Nobody Does Content As Good As The Old School RuneScape Community

Highlights

OSRS community produces high-quality gaming content appealing to non-players.
Gielinor Games and unique creators like Settled showcase the community’s creativity.
Jagex supports content creators, fostering a strong and collaborative community.

RuneScape – what a wonderfully versatile game. I first laid my hands on Jagex’s mega-popular MMO around 2007, coincidentally the year of play the developers would later model the Old School RuneScape (OSRS) variant of the game around. I haven’t touched the game in years, but that hasn’t stopped the YouTube algorithms from feeding me a steady stream of OSRS content over the past year.

I’m not exaggerating by saying that the OSRS community is producing some of the best gaming content on the Internet. There isn’t another community out there squeezing more high-quality videos out of their game than the RuneScape players. Crucially, these videos appeal to non-players like me, and that’s all because of how they’re presented.

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One of the most popular series ongoing is the Gielinor Games, a sort of Survivor-esque game show hosted by SoupRS. A cast of twenty members competes in weekly challenges, trying desperately to avoid ‘The Banning’, a (mostly) 1v1 challenge where the winner survives and the loser goes home. We’re currently in the midst of season four.

As a non-player, I don’t have intimate knowledge of almost anything in OSRS. However, the Gielinor Games is presented in such a manner that anything that requires more complex game knowledge is explained, either through Soup’s voiceover or by one of the contestants in their reality television-style ‘talk to the camera’ dialogues.

I started watching the Gielinor Games during the third edition of the show, ignorant of many of the personalities participating. Any OSRS player knows Settled, J1mmy, Boaty and so on, but I wasn’t a player, so I didn’t. Regardless of my lack of knowledge, Soup’s editing brought out the colourful personalities of these people, and now I feel quite familiar with the regular cast even though I don’t personally watch their videos.

You might think the Gielinor Games is an anomaly; something unique that transcends the hardcore audience and pulls in the casuals. The popularity of OSRS content isn’t limited to just the Gielinor Games, though. Another popular creator who has earned an audience with his unorthodox approach to playing RuneScape is Settled.

Settled famously spent years of his life playing a Hardcore Ironman (an account with ‘one life’ that can’t engage in social aspects of the MMO, like trading with other players) entirely within the in-game swamp region of Morytania. The whole thing began as a quirky experiment but quickly became a gripping tale of perseverance and the conquering of adversity. Settled’s infamous in-game death during the series was commemorated by Jagex, who added a Broken Crossbow to the tile where Settled died.

Settled has continued in this vein of self-imposed restriction, recently completing a ‘Tileman’ playthrough. This ruleset stipulated that Settled had to unlock tiles through gathering experience, severely limiting how far he could travel. His current masochistic struggle has seen him invest over 200 hours in an account that gets instantly deleted if his character takes any damage at all.

Another recent video I thoroughly enjoyed by J1mmy saw him throw the biggest house party ever in his player-owned home. The festivities included a pub crawl through Gielinor’s many taverns and a mass gathering of veteran players atop a mountain. The recurring gags are hilarious and the editing is sublime, and once again a testament to the creativity of the community’s creators.

To their credit, developer Jagex is cognizant of the strength of its content creators. They collaborated with SoloMission, a creator, on his unique game mode, Deadman All-Stars. A developer that facilitates the creativity of its creators should be treasured.

The Old School RuneScape community is a shining example of what an MMO community can be. There’s collaboration among its creators who genuinely adore the game they’re playing and they don’t pretend otherwise. I almost wish I’d played RuneScape for the past decade so I could feel more a part of it.