I’ve had plans to play quite a bit of OSRS (Old School RuneScape). The issue was I lacked the free time I felt was needed to properly leverage paying for a monthly subscription to be a premium member. There was also only so much more to do as a free-to-play that felt like it would be worth the time invested.
While it’s true nothing was going to stop me from grinding out any free-to-play skills to level 99. I was at a point on a free account where any upgrades or things I could be doing either required being a member to wear or go to the location. Not to mention there are a lot of quests for members that provide a huge advantage in experience and other rewards.
There are some free-to-play bosses to kill as well. However, with free-to-play items, I'd need to grind for quite some time before I would even have a decent chance at taking any one of them down. Anything I investigated doing I kept hitting the same roadblock.
It’s a good thing I ended up waiting as well. I had no idea at the time that I would end up going several months without a decent internet connection. Along with having quite a limited data cap.
Once I, however, got better internet speed it was time to go. Since OSRS can be quite a time-consuming game I might even at some point start cutting down how many posts I make in a week. A game like OSRS I never got around when I was younger is exactly the kind of game to scratch an itch that modern games just fail to even come close to.
Also, interesting enough. It turns out I could buy a $25 gift card with cryptocurrency. Then convert that RuneScape card into a membership on the RuneScape 3 store. Once you have membership it applies to both games. I could in theory make a character in RuneScape 3 as well if I wanted. For now, however, I'll be focusing my efforts on OSRS.
While playing OSRS as a free-to-play the world is quite smaller. After looking at the much wider map, I'd now have a bigger amount of access to either unlocking access or just getting there if I could find a way. I needed to come up with a bit of a plan.
OSRS is after all quite an older game. There are a lot of things to do with it. It has even become a bit overwhelming to try and decide where I wanted to put my next set of goals to achieve in the game.
One of my first places of thought was wanting to do a lot of questing. However, after doing some member questioning it became quite apparent there was going to be an alarming amount of time spent traveling around the map to get to locations. On top of my lack of knowledge in how to do so in the most efficient manner possible
There are quite a few ways to get around different places. The most basic one is simply walking or learning which boats to take and possibly even unlocking access to any other boats I needed if they simply did not let me get on board.
There are also in the world while walking around quite a few shortcut paths to be taken. They, however, usually have a requirement. Sometimes you need to have something like a hook on you. Many of those shortcuts also seem to have something in common requiring a certain level of agility to use them.
Agility is a member-only skill and only just becoming a member I'd need to invest quite a lot of time into leveling that skill up if I wanted to take advantage of those shortcuts.
There are also teleportation spells you can cast once you have a high enough magic level. I am, however, quite tight on money and magic tends to cost a bit to level up. In the short term, I already do have some spells unlocked if I have the runes sitting in a bank to use to teleport me around to a couple of different locations.
Like a lot of things in this game, you need to remember a lot of things. I've lost count of how many times I've run near a location where I had a spell to teleport to an area near it. Other times, I simply lacked a single run out of many needed to cast the spell.
Another way of travel would be building a house and a portal. Housing is a member benefit, and I knew next to nothing about that entire system. What I do know is leveling up the construction skill costs boatloads of gold, and my stacks are quite small.
There are also many other ways to travel around such as having the right piece of jewelry, fairy teleportation, and who knows what else I'll end up discovering along the way.
In the short run, it seems I need to put some focus on at least making it a bit quicker for me to get around on the map. So, I'll be working out what are some quick ways to improve my character for that. So far, I'm leaning on putting a couple of days into grinding Agility.
On top of wanting to grind out agility skills and quests. There are also these things called diaries' achievements. They came in a wide range of difficulties from easy to elite depending on the level of skill required to carry out a set of achievements in each area in the game.
While it will be quite some time before I'll be doing anything other than easy to medium diaries. Based on the kind of rewards these give this seems like quite a worthwhile venture early on to also put some time into.
Then you have stuff like me wanting to get some better gear. If I had loads of gold I'm sure I could go out and buy some powerful stuff for my combat levels. That is, however, not as fun as going out and getting stuff myself. I also just love the idea of grinding for my gear when it’s reasonable enough for me to obtain.
Some possible items I'm considering wanting sooner than later are things like a graceful set, barrow gloves, amulet of glory, helm of neitiznot, and so many other things.
As it turns out many of these things I want also coincided with either wanting to work on questing or getting around the map faster. There is also just an insane amount of stuff to do. It’s going to be quite hard to want to try and prioritize going hard on a single thing and most likely I'll just rotate around doing a few different things till I get bored of one then switch to something else to grind out for a while.
Regardless of what I end up working on first. It’s just a nice way to look at a game again and feel like no matter where I open the map up and look at it. There will be more things than I'll even know what to do with.
That is all before even considering which skills I want to start heavily leveling up and possibly thinking about what my first level 99 will be in OSRS. It will more than likely be something on the easier side of things. I would love to have my first 99-skill cape.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Old School RuneScape
