Honestly, past the hype train, I feel like I got robbed. Glad other users on here have seen this, since pro journos can't be trusted.

Gameplay:
First person really doesn't work well. Difficulty is laughable, even playing in first person with all aim assist turned on. Enemies take multiple hits, and you are a tank. There's lots of standing in the open and shooting at each other from 10 feet away, out of cover, shaving off health with multiple shots. Basically gives everything a very low energy, low pressure feeling even with all assists turned off, so that you feel no excitement. The whole experience just feels like a chore. Free aim is terribly clunky, and hit detection is something they still haven't got the hang of without lock on turned on. I'm a very mediocre gamer, and this was one of the easiest game I've played, and not in a good way. Enemies are identical in behavior and armament, and don't behave organically enough to justify the sameness on the grounds of "realism". Last but not least, a lot of boring riding through the same forested landscape. Its wants to be the Witcher but lacks the beauty, variety, and depth of the countryside. It also can't get off its own shaft, and constantly make you ride the same area and pause so the developers can jerk themselves and make you look at their masterpiece. Never though, did I have organic moment like in other games where I stopped to admire.

Story:
Bad. But I have a much higher bar for stories than most people, while my gameplay bar is about average. Still if you like HBO stuff more than say FOX or NBC, the story will disappoint. It's the same tragic tale as last time, with very inconsistently written characters. The dialogue is great in some cases, but the overall story is very lacking. The biggest issue is the attempt to paint Arthur as the good guy, vs just a likeable bad guy.

When you murder 700 law abiding government officials, its hard to portray the guy as a classic hero, but try they do. To make it doable, the employ the laziest method ever, which is to make everyone else racist, and Arthur and his gang of barely literate horse thieves and prostitute feminists and equality centric. Why is it okay that Arthur is killing trains full of 18 year US Army personal just doing a job? Oh, because they are, every one of them racists, so now Arthur the murdering thieve is a nice guy do-gooder. Dumb + lazy writing. Makes me wish for Niko again. Didn't pretend to be a good guy any more than Scarface, so when he thinned out the ranks of the NYPD, it still made sense.

Value for money:
Low. They claim like 200 hours in bonus activity, but this isn't the case. You end the game with tons of money, with nothing in the game world to spend it on. Even if you did have something worth buying, you wouldn't be able to make it. All side activities pay very poorly. Robbing a store (banks are not robbable???) pays 30$, meanwhile the bounty you'll rack up escaping will be a minimum of 400$ bounty if you want to have any fun, and you can lose thousands if you die. Bounties pay nothing, like 80$ on average, and hunting fishing is boring (somehow the only viable option is with a bow, and you there are so many animals you can just ride up to them and dead eye, making it pointless to go looking) and pays very little. Stick ups pay 50 cents, and always go the same way. Poker games are limited to 5$, also making them pointless. I think the reason the post game feels so dead is to force people into online.

Most MMOs lead you on a campaign that introduces the most important characters, areas and activities, and only then do they take the leash off and tell you to do whatever you want. That last bit is where Old School RuneScape starts. It's a sandbox MMORPG that's deliberately grindy and intimidatingly hands-off. You go through a five-minute tutorial which teaches you the absolute bare minimum and then you're unceremoniously dropped into the hometown of Lumbridge. It's the kind of game where you have to bookmark the wiki before you can get anywhere. But if you're willing to push through the harsh learning curve, and if you find RuneScape's freewheeling sense of adventure liberating rather than overwhelming, you may well find your forever game.

Part of the reason Old School RuneScape is so bad at explaining itself comes down to its heritage. A decade ago, there was no Old School RuneScape. There was just RuneScape. But after a major update totally overhauled RuneScape and turned it into what is now colloquially known as RuneScape 3, Jagex ran a poll to see if players wanted independent servers where they could play RuneScape as it was back in the day. Nearly 500,000 people said yes, and Old School RuneScape was born. So, the threadbare tutorial is more than enough for people who've played RuneScape before (like myself). That said, Old School could still stand to guide new players a bit better, because it's totally unlike other MMOs.

