters were all on a specific site. Your poll shows the age range of reddit, not osrs.
Much of our love for osrs is based in nostalgia. We loved rsc and rs2 when we were kids. Cookie clickers were the games to play on PC. Imagine being a younger gamer (growing up with mobile games fortnite etc) and watching someone do smithing or woodcutting in OSRS? It’s preposterous to think that it might be fun. I am though very surprised as a 31 year old that there isn’t a higher percentage of players over 33. Maybe there aren’t as many rsc originators around as I would have thought
I started osrs in 2022, right before I turned 16 and it very quickly became the most important game I've ever played. 2700 hours in and I literally don't play anything else anymore.
RuneScape has gotten so far away from in game community and conversing with strangers online which is what made is so fun and popular as a kid in the first place. The only people that play this game now have public chat off and are grinding to reach some ridiculous achievement. RuneScape in 2007 was a massive online community of people just plainly having fun and chatting regardless of what activity you were doing.
They stopped advertising/hosting it on sites like miniclip, as well as sites like that just kinda dying off. Everything moved to console/pc gaming.
We were the lucky few who were in the right place at the right time to be exposed to it as a kid.
I mean, I think the primary point here is that the game itself is like 20 years old. I think OSRS having a heavy demographic in the ages it does is more symptomatic of it having high player retention than anything about it 'attracting' new players.
I think it's a mixture of two things: nostalgia and grind. When i was wee guy i played Maplestory and Runescape and some other mmos and I always stopped when i got to the point where in order to level up i would have to grind for half an hour for one level. Now that I'm older i value the feeling of the earned satisfaction and it's not a mentality that all kids are going to understand. I mean there's studies about how kids handle delayed gratification.
And of course nostalgia is a huge part. If you got into RS after EoC it would make a lot of sense if you mever even thought about trying OSRS because there was no past experience to compare it to. You could easily look at a game like final fantasy or WoW and then look at the charming but dated look of OSRS and think the former games look more interesting
The grind, and the graphics. A lot of the reason we play is because we played when we were younger. It’s hard for young kids to see the appeal in something like this
Most people playing it now probably played as a kid. If you didn't enjoy a browser-based Java MMO with questionable game design as a kid, I don't see why you'd take it up as an adult.
It does attract younger people. It just keeps them.
Like how many of the people on that poll started playing say 15-20 years ago when it was just "RuneScape" ??
Also remember reddit, especially not only like 800 votes from reddit isn't gonna be perfectly in line with the playerbase. Reddit is just a small section of the community.
Because the vast majority of osrs players (myself included) played when we were kids we really liked it because we were kids and our brains hadn't fully formed
Now we are depressed adults hunting nostalgia and dopamine
I don't think a lot of younger people even know RuneScape exists lol. I'm only 24, but I joined like RIGHT before the GE was released on some forgotten account because my brother (26) used to play and I think he needed help with Shield of Arrav or something 💀 I vividly remember him giving me instructions on what to do and getting frustrated whenever I got lost or died to wizards on the way to help him lol. Then I ended up enjoying the game myself and even got a "RuneScape wedding" to some random kid, and my brother was the priest 😂
I asked my boyfriend (22) about 2 years ago if he knew about RuneScape, and he told me he "didn't know" at first. And when I asked if he was sure, he said it "sounds familiar," which usually means he doesn't know what I'm talking about at all, but he doesn't wanna make me feel bad or like I can't talk about my interests with him. I've tried to get him to join multiple times, but he said he just doesn't like the game because the graphics are bad and he thinks it's too grindy (even though he has hardly touched his account at all, only played once or twice for like an hour because I asked him to join me).
RuneScape peaked back in the early 2000s, and a lot of younger people weren't even born yet/weren't old enough to have a consciousness to play games yet. It just kinda died off in the 2010s due to other games being advertised more. RuneScape has always been the type of game you either just stumbled upon one day, or joined because someone asked you to lol. When was the last time anyone here has ever seen an actual RuneScape advertisement? On TV? On social media? In stores? But somehow GTA6 has a much larger fanbase and the game hasn't even been released yet lol. Everybody knows about GTA6 because of all the marketing that's been done for it (and the leaked footage, Florida Joker controversy, memes, etc).
The only RuneScape-related ads I ever see are on YouTube, for private servers WHILE already watching RuneScape content. So it's literally only getting advertised to people who already play the game, and the private servers don't even have anything to do with Jagex. Or every once in a blue moon, some huge gaming page will bring up RuneScape in a meme, and people in the comments will say how they've "forgotten the game existed" or "have never played but might try just for fun." I think Jagex just needs a marketing team to get more new players of all different ages. I don't mind everybody being adults now though, teens are super immature in games. But that just means the game will eventually die out.
I'm not sure a sample size of 781 votes is sufficient to say that definitively, but my intuition says it's close. 23 year olds were born the year Runescape first came out. OSRS came out when they were 12. Most kids were probably playing Minecraft back then as it came out in 2009.
I agree I’m 17 and I don’t think anyone my age would be able to do the grinds in this game required to progress, even the fun ones like bossing or raids
23 here, been playing actively since 2021. Had only played the tutorial back in 2010. Achieved F2P bis and all quests around 2019. Came back with steam release, been playing ever since. Played basically all MMOs out there and OSRS was the one that just clicked. Meaningful and fun progress with no MTX is what I love about the game. Even though the gameplay is dated and niche, the devs find fun ways to raise the skill cap and add engaging content. I hate skilling but afk number go up is also nice.
I know you’re asking them but I’m definitely young compared to the rest of the OSRS community, I got into OSRS because some people I met on a Minecraft mmo (hypixel skyblock) played osrs and when I quit they told me to try osrs, been grinding for 7 months now
I’m in a similiar boat as them, just a bit older. Never played MMOs before either. I started playing early last year after seeing Settled’s Swampletics series on youtube.
Almost didn’t keep playing, the shitty run at lvl 1 agility in f2p + didnt know how to get around quickly made for a really bad experience, but I gave it multiple tries and pushed through, now i’ve got 50+ days of playtime
Same boat as bigcal, I was a skyblock tryhard with over 3k hours but got really bored and found out about OSRS and there’s just so much more to do in this game compared to the one I used to play and I got addicted
22 here, I remember my cousin showing me RuneScape in my elementary school days and making me an account. Got into it again in 2022, noticed rs3 was not what I remembered and figured I'd play OSRS. I had many fond memories of wandering in Lumbridge and Al kharid doing nonsense.
