The world existed only to perpetuate an endless skill-grind that was largely without purpose, and the height of competitive or co-operative gameplay was racing a friend to a particular skill level. It’s been almost ten years since those first moments of RuneScape, and the game today is barely recognisable as that world many of us grew up in. The game engine has had several major graphical overhauls over the years, from the RuneScape 2.0 3D upgrade in March 2004 to the RuneScape HD overhaul in July 2008. There are now hundreds of servers worldwide, and players can benefit from ten years of previous content updates.

Back in April, Jagex published the largest content update in RuneScape’s entire ten-year history. The Dungeons of Daemonheim expansion brought in dungeoneering — a fantastic new solo or group activity with practically infinite replayability. Players can form groups of one or more characters and venture down into the dungeons of Daemonheim to test themselves against some unique challenges. The high degree of replayability comes from the fact that the dungeons are procedurally generated and tailored to the specific skills of the players in the group. The dungeon rooms are filled with monsters of varying difficulty, items you can use and skill challenges that unlock bonus rooms and loot. Dungeoneering is available for free players, though some of the content is limited to subscribed members.

In this hands-on article, we get to grips with RuneScape’s massive dungeoneering system and ask whether or not it’s as fun as it sounds.

The concept

 The basic mechanics of dungeoneering are absolutely inspired. By procedurally generating dungeons tailored to a specific group, players can have a completely different experience when grouped with different friends. One of the most important mechanics is that you can’t bring any items into or out of the dungeon. Part of the challenge in the dungeons is in crafting the various items you’ll need to survive. Materials can be scavenged from the environment by cutting down trees, mining ore nodes, picking various plants or fishing for food. Materials like wood and ore can also be looted from various monsters or bought for gold at a smuggler NPC who sits at the start of every dungeon. Since you can’t bring any gold in with you, the gold dropped as loot when you kill monsters is an invaluable resource. Items you find that you’re not going to use can also be sold to the smuggler in order to buy materials you can use.