It's almost impossible to put OSRS' 'Old School' feeling into words, so I gave its devs a crack at it

Old School Runescape has expanded in ways a younger, more sprightly version of me could never have imagined. We've now reached the point that Gielinor has ostensibly revealed all its overworld has to offer, its Varlamore update clearing away the last of the black squares of nothingness that punctuated its world map. Yet, despite the swathes of new monsters, quests, and even entire continents that have arrived since the Old School version of Runescape 2 launched over a decade ago now, the game has never once felt like it's strayed from that special something that made it so magical for me growing up.

What constitutes this sense of 'Old School' is something that I've never quite been able to distill into a simple answer. For me, it's the sickies thrown and all-nighters pulled at school to head down into God Wars. It's the breaks I took from writing Masters papers to dive into another adventure. Today, it's the weird conversations I have with other players while whacking away at the Gemstone Crab during my lunch break or between gym sets. It's not just nostalgia, it's just Runescape. But what do one of the best MMO's creators reckon is the secret sauce to Old School? I recently sat down with OSRS dev trio Ed Pilkington, Elena Nordmark, and Kieran Charles to chat about all things Sailing, and used the opportunity to put the question to them.

Using Sailing as a contextual example, Nordmark says: "It's not just a unique game mechanic, it's the visuals, the audio, it's everything combined. If it feels like it could have been there from the beginning, that's Old School." From a design perspective, Nordmark firmly feels that retaining "consistency" is key.

"It's very hard to define," Charles muses, "it's a sense of familiarity. It's not realistic, right? We could have made boats behave realistically, but that's not going to fit the game. It would feel so alien compared to everything else. It's a level of jankiness that feels so appropriate that it just fits. I mean that in a positive way!"

Pilkington, meanwhile, reveals that much internal head-butting has happened to try and conjure up an answer. "We've done so many things and dug into 'what is the Old School feeling?' We've documented so many things about rules on what we should and shouldn't do and that sort of thing. But ultimately what it culminates as is an emotional response. It's not nostalgia, it's not necessarily exact characters or lines of dialog. In a couple of cases, maybe; Wise Old Man, for example, but it is more the emotions you feel as you're playing rather than connecting with certain things. […] It's like trying to create something that feels like home."

As Old School has continued to flourish, especially over the past record-breaking year, it's also managed to capture an entirely fresh cohort of players who never experienced it through the lens of nostalgia.

"It's interesting because you almost want it to feel nostalgic," Nordmark says. "But people who didn't play back in the day will still know what it feels like for something to feel Old School."

So, there you have it: consistency, emotion, and a healthy dose of jank. If I was Professor Utonium cooking up a Powerpuff MMO, these are the ingredients that, at the very least, would get me some way to conjuring Old School Runescape. Though, the reality, perhaps, is that the intoxicating scent carried by the cauldron's smoke is where Old School's lure truly lies; intangible, ungraspable, even if you think you'd finally gotten a handful of it.