"Break the game - make the player feel like they are essentially just cheating!": Old School RuneScape's biggest event is here, and it's all about overpowered nonsense

This week, the Old School RuneScape community (myself included) is a little more feral than usual. These are the same fans that cheered as one player spent a week killing 16,000 chickens, mind you, and voted to continue being screamed at by one of the game's over-zealous monsters for no discernable reason. Its members include lapsed monks and former prison inmates who spent years thinking of the game. It seems to take something massive or monumentally mundane to work this crowd into a frenzy, but Leagues – temporary, standalone modes that turn the traditionally grindy game into something driven purely by power fantasy – tends to have that effect.

"It's hard not to get enamored by it all," says Elliot Womack, senior systems designer at Jagex. We're chatting just a few days away from the launch of OSRS' fifth League – called Raging Echoes – and they've spent the week flitting between nervousness and excitement. "As a player, I'm very excited. As a dev? I'm exhausted by it."

Turn away, Guthix

Back in 2013, if you'd told me that Old School RuneScape would be at its most popular during a game mode that lets players become incomprehensibly busted, I'd have laughed you out of Lumbridge. But with Leagues consistently shattering playercount records, it's hard to argue with the message: 'scapers cannot get enough of the game mode's power fantasy, which – to name a few of Raging Echoes' Relic power-ups – lets them buy prayer XP, resurrect from death with ludicrously buffed stats, and infinitely alchemize items.

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Associate design director Kieren Charles, who's been with Leagues since its inception, says these Relics sprung from "modest" beginnings. While the game mode was initially designed as a way for players to experience levelling up through Old School RuneScape again, Jagex instead decided to add some "spice" and make players "powerful in a way that you can't ever get in the main game, and we will never give you in the main game".

"In the first iteration that one of the designers on the team made, it was too modest," continues Charles. "We're not used to designing things that powerful. The first iteration felt a bit like quest rewards, or diary rewards – they were nice little perks, but weren't game shattering. My message back was 'No, I want you to break the game! Don't care too much about it – break the game, make the player feel like they are essentially just cheating!'"

But alongside these Relics, players must also choose which of RuneScape's regions their fresh character starts in – and although you can slowly unlock new areas by completing in-game tasks for points, you can't unlock them all. Throw in "ironman" rules – meaning you can't buy or sell items with other players – and the real goal of Leagues turns into trying to become monstrously strong within your means, weighing up the pros and cons of which Relics and regions to choose.

XP waste?

The thing I've found most interesting about Leagues is its ability to win players away from Old School RuneScape's usual grind. Jagex's MMO is unique in that just about anything you can do in Gielinor counts as progress in one form or another. With Leagues taking place on completely fresh characters that disappear after up to two months, a ton of players put their main account's progress on hold – something akin to heresy for many of the game's biggest fans. I missed the first few Leagues because I couldn't tear myself away from my main account, and Womack acknowledges it can be a "bit of a struggle" to win players away from their day-to-day grind.

"If you are really into your main account, it's hard to pull anyone away from that," they explain. "We probably get a lot of people that are maybe in the middle of a grind, and maybe [it] isn't too exciting – so it's easier to pull them away from it, right? But I do think people are also getting towards maybe the end of their account, and they're like, 'Okay, well, I can kind of see the end in sight now. So I'm not really in a rush anymore' – it's easier to pull those people away. That's true for the first time you get someone in a league, then I think after that, it's a lot easier to pull them back in. They kind of understand what it's about, they don't really care about losing two weeks of progress."

The bigger question, though, is whether too much of a good thing would change that balance. There's only been five Leagues since 2019 and they don't run on a predictable schedule, which makes their arrival even more exciting. Charles agrees that Jagex doesn't want to "oversaturate" the mode by wheeling it out too often, but says that the long gaps between Leagues also stems from a more practical reason. "It's a matter of: how much time is it going to take us to make the next League special?", he explains. "We don't want to keep delivering the same experience every time [...] this League will feel very different to the previous one – you'll pick different areas, and different things will matter. We need to make sure we do that next time, and the time after that."

Womack adds that OSRS' fairly frequent content drops – which doesn't follow a seasonal approach like many MMOs or live service games – further complicate planning Leagues. "Like, if we're going to release a massive update next year at the same time that we would have usually had a League, do we really release both at the same time? Do they conflict?"

"There's a lot of weird challenges there, compared to something like Path of Exile, which [developers can update every] three months, four months, and kind of ignore everything else," explains Womack. "It just kind of works for them – the only thing they have to dodge is competitors, right?"

On the topic of OSRS competing with itself, I've been wondering whether its upcoming customizable community servers will crowd Leagues' space. While Charles doesn't know the "exact details" of the feature – which is "still being worked out" – he doesn't think it will present any issues for Leagues. "My belief is there will always be a special difference when it's the big, official League, when you know it's going to have tens and tens of thousands of people playing it," he explains. "People may experiment a little bit and play it here and there, maybe for a few friends and that kind of thing. But I think it's a nice extra, and it'll be awesome to see if people experiment with that and see what people experiment with, and which modifications they make to a world – maybe [there will be] ideas we could learn from as well! It's win-win."

Right now, though, community servers are the least of Jagex's problems. "The thing I'm worried about is everyone's not going to be doing much work – probably for the next couple of weeks – because I guarantee everyone on the team is going to be AFKing something in Leagues while working," admits Charles. "That might be a slight problem."

"We do have quite a few people booked off," adds Womack, grinning. As far as issues go, it's quite a nice one to have. Over the years I've spoken to a number of RuneScape developers who started off as fans of the game, and I find that passion often finds its way back into the game. Plus – when it comes to Leagues, I think everybody should be able to commit a little time theft. You know, as a treat. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a starting region to choose.

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