Traveling Back

Every once in a while I like to go back and play the old detail mode of Runescape just to remind me of how far we’ve come visually in the past month. A lot of people have complained about the HD update, and for various reasons. It slows down their machines. It doesn’t run at all. It makes their characters look fat. Their character’s hair looks funny. And I saw a few players on the morning of the update say things like, “I hate this, I’m gonna quit Runescape.” Comments like that raised my eyebrow as I wondered, sometimes aloud, why the hell don’t you just play the old detail mode instead of quiting all together? I know that people like to whine and pout when things don’t go the way they were expecting. I know that many of the players are children in the’r early teens who still don’t have the emotional maturity to handle disappointment properly. But really folks, just don’t play high detail if you don’t like it. It is as simple as that.

Anyway, I find myself continuously amazed when I downgrade to the old graphics. Everything in the older version seems so artificial and bland. I find it a challenge on my eyes.  Everything seems so tiny (I now play on full screen most of the time). And looking at images of Runescape Classic, the improvement since 2001 is stunning. The old Classic characters look more like cartoons than anything else. I almost need to laugh when I see them. Below is a progression from Classic to HD. The buttom picture is HD Full Screen, which gives me a near 50% increase in character size.

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The Evolution of Runescape Graphics

Because Classic is no longer open to new players and I let my membership lapse years ago, I needed to search the net for some old classic images.  The little dude in the upper left hand image is from the Runescape Classic photostream on Flickr.com.