1. Tons of free content. I didn't get a membership for a long time. When I did it was something like 5 dollars a month, which I could scrape up as a kid.
2. Massive world. You could wander around for hours and find new stuff. Even just little things like some cool empty building, all of it was so fun to explore. Staying up late and exploring the wild with a friend was legitimately thrilling - and horrifying when you'd see a little yellow dot show up on the minimap.
3. Tons of quests and content, new content came out all the time.
Whoever pushed RS3 greatly misunderstood all of this. Graphics improvements were appreciated but not super necessary - otherwise, the game was basically ruined by having tons of random shit and an extremely cluttered UI. Really bad mobile game vibes.
I played against a year or two ago, just for a week or two, and it was still super fun. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a time sink, and I just can't spend time on it anymore. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.
I got back into it a year ago and it's nostalgic and fun - but yes, definitely a time-sink. I'll often have it in a spare window though doing some AFK skill such as fishing or woodcutting - helps keep me sane when I need to do some more mundane work tasks, lol.
There are some really old multiplayer servers kinda like that, where you can find ruins of ancient buildings from early betas
We probably would have played WoW if we could afford it and our computer could run it but for a lot of folks like us that just want realistic.
Back when i first started playing I never really did much of anything really... explored around, tried quests and never thought of looking up a guide, talked to alot of people standing in the bank, played alot of minigames etc. etc.
Years go by and I come back and i was hooked on efficiency. What wierd methods were there for getting insane xp per hour like sitting in lunar island, cannoning the trolls, while woodcutting the trees and high alching the logs.
skip to my early 20's when i first started programming for my day job and i would come home and write runescape bots for all sorts of stuff. One of my favorites that i wrote would have around 20 bots with gmauls sit in multi-wildy and hive mind spec poor souls who walked by.
I haven't touched RS in years, but funnily enough last weekend I found out the OS buddy and the runescape Wiki post grand exchange data. Was spending some time learning rust and decided to build a grand exchange analysis tool that looked across a number of factors (Volume, stability, beta) to determine the best items to flip.
Don't really want to post it on github cause it'd probably fuck with the economy but if anyones interested, hit me up at rhoades.lorenzo@gmail.com