Old School RuneScape has been around for a long time, and this year, there will be ten years since the official launch of Old School in 2013. Plenty of activities have kept players going for a decade, from skilling to bossing to completing achievement diaries and getting GP to improve their banks. On top of this, there are loads of minigames, and some are less popular attractions because their rewards need to be better.
Minigames in OSRS
Other minigames are mandatory for any account, such as the Barbarian Assault minigame or the Pest Control minigame. While the former will give you access to a crucial piece of gear and to the completion of one of the elite diaries, which is a huge milestone, the other also plays a role in your achievement diaries and will bring you a complete set of handy gear, the Elite Void Gear.
However, Jagex’s tendency in the past few years was to bring minigames that give a consistent alternative to already consecrated skilling methods. For example, the introduction of the Giants Foundry minigame brought a very cost-efficient way to train your Smithing skill and a new opportunity with the new ability to recycle some of the metal armor and weapons and smith eight cannonballs at once.
The Guardians of the rift minigame brought an alternative way of training your Runecraft skill in a more interactive setting while earning rewards that significantly alter how you’d typically train your Runecraft skill, such as the Colossal Pouch or the Runecraft outfit: the Raiment of the Eye. These items aim to increase Runecraft’s profitability, while giving you slightly more XP per run since you can carry more essence.
Tower Defense
Jagex is considering stepping up their game and bringing a tower defense minigame to RuneScape. If you haven’t heard of it before, Tower defense is a game where you’ll have to build towers to defend against progressively harder waves of mobs and prevent them from reaching a certain point.
Most tower defense games will give you a variety of towers to choose from when you carefully consider what to build or upgrade. These towers often have different strengths and weaknesses and consume specific resources when built.
The main point of the game is to build towers in such a variety, strength, and positions as to defend against the variable waves of mobs coming through. It is also a resistance game, and the more waves you manage to face, the better the final result will be.
Waves
Thinking of RuneScape, there are some occasions when you encounter waves of mobs. Still, the most memorable is the fight caves, where after 61 waves of progressively harder mobs, you will finally face Jad, one of the strongest bosses in Old School RuneScape. However, if you defeat Jad, you will be rewarded one of RuneScape’s most iconic and valuable untradeable items, the second-best in slot melee cape: the fire cape.
Could a tower defense minigame in Old School RuneScape have a similar difficulty and reward to that of the Tzhaar fight caves? Or is Jagex planning on bringing something with a much lower difficulty?
Construction
Jagex stated that the design of the Old School RuneScape tower defense minigame would synergize your character’s progression and mainly the mechanics of OSRS’ skills and combat. Your combat skills could play a big part in a tower defense minigame. Furthermore, in most tower defense minigames, the character has the role of the builder, which means that there is a high likelihood that Jagex is planning to link the Construction skill with the tower defense minigame.
There is already a Construction minigame in OSRS (Mahogany Homes minigame), where you have to pick up Construction Contracts from several NPCs, then go to specific houses in the big cities around Gielinor (Varrock, Ardougne, Hosidius, and Falador) to build and repair stuff. But it doesn’t matter. Smithing already had a minigame in the form of the Blast Furnace when Jagex introduced a brand new Smithing minigame, the Giants’ Foundry.
Combat Skills
Other skills that perfectly make sense for a tower defense minigame are combat skills. And this is because tower defense involves a fair amount of killing mobs, even if it is through the towers. And there’s a lot of room for exploration, from how your HP level could influence the minigame, for example, to building specific towers with specific Strength, Attack, Magic, Defence, or Range levels.
A higher Prayer level could also allow you to build or upgrade specific towers. On top of the variety of towers that specific combat levels could unlock, when it comes to combat skills, Jagex has considered a lot of the combat trio when thinking of what types of towers could be more efficient against specific waves.
Combat Trio
The combat trio in OSRS is Melee, Magic, and Ranged, where Melee is weak against Magic and strong against Range, Magic is strong against Melee and weak against Range, and Range is strong against Magic and weak against Melee. You could utilize this a lot, and we could see towers that hit with Magic, Range, and some weird form of Melee towers.
From what Jagex has shown, though, they have only considered two types of towers, so it is safe to assume that one will deal magical damage while the other has ranged damage. Another teasing piece of information is that building these towers will consume two types of resources: planks and bars. Even though the tower defense minigame is not a certainty for RuneScape, it could be huge if the community votes for it in the future.