Just to preface this, the last WoW expansion I TRULY enjoyed and put a lot of time into was MoP. I have tried every expansion since then, but have gotten burnt out sooner or later. I came back to OSRS just 6 days ago. I have an old Runescape account back from ~2007 and haven’t played it in a very, very long time. In the last 6 days I have achieved combat level 61, with a total level of 817, a bank worth ~1million, and 25 completed quests. Now, obviously Runescape is a horizontal progression game, something Blizzard claimed WoW Forever would be, before showing us, it absolutely will not be, it will just be much slower vertical progression. This horizontal vs vertical progression is a huge topic of debate right now for anyone following WoW Forever. I never realised just how much of a problem vertical progression can be until coming back to OSRS. I will come back to this point in a second, but first I want to talk about something else. Runescape is built on player autonomy. What you do, how you do it, and when you do it, is up to the player. WoW on the other hand, is a chore list of mandatory things you must do in order to a) reach end-game and b) stay relevant at end-game. WoW feels like a race to max level where you are handed a checklist of things you have to do so you can actually access endgame content, which going back to my last point, is only made a thousand times worse by the vertical progression because you feel like the grind it pointless when it will be meaningless in a few months. (As a side note, the above is EVEN worse when you consider just how much of this checklist has to be repeated on alts, which if you want to experience other classes, you have to make. Whereas on OSRS, and games like FFXIV, one character lets you access everything the game has to offer, as far as I am aware). Now, those two things combined are terrible. Here’s an example: As I type this, I have OSRS open on my other screen, I am at fossil island spinning flax, and weaving linen. I have probably spent 4+ hours in total doing this on this character, plus a few hours doing bow strings. This is incredibly repetitive! So, so, so repetitive, and yet, it is FAR less monotonous than end game questing in WoW. End game questing in WoW may look less repetitive on the surface, with new zones and new mobs, but when you get down to it, it isn’t. It is kill X of these, collect X of those, speak to them, repeat. What makes this so bad, is both things I spoke about before, autonomy and progression. First of all, in OSRS I CHOSE to spin this flax. The game never once asked me to do this, there are many other ways to make gold, and I could easily continue questing or grinding skills without making more gold if I wanted to. Second, any gold I make from this is a PERMANENT investment into my character. Say I buy gear with it, when it comes time to upgrade my gear, I can sell it back for around the same price, so that gold was never lost in any way, just frozen in an asset. I could buy runes, which is a direct translation into magic EXP which will always stay relevant because the level caps never change. Whatever gold I make from this completely voluntary grind is a permanent investment into my character. Horizontal progression isn’t what makes OSRS great, it is the fact that it is combined with so much freedom and autonomy, and experiencing so much of that in an MMO, makes me wonder how I could ever look back to games like WoW again. Plus, it feels like Jagex actually gives a damn about the player, while Blizzard only cares about money, which also plays a huge role in all of this, but that is a whole other kettle of fish. Edit: Grammar. submitted by /u/Tessiia
Originally posted by u/Tessiia on r/2007scape