RuneScape HD – Our Final Review
Hello everyone, as some of you may remember, when RuneScape HD was in beta, i did a small review of it and concluded that some of the thoughts that i placed in that article could fluctuate depending on how the final release looks and feels. This may be the old RuneScape 3 rumor unveiling.
Now, its been almost a month since the full edition of High Detail has come into play and i must say. Its amazing. For once, i will fully say that jagex has pleased a great deal of the RuneScape community. The real thing that impresses me is that they managed to do all of this with java. So such a great looking game loads up fully in your web browser and requires absolutely no installation. That’s simply awesome. So lets go ahead and break down some of the main things that RuneScape HD has introduced.
Full Screen Mode
This is arguably the coolest and long expected feature for RuneScape. Sure, it requires players to subscribe to RuneScape. But seriously, this is the type of game-play that is worth the 6 dollars a month. ( Yes, i know its 5 right now, but they will be increasing it to 6 soon, if not already. ). Below is a screenshot of the new full screen interface.
At the top right corner, you can see the new RuneScape Map. It has a few enhancements too, they’ve added a few useful things on the side such as your HP, Prayer points, run meter, and summoning skill. This should be alot more efficient then having your skill menu open! Plus, it looks 10x cooler. Lastly, they even built in the world map which you can directly use within the game now.
As you can see, the whole interface has gotten a face-lift. The chat area is pretty similar to the old interface, but it is now transparent, and in my opinion, it feels alot faster and smoother than the old chat. Plus, you can view older messages and fit more messages into that box. The private message category on the other hand hasn’t received much attention from jagex, you can still recieve messages ontop of the chat box or within the chat box. I guess that really seems like the easiest way to go about it, but it would have been nice if they added a separate tab for private. So above the chatbox, they would have a public/private toggle. Maybe they plan to introduce this in the future.
The other tools that we are used to toggling, such as the friends list have gone onto the corner on the right hand side. Most of the interfaces will be easy to learn, such as in the screenshot, the friends list pretty much looks identical to what you have become used to. The length of the actual row depends on the size of your screen i believe, because on my screen that whole row was on one line instead of 2 as dipicted on the screenshot. They’ve also left one of the boxes empty, so as an educated guess, i think they plan to add something there soon
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Graphics Update:
Well, this is probably the most obvious thing about this update. No one can now say, “RUNESCAPES GRAPHICS SUCK! WHAT A $#$ GAME”, yeah we’ve all heard that from at least one negative runescape player. But guess what? Now you can tell them about RuneScape HD
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All the textures have been revamped, even the movement of the characters has been improved. No more will you see those nasty box like character movements, the characters actually walk and run more realistically. In overall, everything from monsters, all the way down to trees has been redone graphically, without a single sacrafice to performance.
Final Thoughts:
Theres not really much to say other than the fact that this was probably the result of all those RuneScape 3 rumors from previous years. Boy, we’ve gotten far from RuneScape Classic haven’t we? Cheers to Jagex and the whole RuneScape community.
Now go whip up some HD.

Great thoughts, im loving RS HD. It seems to run well even on integrated cards, and thats a big thing since alot of rs players are people who can’t run higher end games.
Excellent article, i always enjoy reading TRB articles usually since they offer a good depth to whatever you guys are writing about.
I myself run HD really well since my pc ownssss
lol, cool read, my pc sucks so i cant run HD but thats a good screenshot
Nice article , but the empty box is for summoning familars and pets (when you have them out with you).
a good article… although somehow i got over the fact that there are new gfx released and only bother looking around when im in dungeons… which do look awesome
I think Jagex have gone really far since Runescape Classic. I love the article and the points explained in it, the only flaw i see is that it is a little short.
Its weird that this still got complaints on the forums. I’m convinced there’s a great number who will complain about everything because the updates are pretty amazing.
Good article.
“The length of the actual row depends on the size of your screen i believe, because on my screen that whole row was on one line instead of 2 as dipicted on the screenshot.”
When you run RSHD in a window, there are two rows, and when you run it in fullscreen mode there is only one…
“They’ve also left one of the boxes empty, so as an educated guess, i think they plan to add something there soon.”
As Nick said, this box is for the familiars and pets… It existed already before RSHD came out… =)
Very good article!
rs has better graphics than wow cos it requires a nvidia ge-force 3 to run wow requires the g card below that but wow runs off a disc so I duno how dat compaires to a browser mmorpg? ps gr8 article m8!
“The real thing that impresses me is that they managed to do all of this with java. So such a great looking game loads up fully in your web browser and requires absolutely no installation. That’s simply awesome.”
I whole-heartedly agree on this one concept.
The fact of the matter is that the $6/month is simply keeping up with inflation, but what Jagex could do with High-Detail is make a 16 bit and 32 bit system resolution version for each…
That’d be swell
i love RUNESCAPE yeah its all i do u know… i dont really have a life
Well, I play blockland, and alot of people are still going, “R00NSC@P3 GR3PH1C$ S0CK GAMPLAY SECKS WOW BETTER WOW SUCKS $LOLCENCORED$ OOOPS I MENT R000NSC4P3 D0ES LOOLLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
ARSEHOLES
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY”
on the games forums, so I am going to show them about this. Thanks, this is truly correct.