Over a decade ago, two brothers working out of their parents' house in Nottingham set themselves the impossible task of building their own graphical multi-user dungeon, a genre that later evolved into the MMOs we know today. RuneScape launched to the public in 2001 as a low-res browser runescape gold game with only a few hundred players and 2-D sprites for monsters, but several years later it boasted over a million paying monthly subscribers. The 2007 Sunday Times Rich List even estimated the Gower brothers' business empire to be worth over ï¿¡113,000,000, due almost entirely to RuneScape.

The secret behind RuneScape's success is that it's been continually updated throughout its lifetime, not just with regular infusions of new content but also with several major graphical and gameplay overhauls. The game was recently reincarnated as RuneScape 3, which is as far as it gets from the primitive game many of us grew up with. It now boasts a visually improved HTML 5 client with graphics acceleration, orchestral music, some voice-acted quests with cutscenes, and a fully customisable UI. This combines with last year's Evolution of Combat update and over a decade of new quests and zones to produce an MMO with more depth and character than many other AAA titles.

Rather than force new players to muddle through an elaborate and text-heavy tutorial island as in past versions, RuneScape starts off with a voiced cutscene. Players are given a quick demo of one chosen combat style (Melee, Magic, or Ranged) before being dropped into Burthorpe, which has been redesigned as a training area for new characters. NPCs here will explain how each of the game's skills works and set you tasks to get you started. Existing players logging in for the first time since the update will see a cutscene introducing the story behind the Sixth age of RuneScape, with the gods Zamorak and Saradomin returning to raise armies and do battle.

/>It's an interesting change to see cutscenes and voice acting in RuneScape, though the graphics engine honestly doesn't suit close-ups on characters' faces. The voice work in the newer quests definitely helps immerse you more in the story, but the cutscenes sometimes just look out of place and unnecessary. My first impression is that this is more of an incremental update than a total overhaul, and there's definitely still a lot of room for the game to grow. The new UI system is a welcome change, allowing you to move every element around, combine windows, and snap windows into position next to each other.

RuneScape has always been about completing the latest quests, and time not spent questing or PvPing is usually spent grinding up skills to meet the requirements for the next quest you want to do. The skill grind now feels a lot more forgiving than it was in RuneScape 2, and winning the occasional XP lamp in your daily Squeal of Fortune spins certainly helps. You can also now set a quest as your currently active task to keep track of it and set a destination on the map to get a handy direction arrow on the minimap. But a lot of information is still not easily accessible in-game, so you'll find yourself frequently looking up the RuneScape Wikia page to check what a runescape item does or see what the next step is in a quest.

/>Let's looking forward the great change lanuch in Runescape2014