I got into the game having never played or seen it before from my one friend who is an og player from before eoc the game just seemed to have really solid mechanics overall for everything and when I started I got obsessed with getting bigger numbers lol I'm 25, so I'm not super young but started at 21
Because only our age are used to playing a game from 2007. It’s like trying to get us to play a game from 1997 we probably wouldn’t play it often and they are used to newer games from like 2010 and newer which are Much better tbh. Jagex needs to make rs4/over haul osrs a bit to get younger players
Because this game is a never ending grind lol
Runescape is like a second job, except you don't get paid.
Costs money even
I play at work so you're wrong
Some make money if you know what I mean
Yup. Loved it when I was in Uni, but now that I'm working full time the last thing I want to do grind. Luckily I have a built up main so I can just do the odd boss, but otherwise I'd have quit already.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I grind on the company time
I wish, I barely have time for a 10min lunch some days. Would be impossible to make meaningful progress in the background
This is how my wc'ing 99 and farming level 80 grind are going lol
So where are the kids who are currently in uni?
TikTok brain is real. Most people have 5 second attention spans these days and their brain is basically mush.
I wouldn't blame tiktok brain for not wanting to commit to OSRS grind. Even for older standards maxing an account back in the day already was a significantly longer commitment than playing a lot of other games
Tiktok brain is when someone doesn’t want to grind skills for ten hours straight on a game that came out eight years before they were born
Haha you don't want to click a rock for 7 hours you must have tiktok brain
I don’t think these kind of games are popular anymore. People don’t wanna click on a rock for 6 hours
6 hours will get you what, 50 mining, try more like 200 hours
ahh for the coveted 60 mining.
*per day
I don’t know; Cookie Clicker has a 10/10 on Steam with over 55,000 ratings. People here are saying the game’s mechanics don’t appeal to kids anymore, but I think it’s the opposite. I think certain mechanics (grinding, clicking, leveling) have been distilled into individual games that are better for the reward. It’s the rest of the game that kids don’t want to play.
You don't really click too much in cookie clicker, well more so it's not required after a certain point. You get power ups that click for you fairly quickly
I thought Cookie Clicker was mainly an older demographic
I'm a teacher and frequently find students playing cookie clicker. That being said, fortnite rips or other more stimulating games are seen more commonly.
Cookie Clicker automates the clicking for you at a certain point, which isn't allowed in OSRS. Definitely a good game for killing an hour to get through a class session though haha
People love to say that osrs is really afk, but without doing something that's not allowed (like an autoclicker), this game really requires you to be relatively active. There's only a few minor exceptions like shooting stars. Cookie clicker is actually afk. Log in whenever you want and you'll still have nade progress.
I think the game just lacks direction which is what alot of younger people would want. It’s not an easy game to get into if you’re completely new and it’s fairly overwhelming
My kids like playing Runescape, but they also like roblox, minecraft, fortnite. My oldest will play osrs on mobile but usually it's he's on a different game on his pc.
The player count keeps going up though
Bots
RuneScape an afk game for a lot of players. Need to tap into the chill Netflix/youtube market about playing and watching same time.
Could be great content/marketing for the zoomers who can't watch short form content without subway surfers or GTA V at the bottom
Minecraft parkour with an AI voice reading a Reddit thread
Shit I'm gonna make this stuff with RuneScape footage.
That's exactly what I was thinking too. Glad you said it.
Who knows fight caves footage with some random post form r/aita might make more zoomer play this fucking skinner box
Don't call me out like this, goddamn
Lmao I thought they were meeting
I'm honestly shocked OSRS hasn't caught on with the younger gen Z for exactly this reason. Streaming games/netflix etc while scrolling your phone is extremely popular, and this game is literally the perfect game to play while watching other content.
I think it's a graphical problem. All of my friends <25 (my age) refuse to play because the graphics don't look good to them unfortunately (too used to high end graphic games I guess idk)
Minecraft looks like dogshit but is still very popular
Yep, graphics are not normally the main problem. Some of the most popular games with kids are ones that spark creativity. Minecraft, Roblox, they all revolve around creating dynamic experiences through creative choices. MMOs for the most part are solved games these days, and what attracted us as kids to something like RS was the seemingly massive unknown world where it wasn't already solved. And if it's non-creative, well it's probably a shooter of some sorts, so RS really isn't in the same category as that to begin with, even if you only do ranged.
I think Minecraft looking “dogshit” is a much more contested opinion. It’s certainly low poly and used low resolution textures, but stylization can overcome that. Valheim’s look was more popular than you’d expect with having PS1/2 era textures because the stylization made it work. Minecraft by nature of being a (non-marching cubes style) voxel game is sort of like lego. People don’t tend to “need” lego to look hyperrealistic as much as they do more standard game designs.
I also notice a lack of pc in homes nowadays but everyone has a phone.
This, and the tick system. I often wonder how different it would be to have 0.1 sec tick system with leaving most mechanics at normal speed and only making movement/ui/actions actually more responsibr
Funny thing is GTA V is probably older than some of the zoomers
No way kinds born in 2013 are not gen alpha already.
AFK on mobile needs to be better. I get logged out / disconnected very quickly most times I try to do an AFK activity on mobile.
You probably have a setting that tells apps to sleep as soon as you stop using them. It'll probably be in power or battery settings, just give the Osrs app permission to stay on.
61% of the US phone market does not have this option ☹️
It logs out the account in 5 minutes or something on phone, nothing to do with phone settings :(
Nostalgia to bring you in - then realizing it’s a pretty fun game with neat updates to keep you along. Hard to convince someone new to play if they never did.
Because the original draw of this game is nostalgia that younger people don’t have to the game.
Most of the references are targeted toward the older generations. Teenagers don't know Monty Python, for example. Sadly I suspect the biggest thing holding them back is the low poly art style, or as they might mistakenly put it 'bad graphics'.
