Old School RuneScape

Old School RuneScape began as a nostalgia project, Jagex restored a 2007 backup, put it online, and expected a modest audience. What happened instead is that it became the larger of the two RuneScapes and stayed there. The reason is structural: no content ships without passing a player poll, which has kept the design remarkably coherent for a game being actively expanded two decades after its systems were designed.

There are no classes and no levels in the conventional sense. There are twenty-three skills, each trained independently, and a character is simply the sum of what you have chosen to train. That makes the opening hours genuinely directionless, and it is also the whole appeal, the game never tells you what to do next, so what you do next is actually a decision. The interface is uncompromising and the graphics are exactly what you would expect. Neither is an accident.