Cheating in a multiplayer game is a shitty move, regardless of motivation.
They released safer seas (pvp-less servers) if you don’t want to be hassled.
If child voices bug you (squeakers), go to the options, mute voice chat from non-crewmates. Turn on auto captions for voice chat if you’re worried about missing something or them sneaking up on you because you can’t hear them.
The model hasn’t changed, but as development of new content has continued, 95% of new content is subscription only.
That said, I can’t speak for Runescape “proper” aka Runescape 3, the current “main” version. I’ve heard a lot of concerning things about all sorts of mobile game style predatory shit going on there.
I’ve only played Runescape 2, now called “Old School Runescape”, which is a fork of the game from (I think) 2006.
Essentially, right around that time they completely overhauled combat, stat progression, and a bunch of other stuff, and called it Runescape 3. A lot of people didn’t like the changes and started hosting custom servers from before the changes.
Eventually they made an official version, called it Old School Runescape, and have been developing it side by side with “normal” Runescape since.
Old School isn’t predatory in my opinion. Outside of occasional “leagues” on special servers with specific challenges applied, there’s no FOMO. The f2p game has plenty of content enjoyable on its own. The subscription just unlocks a mountain of more content, including alternative ways to level up through early game. Technically you can advance faster with a subscription, but that’s due to having more options to turn into an over optimized plan, not some shit exp multiplier or something.
My man, this isn’t shaming. It’s someone politely pointing out that the entire world isn’t your personal soap box.
Want to speak out about how shit Ubisoft is? Go make your own thread. I’m being serious, Lemmy is overdue for some name and shame of horrendous game companies, and it’d be good to have some sort of megathread documenting their bullshittery here on the fediverse.
This also doesn’t really offer a different perspective on whether the game is enjoyable or not. Your justified distaste for Ubisoft is an entirely different topic to the question asked.
If you’re up for tinkering, there’s a decent bit of mods for ship of harkinian. You can replace models with the 3DS ones, or even with Twilight Princess ones. There’s also mods for higher resolution textures.
Lastly, check out all the settings. I forget what QoL are switched on by default, but there’s a good amount of QoL you can toggle, like putting boots on the d-pad for quick equipping and unequipping so the Water Temple doesn’t suck.
Haven’t played in around a year and a half. Shame, it had been a weekly thing for our little 3 person crew. We had even started to be able to hold our own in PvP ship battles.
Stuff has been leaking about the next Half Life game since Episode 2 came out, and not much of it had anything to do with what we ended up getting with Alyx. Don’t get your hopes up newbie.
What? Search nointro on archive.org for collections of cartridge games. Search redump there for disc based.
Anything not on archive (usually newer releases, or disc based games from PS2 or later), try some of the resources from the wiki/megathread on db0.lemmy.com’s piracy community.
Don’t miss out on Mario Vs. Donkey Kong (GBA, with a recent Switch remake). It’s the psuedo-sequel. The sequels to it though are completely different gameplay styles, unfortunately.
They only care as far as going after large targets running rom sites (archive is much more than that, so they skirt by) and emulation of modern consoles (they go after the devs). They will never go after an individual just direct downloading and emulating shit.
Brother, have you heard of our lord and savior, emulation?
Outside of a few weird edge cases, everything up through N64 era is easily emulatable. PS2 is… okay for most popular games but still actively being worked on.
There’s even video shaders if you want to make it look like your old boxy TV. A lot of games from that era have graphics made with CRT screens in mind.