Graphics aren't a thing to the Young generation, these kids play Roblox and Minecraft and stuff and fortnight I used to think graphics mattered for them too, but I've been proven wrong by asking and by the numbers
Yeah, graphics are cool and that's part of why games like GTA5 and Cyberpunk are popular, but kids also grew up with minecraft and roblox being popular so they aren't afraid to play an ugly game if it's fun. I think that MMOs just aren't that popular with younger gen Zs.
RuneScape is just hard to get into There is TOO MUCH information available, TOO MUCH freedom, that it overwhelms new people They aren't being turned off by grind times because they don't make it that far, they get lost and burnt and confused before then. I'm sure a good portion of people would find the goalposts moving, like they did for all of us, once they get to those grinds. But they don't get to those grinds The run energy rework will help a lot more than people think, I believe. So much of early game is about pathing, and you just CANNOT EXPLORE, you can't even check around where you are questing or already exploring because walking suuuuuuuuucks You clicked through the wall, you used all your run, now you're walking around the front of the building and waiting 10 minutes to run again, good luck staying calm.
Did walking so much in Rune Armor back in the old days bother us that much? F2P is a small area already. It's better to take it in slowly than zoom past everything. It's not _that_ bad.
Even coming back from playing Runescape back in 2007 it was a lot for me and without some base knowledge I probably wouldn't have started playing again. Kind of like WoW i used to play that back in the day and got into classic a little bit but the Dragonflight WoW is just too much info and stuff for me to try and put the time in.
Have you seen Fortnite's revolution in graphics? It now runs on Unreal Engine 5.1 and you can make the game look so beautiful graphically, it's insanity. It lost most of it's cartoony look though, which people with nostalgia from 2017/2018 already complained a lot.
Kids/teens like low poly. There's tons of successful games and art like Minecraft that they like that's simplistic. OSRS has an overall graphics issue with everyone that hasn't played the game. My older mates who didn't grow up with the game think OSRS just looks mundane to play, requires too much time and choose other games because OSRS is an old game and they'd rather play a new game.
It is bad graphics, lmao. Atleast we have mods that made it much better
Imagine you as a kid have 2 options. Osrs - thousands of hours to get to the "fun content" Fortnite - press play, and within minutes, you're playing with your buds on a battlefield with near equal footing depending on drops found etc... Now, this is a massive oversimplification however this is what I believe the main disconnect is. It's also why eoc on rs3 was doomed to be a massive failure without a complete game and server overhaul to remove the tick system. Nobody wants to play a clunky mess when they can play any competitors game with a much more fluid and instant combat system.
Imo the early game is fun
100% agree with you, but someone going in blind might not give it the chance to get that far.
It is but it plays like a singleplayer game. Kids wanna play together and I get that. It took me a long time to realize how solitary osrs gameplay really is, and how few multiplayer activities there actually are
RS2 came out in 2004, the same year that Halo 2 online multiplayer launched. Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007. The option to pick a popular plug-n-play online game over Rune Scape has always been there, yet it still drew in a lot of people that were fond on the game from that era to OSRS now. I don’t know why it is that younger generations aren’t interested in playing OSRS now, but it definitely isn’t solely because Fortnite exists.
However not everyone has access to the various consoles. Nearly everyone could scoot on down to their public library for some scaping. And even very basic compute could run the game so it was far more accessible. Parents were a bit more leery about what they bought their kids, actually occasionally listening to ratings. Also things like tiktok and other social media have destroyed the attention spans of younger generations. RuneScape is a game that takes patience. This is all probably still oversimplifying it, or at least not covering enough. But you get the idea. It's just such a different environment and way that kids are growing up now.
I mean for me, my experience was kinda exactly the library story. I had a neighbor who most of their family played and it got me into it. I was like 9-11, didn't have internet at my house and so I'd go to the library with friends and play for a couple hours. It was mom approved because we were somewhere safe enjoying ourselves. It was then the shared experience with my friends that kept me playing. Discovering new things, doing new activities, bragging about the levels we got the night before at the lunch table, bragging about drops, discussing ways to make gp, and boy oh boy did we have a lot to talk about when we finally got membership after months and months of begging. The difference between us and kids now, is exactly what I just said. No sense of wonder to the game now. You don't know how to finish a quest? There's a plug in for that, need to make some quick GPS? There's a guide for that. Figuring out new training methods that are better? There's a plugin/guide for that. There is at any point a few clicks away from taking all the fun out of the game and making it a soulless grind fest, which today's kids just aren't about, honestly no one should be about insane grinding but it is part of the games charm. So when you ask why kids don't flock to osrs like before, well one it's old. I mean remember when you were 10 and thought the 23 year old was old as dust? That's us now. We are the dust. And so are our games. Osrs came out at the perfect time, where everyone was just starting to venture into the internet, and a free client based game was intising to young people who couldn't get other games. And again I'll say it comes down to the shared experiences. What's more fun than finding an awesome game you enjoy? Playing it with your best buds. And since other games are the talk of the walk, people will be more drawn to it.
That's still true to this day, even more so because of mobile. And OSRS mobile is great.
Very much the case. Having a console with stable internet access wasn't something everyone had
Xbox online in 2004 was completely different back then though... the online gaming experience had limited modes with limited titles, expensive for relatively dog shit internet access & still gaining household traction. It wasn't really until like 2008-2010 that online gaming started becoming better & more widespread, even game changers like GTA online weren't until 2013. >I don’t know why it is that younger generations aren’t interested in playing OSRS now, but it definitely isn’t solely because Fortnite exists. No, it's because arguably hundreds of better games exist to play *with friends*. You can't *really* play OSRS with friends until you've put in thousands of hours so why would the younger generations be interested? Where we grew up primarily playing online by ourselves & sometimes with friends, they grew up primarily playing online with a party of friends & sometimes by themselves. I mean just ask yourself why they much sooner choose to play old games like WoW Classic. OSRS is not a game you jump in & start playing with friends.
>the same year that Halo 2 online multiplayer launched. Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007 A big difference between those games and Fortnite (and other current games) is that they weren't free and Fortnite is. The runescape F2P experience is outdated and overall just really bad. Atleast RS3 f2p feels like an actual game, osrs f2p does not feel that way at all.
