I got on runescape after god knows how long... and wow. It's not even the same game anymore.
In a good way or a bad way?
Never played it but I looked in on it from time to time way back in the day.
Well, they enhanced the graphics and sound design. The retro feel is no longer there (unless you're playing the 2007 edition), which I personally like. Everything is prettier, save for sections that didn't get updated yet. They knocked the sound design out of the park for the most part. You even hear the torches as you walk by them. They added water shaders, if you could call them that(Two alternating texture maps that fade into eachother, essentially), which look good as long as you don't spend long looking directly at them. That said, the actual texture maps are awful when you focus on them, in that they look like paint that was brushed onto the surface more than water. Oh, and they have voice acted stuff now. It's pretty sweet.
They now have a standalone launcher that runs the game... better than it would have run otherwise. I can't get more than 20 fps at any given time, but it's better than falling into the seconds per frame hell that the new graphics would be in a browser. Hell, I got a better framerate running The Witcher 3 on max settings. (Oh and screw large crowds -- they easily quarter your fps)
Gameplay wise, it's probably another thing that's up for interpretation. They added a skill system (which gives you abilities for each of your combat skills), which can be toggled on and off... though there's no practical reason to toggle it off. They have a neat feature with the skills called "revolution" which automatically cycles skills for you so you can just click on mobs and enjoy the show. Setting up skill bars pretty much revolves around getting it as compatible with revolution mode as possible.
Now, what's really fascinating, and this isn't really a change, but lots of resources are unlimited and easy to get. You can harvest and make unlimited wood, runite, adamantite, mithril, food, armor, etc using resources that regenerate fairly quickly, but there's still an economy for all of it. Through the inventory restrictions, lots of goods are able to retain their value. It always fascinated me how, in runescape, you don't even need to pick up a sword to make it big. It's an MMO that seems to really give you the ability to choose your path... or all of them, if that's your cup of tea.
One issue that has only grown is... Jagex seems increasingly eager to get you to subscribe to their 10$ a month membership. In the new UI there's a "subscribe" button that you can't get rid of and that forces you out of the game and into a pay screen if you click it. All you can do is move it in the UI editor(The UI editor allows you to adjust the size and location of hud elements like bank windows, minimap, etc which is actually pretty nice).
With every expansion, too, there are more "only members can access this" or "Only members with an agility of 12 can climb this 1 foot pile of rubble", and the list of member's only skills only grows. More than half of the unlocks in the skills that free players CAN level are reserved for members, and a fair number of the ability unlocks that f2p players are barred from are noticeably overpowered. They added a way to 'earn your membership' through bonds, but bonds cost about 12 million gold. To put it into perspective, a full set of runite armor, two weapons, and a runite pick and hatchet cost about 100,000 gold, probably a bit less. To get the scratch for one bond would take selling 120 sets of runite armor, weapons, and tools. For the uninitiated, runite is only avaiilable in extremely dangerous areas for f2p players, in the back of what is known as "The Wilderness", which you can't teleport out of and will lose almost everything on your person in if you die. Most people struggle to make 100k in a day, so you can probably see how restrictive the bonds really are.
I'm not a huge fan of only being allowed to consume ~10%(and shrinking) of the content in the game, but I'm not going to hold that against them. They probably think of f2p as a free trial more than anything... but each expansion makes our slice of the world feel that much smaller.
I guess, to put it simply, the only bad things about the changes are how they approached monetization, and the horrid optimization. Regarding monetization, the immense capacity with which they hobble the f2p crowd just makes me want to not pay them out of spite. I've paid almost 100$ into another mmo that had paid content be simple bonuses, cosmetics, that kind of stuff. And frankly, that game didn't even get close to the depth of Runescape. Honestly, if they spent more time pleasing people BEFORE they decided to pay, I probably would have paid into this game for those little things because I'm pretty confident that ten years from now, hell, maybe even 20 years from now, I'll be able to come back to Runescape.
It just refuses to die, and I can respect that, actually... but as it stands now, if I were to get a membership and get into the big leagues... when that membership runs out... I can't use any of the stuff I got as a member. I wouldn't even be able to go to the house I build, or the clan citadel that I tirelessly gathered resources for, and I wouldn't be able to use any of the cool gear I got as a member... until I paid them again. Granted, that has always been an issue, but it's ever more apparent the more you progress... the more you understand that content, the scope of it, and the better the gear that you're eligible to use as a member as you keep levelling, the members items that you come to realize you can afford, but can't touch... and so on. If it looked like I was, I wasn't sent into a blind rage over them trying to get a return on their investment... I just think there's much better approaches to it than this.