The good news is I’m enjoying it. It’s definitely a much deeper game than it used to be. One of the cool things about Runescape is that when you kill enemies, they leave bones behind. You can bury them and gain a little bit of experience. This allows you to level up in prayer. Prayer is a skill that can become very helpful later on. Also, the cultists I killed dropped a bunch of cooked meat. As it turned out, I would need all but one for the boss fight against the demon Delrith.
Then, there was one major story quest to complete that was actually fairly challenging with a mix of puzzles. The creatures were challenging to defeat, but they always dropped minnows, which are the fish equivalent of cooked meat. This helped me complete my Pathfinder set and gave me lots of experience lamps that you literally “rub” to level up your stats. In Runescape, your attack, constitution (health), strength, and defence are all separate. Also, Runescape values you being able to use melee, ranged, and magic attacks throughout the game, as different monsters are weak to different types of attacks. You level up melee, ranged, and magic separately as you use them, as well. I’ll get more to that later.
When you go to the Combat Academy you have to put all of your gear and anything in your backpack into the bank. There’s a chest nearby so it’s not inconvenient. I didn’t realize you had to throw your gold in there, too, though. Fortunately, the bank was able to store what I had at this early point in the game.
It’s not just a tutorial, either. When you complete each tutorial, you get “graded.” Based on these grades, you get a certain amount of reward books. These give you a decent amount of experience in the combat skills of your choice. I simply evened out my strength (melee), ranged, and magic skill levels. I didn’t grade out perfectly on some of the tutorials, so I may return later and get some better rewards. However, at this point, the experience may not be worth it.
My goal right now is actually to return to the first story quest. It takes quite a bit of effort as there are many items I need to collect. My thinking is that I’ll follow each path in a row. I don’t regret at all doing those Academy trials first. That experience should prove very helpful in my adventuring. Hopefully, I’ll be playing this game for awhile longer and give you my thoughts on if this game is worth playing for free in the long run.