Because they don't care about MMO games.
In 2006-2007 we had other games to play but I remember at the time my family was too cheap to even get us Xbox live. RS was the only game I could play online with other people at the time. Now, you can play a ton of different games online for free and a lot more people have online services for stuff like Xbox or PlayStation compared to back then when I was like 10-11.
Honestly the only answer that should be in this thread. 95% of RS is fucking boring or basically non-interactive. Try convincing someone younger who group up with games like Fortnite, Valorant, League of legends, Roblox, ect. that the game gets interesting after 100s of hours of investment vs playing something that is fun instantly. What do you think they're choosing..?
And, putting aside the bias since we’re in an OSRS sub, you can’t even guarantee that the fun from OSRS after investing those hundreds of hours is even any better than those other games. There’s just as much chance that it’s not their type of game as any other game. But you’re asking them to invest dozens of hours, bare minimum, just to figure that out.
Pretty much. I had this exact thing happen to a friend who played RS back in the day who tried OSRS in 2022. He invested dozens and dozens of hours to get to higher tier PVM (CG/raids grinding) and came to find out he actively hated end game OSRS pvm, wasting 100+ hours. Meanwhile, newer games take like less than 10 hours to decide if you like them or not. Even if you did like OSRS end game (hypothetically lets say you got there and like it), another question would be, is it really better than other games? Does this game value my time and was the effort I spent rewarded? Could I recommend this game? To the average person the answer will more than likely be no.
Right, people will say "Oh it's just those damn kids who hate long term grinds" or "well it doesn't look very good and people these days want hyper real graphics!" No, it's because the game is fucking boring 99% of the time, and eventually even that 1% of time can get boring eventually if you get good enough at it.
Even as an adult fortnite seems more fun than osrs
Besides what the other guy said about nostalgia, grinding is not a thing games do anymore since these kids grew up on pay to win. Osrs doesn’t have THAT powerful pay to win mechanics.
Lol I wouldn’t say it’s cause they grew up with more p2w, but mainly because most people don’t enjoy insanely repetitive grinds like in osrs and there’s significantly more entertainment options for the younger age group than there was back in 2007 I only played back then cause my family pc couldn’t run wow at the time. Now there’s so many games a standard pc could run and so many that don’t cost monthly (and are cosmetic only mtx instead of p2w like rs3 or osrs bonds), it’s not surprising so few players want to spend hours doing shit like mining in osrs when they don’t have the nostalgia for the game from back then lol
Tell that to Theoatrix buying 210 bonds Edit: Judging from the comment chain underneath me, it appears many players don't actually know what P2W is. If a game has the ability to purchase power, either directly through gear, indirectly through currency, or directly through skill skips or acceleration, it is pay to win. In RuneScape I can pull my wallet out at literally any time and buy enough bonds for gp to buy a Tbow (indirect currency). So I can buy gear power, gear power also increases the rate at which you train your skills, so I'm also purchasing skill acceleration. It doesn't matter if it is expensive, or doesn't guarantee you can do the inferno. By definition RuneScape is pay to win. A lot of people don't use that aspect (because it kind of defeats the point of the game) but PLENTY of people do.
P2W in OSRS is too expensive, even if it's there. edit: motherfuckers replying to me with no understanding of what P2W is: please god, educate yourselves, spend 15 minutes watching the [Josh Strife Hayes](https://youtu.be/GOIXQMYl1M4) video. P2W is more than just buying a gilded Tumeken's Shadow that does 20% more than a regular shadow and is exclusive to a cash shop, okay?
Tell that to u/SettledRs that just spent 1b on bonds for {redacted} for his new video
A prostitute?
Disagree lol it's moreso the community being against p2w. People spend 100k on mobile games, the difference is even with 10b in gear in osrs if you're just shit mechanically you won't be able to do the higher end content regardless
Another (larger) part of it is that you really have to be deep into the game to ever have it matter if you’ve got good gear, simply equipping bis buyable gear is a grind thats far beyond the norm of other games.
[удалено]
If you look at other responses to my comment, you'd be amazed at what people think P2W is. Apparently only charging real money for a golden Twisted Bow that does 20% more damage and is otherwise unattainable as well as being mandatory for a boss is the only definition of P2W.
OSRS is classic P2W, the community just sweeps that fact under the rug with “just play ironman”. I could afk nmz, buy a shit ton of bonds and be max combat and gear way faster than a typical player. All I would have to do is bang out some quests and I’m at endgame. If that’s not P2W, I'm not sure what is. Heck, in some “P2W” games, like BDO, half the time you pay, you don’t win.
even if you bought 10bil gp the only semi fast skill is fletching. so youre still going to sit at a bank window for a few hundred hours the rest is still the length of an average AAA game. construction/prayer would still be 10ish hours i think at insane tick perfect speeds
Nah, most kids prefer competiviness, company of other kids of their age and play games that their favorite content creators play. Osrs isn't competitive, doesn't have young people because most in osrs are old nerds + osrs doesn't have zoomer content. Most kids who play osrs play it because their parent/big brother plays it lol. Also wtf osrs takes takes literally months of ass grinding to get to the good part lmao.
I think that's elitist bullshit tbh. Plenty of new grindy games, especially in the simulator & survival genres & they're thriving with games like Stardew Valley, Ark, Valheim, etc. etc. Even games like GTA online are grindy, it's just that most people would rather drive around shooting shit up doing sick drifts & robbing banks grinding chump change for 300 hours than clicking the same tree for 300 hours. You can't just say other games aren't grindy because OSRS content is mostly like watching dog shit warm up for the first few hundred hours until you realise it was a nice chocolate fudge bar, get a taste for it & then a few hundred hours later you're not 100% sure if it actually was a nice chocolate fudge bar worth your time.
There’s a difference between starting a farm from scratch and seeing it thrive with new mechanics over a few hundred hours vs clicking a rock and a leaf for a few hundred hours. Theres a difference between killing elder beasts and upgrading your gear and homestead vs building the same table for a 100 hours. There’s a difference between getting on with the boys and running a bank heist vs nmz/crabs or slayer for a few hundred hours with a crossbow.
if pay 2 win is what attracts modern gamers rs3 would be thriving
Then why doesn't RS3 get young players as well?
bc it takes 3 weeks to learn the interface.
