RuneScape
Run! Escape!
Part Two: Lumbridge Job Centre
The first person I meet in the starting town, Lumbridge, is a beggar. "I've spent all my money, and I can't be bothered to earn any more," he says. I've been through this before. It's the old "waste a gold piece because you think the beggar might be a bearded princess" trick. I always fall for it, because I think it makes me a better person. But I realised that I was being given a subtle hint not to kill beggars with kindness. It was RuneScape's way of telling me that they'd only spend it on absinthe and Marlboro Reds.
So, RuneScape has a strong work ethic, and work ethic here means fetch quests. The very first job I took on involved me fetching 23 cooked chickens. (Can I just type that in words? Twenty-three.) Finding a few chickens opposite Millie Miller's Mill, I killed them until my backpack was full of raw meat.
I say "killed". Early combat is more like watching the world's first computer slowly bleed binary. Each battle took nearly a minute to resolve. Chickens only have 3HP, but both myself and my equally determined and noble combatant seemed completely incapable of hitting each other. The long stream of zeroes - punctuated by the occasional one - was bizarrely gripping. By the time I'd reached level 15, and upgraded my weapons to match, beating a Level 5 goblin wasn't much more fun.
Apart from issuing the attack command, you have three ways to influence the fight. The first is a setting: your attack style. I could also cast a spell, a process which uses up runes and gives you Magic XP. I could also have activated a prayer buff. I refused to pray, feeling that if I had to pray to survive a flurry of chicken pecks, I'd be better off playing Insaniquarium Deluxe for the rest of my life.
As I levelled up, the zeroes turned to more regularly to one, and although it'd be some time before I saw my first two, my backpack slowly filled with sixteen carcasses. Time to cook some, and hand them in. I chopped down a tree, lit the logs, and destroyed eight of my corpses thanks to my low Cooking level. The only thing that stopped me weeping from the thud of futility was the fact that I'd levelled up in four of my boxes. So that was pretty f***ing awesome, all things considered.
Part Three: Questing For Coins
I died. There's no excuse for my death, I was simply caught up in the zeroes and ones, and forgot to run away when death became likely. Battle has such a randomised feel that it's an exciting gamble, but there was more was at stake than I realised. This is old-school MMO death - you lose pretty much everything. There's no "soulbound" here, no sanctity of possession. You die, passers-by will loot the meat from your bones.
I've never been more tempted to beg. Nothing was possible. I couldn't chop down trees, because I didn't have an axe. I couldn't buy an axe, because the cheapest was 16 gold pieces. I went back to the cook I'd got the chickens for - he wanted 22 raw shrimp. With no fishing net, I threw myself at the mercy of a fisherman, who was disgusted enough by my wailing void of dignity to give me a free shrimp net.
And this is how the rebuilding of my squalid life began. Fifteen minutes of fishing, in which I took advantage of the tabbed browsing environment by control-tabbing to some erotic jpgs. It's difficult, however, to maintain an auto-romantic mood when you're waiting for the sounds of prawn-sloshing to stop in another window.
Paid by the chef, I bought an axe, and the best armour I could afford. Luckily, my sword had survived the death. Replacing everything was a pain - shops are inconveniently scattered. The sword shop in Varrock is a couple of minutes walk from the shield shop in Falador. This walking - it's all part of Jagex's barely-disguised eagerness to fill the time between levelling up with something. That's OK for children: they're made of time. If you cut them open, pocket watches fly out. But I'm an adult. An adult who's chosen to play games for a living, sure; but that doesn't stop me feeling witheringly mortal when faced with such blatant life-eating tactics.
I moved on to the quests, and at last, I found something that appealed to me on a level that wasn't... levelling. For levelling's sake. Some quests were your standard forced exploration, but some were like Ernest the Chicken, a miniature point-and-click adventure that made clever use of the control system. Others were just as entertaining, and the script is often knowing and self-deprecating enough to win you over.