For starters, there are no classes, only skills. Everyone has the same 23 skills, which can broadly be grouped into combat skills like Strength and Ranged, crafting skills like Herblore and Fletching, and gathering skills like Fishing and Mining. All skills start at level one and go up to 99 as you gain experience by dealing damage, crafting potions, catching fish and so on. In other words, you are not a mage, you have high Magic. You're not a warrior, you have high Attack, Strength, and Defence. Your skills reflect your playstyle, but there isn't a hard division between character types. Everyone is encouraged to level all of their skills, and the end goal for most players is to get all of them to 99.

Old School RuneScape also doesn't play like most MMOs. It lacks the customary array of skill bars, hotkeys and cooldowns. It feels more like an old cRPG. It's presented in simple, literal terms, and it's almost entirely mouse-operated. The world is laid out on a grid, and to move your character, you click on the square you want to move to. To talk to an NPC, you click their "Talk to" option. To attack a monster, you click on its "Attack" option. You can do almost everything without touching your keyboard, though it's much easier to play once you set up a few shortcuts.

From its low-poly graphics to its point-and-click interface, Old School is about as barebones as it gets, but simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's no fat on RuneScape, and it works because, more than anything, it's a game about setting and reaching goals. It's about improving your account by reaching the finish lines you set for yourself, whether that's earning enough money to buy an expensive item or training a skill to 99. You decide what you want to do, and with every milestone you hit, you unlock new things to do. It's a hugely engrossing cycle for the right kind of player, but it's not always a fun one.

I went into Old School with a clear short-term goal in mind: complete Recipe for Disaster, RuneScape's most difficult and famous quest. To do this, I'd have to complete dozens of other quests and train multiple skills to decent levels, making it a great way to see a lot of the game in a short time. For new players, it's also the best way to learn how RuneScape handles quests.

There's no defined campaign or main storyline in RuneScape. Instead, its world is fleshed out through quests which are structured like short stories. RuneScape's quests aren't disposable tasks like the fetch quests you pick up from random NPCs in many MMOs—at least, most of them aren't. They're loaded with branching dialogue, unique puzzles and endearingly janky cutscenes. In one quest, by constructing a research tower I unwittingly helped a bunch of researchers create a homunculus, and then I had to calm the confused, malformed being I'd helped create. In another, I uncovered a fraudulent plague that a king had used to quarantine half his kingdom in order to cover up some demonic dealings. Recipe for Disaster is about rescuing committee members from the Culinaromancer, a powerful food wizard, by feeding them their preferred dish.

Thankfully, some of Old School RuneScape's more recent updates introduced minigames that help liven up otherwise boring skills like Cooking and Firemaking. And while some skills are still dull to train, they're at least more worthwhile thanks to the addition of skill-gated regional diaries which give you a globetrotting to-do list—kill this monster, talk to this NPC, complete this quest, craft this item and so on. Completing diaries unlocks incredibly useful utilities and shortcuts, so they motivate you to train skills and complete quests. They also offer a small but precious dose of direction: if you need a new goal, you can always work on your diaries.

Like diaries, new game modes also encourage players to train their skills. I said earlier that there are no classes in RuneScape, and there aren't, but there are two different account types: normal accounts and ironman accounts. If you play on a normal account, you can do whatever you want, but if you're an ironman, you can't trade with other players, meaning you have to earn and craft all your items yourself. This makes RuneScape much more demanding, but it also amps up the payoff of getting things done. As such, it's rapidly becoming the most popular way to play. True devotees can raise the difficulty further by playing as hardcore ironmen, who are demoted to normal ironmen and kicked off the hardcore leaderboards if they die even once, or ultimate ironmen, who can't store their items and have to carry everything on them at all times.