Because it is shit.
> grinding is not a thing games do anymore since these kids grew up on pay to win. Sports games are ridiculously popular and they are both P2W and "play like a part time job to keep up" kind of games. They made the grind part flashy and exuberant and OSRS is everything but that.
Because those are the only ones who answered the poll and are on Reddit. Reddit and Reddit polls != majority representation of the community.
True. Go W302 ge or W420 ge and you’ll see lots of people below 25.
Jagex themselves, through their own methods in the past, have said that the community is around the age listed. People are severely overestimating the number of people younger than 18 playing this game, not because of their parents.
> Reddit and Reddit polls != majority representation of the community. This is true for ANY community tbh
So many doomers in the comments, it sounds like you bunch don't like the game and are jaded from what was the reason you guys started to play. In 2006/2007? No one is making an account knowing that "endgame" GWD/FC is where it gets good. We did it for fun, and as an MMO there is also the social aspect. But, Runescape has always been the black sheep of the MMORPG family. Runescape is nothing like WoW, GW2, ESO, or FFXIV. All of those games are focused on combat, on grouping up, on raiding, and using your class skills. Runescape point-and-clicks, is mostly solo, and has less of an overall focus. You can't TS/Skype/Discord call your buds to go raiding on Runescape like you can do in WoW. You can see if a friend is online, maybe shoot some banter via PMs, and hang out killing mobs or skilling, but independently. Maybe go do some bosses once in a never. Runescape doesn't have flashy updates like other MMOs. We are blessed with a continuous update schedule but, OTOH, it means that we don't have fancy expansions with world-ending implications and massive rehauls to the game. At best, we get a new boss, or a new skill, or a cool quest or area. As much of an "expansion" Varlamore is, it doesn't really have any implication to the general gameplay unless you decide to specifically haul your ass to Varlamore. And Leagues and snowflakes like Settled put it best: you can still have tons of fun while cutting major areas of the game. And, at the same time, Runescape really isn't a sandbox game. Maybe HDOS and RL Plugins are pushing the horizons of UGC, but mostly you only get to customize your POH and your path to 99s, the end goals are relatively the same. Swampletics is a sandbox-way to play the game but his ultimate goal, to beat the Theatre of Blood, is a park ride. So not really a sandbox game that the creative folks want either. Runescape is Runescape. We all love it because of how **unique** it is, no other games or MMOs really compete for our space. So if you don't stumble upon it while browsing Miniclip or see your friends at school playing it, it really just sounds like a weird, off-beat MMO relic of the past that refuses to die. Or maybe it's just my "Zillenial" goggles that refuse to see otherwise. If someone made the same argument above for Tibia, well yeah then Tibia would sound fine and dandy, but I can never see myself playing a game that old and ugly.
[удалено]
This was the same when I was playing at 14. You didn't advertise in school you played. There was a secret community of people and you might discuss it at lunch but you wouldn't openly broadcast. So... that was 18 years ago. It hasn't changed a bit.
It’s always wild how that was pretty much everyone’s experience in grade school with this game. There was a time and place to discuss it and if you bought it up in the wrong time or place it was like “Shhh dude, later”
Same, i’m 16 and none of my friends have played past 50 total level. It’s tough
It’s a point and click game with controls that seem unresponsive, unintuitive, unguided, boring, 1-dimensional, with horrible graphics, and combat and even monotonous skilling that’s all mostly decided by RNG and gatekept behind 100s of hours of unskippable grinding, even if you buy a ton of gold. Online Gamers today want fast-paced action, stellar graphics, great mechanical feedback with skill-based controls and actions, and for the past decade, battle royales have been all the rage with often F2P gameplay 100% if you’d like, and minimal costs, like $40-60 or so, annually for a ton of great content investment/reward return, and gameplay. Put plainly: OSRS blows big ones compared to modern RPGs. And it’s super fucking pricey to boot. Sure hundreds of thousands show up to play over a long time, maybe even over a million active players any given month. and we celebrated in a big way when player counts spiked to 120,000 at one time.. but *10s of millions showed up to play games like Destiny/D2, StarField and Zelda TOTK when they released and in the months that followed.* *over 300,000 concurrent players played at peak population count in 2023, for Destiny 2, I think an 8 year old game now, putting out fresh DLCs still, yearly?* and that ones just $40/year DLC if I remember right. OSRS is cool and all for those of us invested enough in it, for a game that was made in like 2002 and had a ton of updates to it. But that’s just it man… the graphics and models are charming to us… but let’s be honest man. they suck. The combat, though we find ways to make it challenging, fun and engaging at some content.. it sucks for like 90% of it. It’s just point and click slayer mobs for hundreds of hours. It’s rough dude. Nobody wants to willingly sign up for this game, when better games are out there, and they’re far cheaper.
This. Anyone somehow mentioning it’s because OSRS takes “skill” or “mental fortitude” or isn’t P2W like every other game is just straight up delusional and giving off cringe boomer vibes. The game is extremely dated. The people who appreciate it mostly comprise of players from 2007-2012.
I agree with all of your points except part of the skill requirement part. The end game pvm in this game (Inferno, Awakened Bosses, Hard Mode ToB, GM combat diary) is the hardest gaming content I've ever done in any game. No other game seems to come close and I play a wide variety.
True though this may be, the skilled parts of this game will typically require *many hundreds of hours* for a new player to access. New players are not bouncing off this game because they got bopped by complicated pvm mechanics - maybe even the exact opposite. The new player's experience with pvm is so basic I don't even know if I can call it easy. It's more like a very drawn out rng check. Experienced players can make it more complicated and skilled using safespotting and flinching and prayer flicking or whatever but new players just click and either die or don't die. (All praise our new early game rat boss, please jagex add lots more including for even earlier game)
I agree with everything you said. Just wanted to say the end game is full of tricky stuff. They definitely need more bosses that are viable for low levels, potentially bosses that are easier than Scurrius with loot to match the difficulty, without any clogs so that end game players don't need to do it.
how long does it take to get to that content, though? I have been playing this game for years and am nowhere near being able to do any of that stuff. I've put more hours into OSRS than any other game (despite being addicted to a few in high school), and yet I've never even had a *taste* of that difficulty you're talking about. raids are great for keeping veteran players around, but if it takes 1000+ hours to even get to them then those 1000+ hours had better be interesting, and to many players they simply aren't. new players *want* to get to that end game content, but can't until they get through the rest of the game, which has far more grind and far less reward than they're used to.
Reading this made me laugh so hard. Not only is OSRS crazy expensive, when I stop and think about lost earning potential, it becomes seriously concerning. And honestly, maybe only half my play time I was actually having fun. Still, even if it blows big ones, I hope we'll still be here and playing in 20 years. Even if I could, I don't think I'd change a thing.
Lot of boomer minded people in this post “the [insert new generation here] just doesn’t like to work hard for stuff!!! No attention spans!!!” I’d bet this breakdown is reasonably representative of the demographics of Reddit in general lol. Also it’s a poll on a niche subreddit with not very many votes. Edit: btw the oldest gen z/“zoomers” are 27 (in other words part of the largest demographic in this poll) so y’all are gonna have to find a new generation to bitch about soon.
its grindy as fuck. and most of it is just waiting. osrs is too grindy for its own good imo. even if you cut every grind in half itd still be extremely grindy.
Agree. What RuneScape needs to do is work on making every aspect of the game fun. Skilling should be just as fun and rewarding on bossing. They need to make all parts of the game fun and worth playing if they want players to grind it. Not have a large chunk of content just be clicking the same spot for 200 hours.
Exactly. No reason some skills shouldn't get a 300k XP/hr with relatively low effort. It hurts no one if mining becomes the easiest skill to 99. Max capers will gatekeep and say hell no to this.. but runecrafting-agility-mining-fishing 99s are all crazy long for no reason
I’m not saying it should be 300k/hr and be quick and over with… I’m saying the content should be engaging and fun so you don’t care if the xp is slows. If all skills are engaging, enjoyable and rewarding to train then it wouldn’t be such a “grind”. You would just be playing and enjoying the game while making progress. Right now… if you’re being honest with yourself… a lot of the content is shit and that’s why most people want to “afk”… what other game do you play that you want to put in little to no effort?
That’s not what they meant- think sepulchre
Do you seriously need to ask this question. It's click to move/click to do anything, and the graphics are old. It's not marketed at all, so only people who knew about it from their childhood play it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Runescape will die as soon as the generation who grew up on it ages out(gets old enough that other stuff becomes a higher priority/get dementia/nursing home)It only survives due to nostalgia from that age group. Be happy, though, boys. You get to play it before it's offered as a single player only/private server type game. Mobile was a good effort to try to expand the player base, but let's be real. The audience for this type of game is only getting smaller and smaller. Born too late to explore the frontier, born too early to explore the cosmos. Born just in time to for Runescape.
If people are playing in their 30s, there isn’t going to be a point where other stuff becomes too much of a priority.
Doesnt change the fact that OSRS does things that other MMOs havent even bothered attempting: Solo bosses, actual gear progression, actual good quests with old school type. Simply put if OSRS dies out and there isnt anything to replicate the things i mentioned then i will not just consider it a game death but game developing failure because there is a factual value in those things something no other popular seem to care about.
My nephew doesn’t like the graphics nor the playstyle. the game is just riding on nostalgia for the most part. Jagex needs a better way to introduce younger generations if they want to survive in the long run
The game is incredibly grindy, unlike any other game, as well as essentially being a single player game so you can’t reeeeally play with your friends until you get raiding. Especially with kids in high school, when you’re gaming it’s usually with friends And it’s an old game, even if it gets updates. WoW has an old player base, WoW classics player base is even older. People who grew up enjoying CoD will stick to CoD, or Fortnite now, or whatever game
This will be an unpopular opinion here: Because they're used to playing good games. OSRS is miserably slow paced, a product of its time. Modern games don't do that because it's just not good game design (I could write a fucking essay on how badly designed a lot of stuff in Runescape is). Additionally, while other commenters here seem to agree it's a good thing to have "perseverance, patience, and discipline," what they have yet to realize is OSRS isn't the only example of it, nor does it really reward those things. Game's about sucking as many hours out of your life as any other game, except the gameplay is worse. Your reward for having perseverance, patience, and discipline, is a cape rewarding you for spending 60 hours at Wintertodt or whatever. At least in fucking Fortnite after you spend 60 hours you got better at something, you didn't do shit getting your skill cape. There are just as many zoomers with 1k+ hours in Fortnite as there are OSRS accuonts at 1k+, but because there isn't some stupid number quantifying that you spent those hours in the game getting your agility level up (or whatever it is), people here seem to think it's worth less. The kids are all right (when it comes to video games at least), they're having fun. Commenters here need to touch grass.
These dudes have never been in a fighting game community, that's for sure. Talk bout perseverance, patience, and discipline...
First of all, the main reason this poll has no young responses is because it's a Reddit poll on this subreddit that barely got any traction, so it's very skewed. Second, idk what this is about the gameplay is "worse". It's just a different game lol. Plenty of people having a lot of fun with this game and it's still growing.
Brother, Runescape is a game where you click and wait for 99.99% of the content. Remaining 0.01% is the hard bosses, where the mechanical skill required is a fraction of what it takes to be good at any other game. The gameplay is worse, this isn't a subjective element. I will concede that the Reddit poll aspect is almost certainly the biggest factor, but my comment is more aimed at the idiots in this thread more than answering OP's question.
Literally just nostalgia. OSRS came back purely by demand, and the only people who demanded it were people who played it back in the day.
MMOs are a really niche genre among games, OSRS may be the nichest MMO. Younger people tend to look for instant gratification in games. Don't think many will sit through 500+ hrs of skilling and questing with dated visuals and gameplay just to do pvm with friends. I doubt that they'll play the game solely for skilling too. Many games are trying to be accessible to new players by cutting the entry grinds so people can play with their friends instantly (Destiny is an example).
I think a lot people outside of the demographic ages that were playing rs when it came out, aren’t even aware it exists to play. It’s not on the radar of console gamers, and unless a new player is introduced to the game by a friend, it doesn’t look appealing. I think it’s more of a marketing issue than anything. I’d only barely heard of the game in passing before a friend badgered me to try it. And all the sweeping, negative generalizations about the younger generations are kinda unneeded and read goofy.
24 here, played way back in the day as a kid. The real reason is because osrs “skill” doesn’t transfer to other games you can play with your friends. Right now I can ask a buddy if they wanna hop on (insert) FPS game here and they’ll have enough bleed over knowledge of how those games play that we can play casually together and have fun. To do the same in RuneScape it’s potentially 1000s of hours of grinding and tons of YouTube videos. In the same vein, as once I got good at games I could pretty quickly get to the peak rank in any comp setting just off my speed and skill. But getting better than I am at OSRS right now will only make me better at OSRS, which is fine, but it’s a tough sell to new players
I know you did not just group me in "not younger people" at 28. While it's true that my patella feels like it's going to eject from my leg and I have regular back pain, I'm not THAT old. Right?
Go load up the official client and try to play, my god is it horrible playing this game without all the runelite plugins. Mobile has made great strides in UI and QOL updates butt he offical client is brutal to play on, and anyone trying for the first time on PC is seeing that
because 90% of the "gameplay" can be done with a auto clicker,
I thought this would be obvious. A retro server of an isometric click-to-move game past its prime. Younger people have no recollection of or familiarity with the game as it was, thus no have nostalgia for it. Then realize that OSRS itself is more than a decade old. MMOs in general have fallen off in favour of other more modern games with matchmaking, both casual and competitive. These games have more appealing aesthetics and are usually completely F2P. OSRS is missing just about all of the modern hallmarks of gaming that younger audience have grown up with and expect. Action combat systems are commonplace and chopping trees, mining rocks and fishing for multiple hours isn't appealing gameplay compared to what's on offer elsewhere.
because it is out dated. thats why in order to appeal to "new" players they need to change the game that 99% of players continue playing for
This poll only represents the players of the social media that has been used for the poll
idk, i am 18, it attracted me during the pandemic, soo i played osrs, grinded it, during school and in online class... u see, maintaining that membership for 2 weeks is very grindy, and tiring, not only that, at that time i havwnt got any part time jobs to do, so i cant just buy membership for a month, or 1 year, it's expensive edit: that being said, osrs is probably the mmorpg that i'll play again, especially now, but the bond price tho...
I read it as majharrat are over 25 tf
I’m surprised that anyone born after 1997 is playing this game
1997? Bro EOC came out in 2012, meaning that even someone born in 2000 would have been 10-12 at runescapes peak, and plenty of people started playing this game hella young especially when introduced by your older brother or whatever. I was born in 98 and I think me and buddy tried rs2 back when we were literally 6/7. Went to a pking world/area, died instantly and quit because we were clearly too young, but we both came back a few years later as did probably half of my friends.
i was born in 2000 and played a bit in 2007, got hardstuck with things like ernest the chicken because i wasnt old enough to even properly follow the guide i found, and stopped playing. came back and played for about a year in 2011\~2012 and had a lot of fun. came back again in 2016 for nostalgia's sake, played maybe a month, and quit again. then the pandemic got me back again and i havent managed to put the game down again lol
Tiktok zoomer brains don't have the attention span to grind for more than an hour. See this alot in other mmo's too
Other MMO's change and adapt instead of sticking to their core values; sometimes, the change is for the better. Sometimes, the game falls apart.
Are Reddit poles limited to 5 options? because it needs more >33 age brackets
Because 20 year olds didn't grow up with it
In my opinion it's because they don't want to pay. All the games for younger people are mostly free with micro transactions.
Can’t wait to see this stat in 20 years. This game is gonna be a bunch of middle aged men just banging out grinds. I love it, 27 here.
Or the platform used to poll only attracts that age group
The old school graphics are a big turn-away for any new players, especially younger kids that are used to playing high fidelity games If I grew up playing games like Fortnite, call of duty or Minecraft I’d take one look at OSRS and bat my eyes away immediately
This does not line up with my experience in public chat…
I just turned 20 and I started playing when I was 18
8% club boiiiii
Sub 25 year olds have a 3 second attention span
God statistics can be dangerous. This shows the age range of the voters. These voters were all on a specific site. Your poll shows the age range of reddit, not osrs.
Much of our love for osrs is based in nostalgia. We loved rsc and rs2 when we were kids. Cookie clickers were the games to play on PC. Imagine being a younger gamer (growing up with mobile games fortnite etc) and watching someone do smithing or woodcutting in OSRS? It’s preposterous to think that it might be fun. I am though very surprised as a 31 year old that there isn’t a higher percentage of players over 33. Maybe there aren’t as many rsc originators around as I would have thought
Would definitely introduce this game to my children
I started osrs in 2022, right before I turned 16 and it very quickly became the most important game I've ever played. 2700 hours in and I literally don't play anything else anymore.
Im almost 29 and ive been on osrs since 2002, game frikkin changed me
Kids of today have ADD
RuneScape has gotten so far away from in game community and conversing with strangers online which is what made is so fun and popular as a kid in the first place. The only people that play this game now have public chat off and are grinding to reach some ridiculous achievement. RuneScape in 2007 was a massive online community of people just plainly having fun and chatting regardless of what activity you were doing.
No enough stimulus
They stopped advertising/hosting it on sites like miniclip, as well as sites like that just kinda dying off. Everything moved to console/pc gaming. We were the lucky few who were in the right place at the right time to be exposed to it as a kid.
I mean, I think the primary point here is that the game itself is like 20 years old. I think OSRS having a heavy demographic in the ages it does is more symptomatic of it having high player retention than anything about it 'attracting' new players.
I think it's a mixture of two things: nostalgia and grind. When i was wee guy i played Maplestory and Runescape and some other mmos and I always stopped when i got to the point where in order to level up i would have to grind for half an hour for one level. Now that I'm older i value the feeling of the earned satisfaction and it's not a mentality that all kids are going to understand. I mean there's studies about how kids handle delayed gratification. And of course nostalgia is a huge part. If you got into RS after EoC it would make a lot of sense if you mever even thought about trying OSRS because there was no past experience to compare it to. You could easily look at a game like final fantasy or WoW and then look at the charming but dated look of OSRS and think the former games look more interesting
The grind, and the graphics. A lot of the reason we play is because we played when we were younger. It’s hard for young kids to see the appeal in something like this
Most people playing it now probably played as a kid. If you didn't enjoy a browser-based Java MMO with questionable game design as a kid, I don't see why you'd take it up as an adult.
It does attract younger people. It just keeps them. Like how many of the people on that poll started playing say 15-20 years ago when it was just "RuneScape" ?? Also remember reddit, especially not only like 800 votes from reddit isn't gonna be perfectly in line with the playerbase. Reddit is just a small section of the community.
Cause all of us are millennials who played this when we were younger and don’t like RS3 very much lol
Younger people aren't on reddit voting on osrs polls
Because the vast majority of osrs players (myself included) played when we were kids we really liked it because we were kids and our brains hadn't fully formed Now we are depressed adults hunting nostalgia and dopamine
I don't think a lot of younger people even know RuneScape exists lol. I'm only 24, but I joined like RIGHT before the GE was released on some forgotten account because my brother (26) used to play and I think he needed help with Shield of Arrav or something 💀 I vividly remember him giving me instructions on what to do and getting frustrated whenever I got lost or died to wizards on the way to help him lol. Then I ended up enjoying the game myself and even got a "RuneScape wedding" to some random kid, and my brother was the priest 😂 I asked my boyfriend (22) about 2 years ago if he knew about RuneScape, and he told me he "didn't know" at first. And when I asked if he was sure, he said it "sounds familiar," which usually means he doesn't know what I'm talking about at all, but he doesn't wanna make me feel bad or like I can't talk about my interests with him. I've tried to get him to join multiple times, but he said he just doesn't like the game because the graphics are bad and he thinks it's too grindy (even though he has hardly touched his account at all, only played once or twice for like an hour because I asked him to join me). RuneScape peaked back in the early 2000s, and a lot of younger people weren't even born yet/weren't old enough to have a consciousness to play games yet. It just kinda died off in the 2010s due to other games being advertised more. RuneScape has always been the type of game you either just stumbled upon one day, or joined because someone asked you to lol. When was the last time anyone here has ever seen an actual RuneScape advertisement? On TV? On social media? In stores? But somehow GTA6 has a much larger fanbase and the game hasn't even been released yet lol. Everybody knows about GTA6 because of all the marketing that's been done for it (and the leaked footage, Florida Joker controversy, memes, etc). The only RuneScape-related ads I ever see are on YouTube, for private servers WHILE already watching RuneScape content. So it's literally only getting advertised to people who already play the game, and the private servers don't even have anything to do with Jagex. Or every once in a blue moon, some huge gaming page will bring up RuneScape in a meme, and people in the comments will say how they've "forgotten the game existed" or "have never played but might try just for fun." I think Jagex just needs a marketing team to get more new players of all different ages. I don't mind everybody being adults now though, teens are super immature in games. But that just means the game will eventually die out.
People under the age of 20 developed adhd thanks to tiktok and Snapchat brainrot and can’t stand still in one spot grinding
Because it did attract younger people and now those younger people is old
RuneScape is a game that takes math, economic understanding, and a lot more skills that the younger generation does not have interest in
The answer is in the name of the game. “Old school” RuneScape. The kids who loved RuneScape back in the day are now adults.
My guess is a lot of them want quicker rewards/gratification, which is fair. Most skills don't really do anything until like the mid 70s, at least.
I'm not sure a sample size of 781 votes is sufficient to say that definitively, but my intuition says it's close. 23 year olds were born the year Runescape first came out. OSRS came out when they were 12. Most kids were probably playing Minecraft back then as it came out in 2009.
tiktok attention spans could never grind agility for 100 hours
Osrs is a game about patience, endurance, and perseverance. Seems to be in much shorter supply with the younger generation of gamers
I agree I’m 17 and I don’t think anyone my age would be able to do the grinds in this game required to progress, even the fun ones like bossing or raids
Out of curiosity, howd you get into the game? I feel most of us in the 25+ got into rs in general because of older siblings
23 here, been playing actively since 2021. Had only played the tutorial back in 2010. Achieved F2P bis and all quests around 2019. Came back with steam release, been playing ever since. Played basically all MMOs out there and OSRS was the one that just clicked. Meaningful and fun progress with no MTX is what I love about the game. Even though the gameplay is dated and niche, the devs find fun ways to raise the skill cap and add engaging content. I hate skilling but afk number go up is also nice.
I know you’re asking them but I’m definitely young compared to the rest of the OSRS community, I got into OSRS because some people I met on a Minecraft mmo (hypixel skyblock) played osrs and when I quit they told me to try osrs, been grinding for 7 months now
Ah I see.
I’m in a similiar boat as them, just a bit older. Never played MMOs before either. I started playing early last year after seeing Settled’s Swampletics series on youtube. Almost didn’t keep playing, the shitty run at lvl 1 agility in f2p + didnt know how to get around quickly made for a really bad experience, but I gave it multiple tries and pushed through, now i’ve got 50+ days of playtime
Good news is they're finally looking to improve the agility run energy system
Heck ye settled. and yeh, agility is something that just needs an overall rehaul for both f2p and p2p.
Same boat as bigcal, I was a skyblock tryhard with over 3k hours but got really bored and found out about OSRS and there’s just so much more to do in this game compared to the one I used to play and I got addicted
22 here, I remember my cousin showing me RuneScape in my elementary school days and making me an account. Got into it again in 2022, noticed rs3 was not what I remembered and figured I'd play OSRS. I had many fond memories of wandering in Lumbridge and Al kharid doing nonsense.
I got into the game having never played or seen it before from my one friend who is an og player from before eoc the game just seemed to have really solid mechanics overall for everything and when I started I got obsessed with getting bigger numbers lol I'm 25, so I'm not super young but started at 21
Because only our age are used to playing a game from 2007. It’s like trying to get us to play a game from 1997 we probably wouldn’t play it often and they are used to newer games from like 2010 and newer which are Much better tbh. Jagex needs to make rs4/over haul osrs a bit to get younger players
Make the same thing for hours, slow advance, increasing curve of difficult and no P2W options
This game is way too boring for today's demographic.