author: Zuzanna Domeradzka
Players Save Legacy of Famous F2P MMO
Fans of the popular MMORPG are rescuing old versions of it. The developers of RuneScape Archive are still asking players to help with the project.
Probably a good part of you have heard about RuneScape. No wonder - this F2P title has attracted hundreds of millions of players (in 2017 it entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the MMO with the highest number of registered users). Avid fans of RuneScape are certainly numerous, and some of them have decided to save the legacy of this MMORPG.
What is the Archive project?
RuneScape Archive is a project that aims to restore old versions of the game. Because although this popular MMORPG was created in 2001, the developers from Jagex Ltd. didn't choose to keep any backups until 2012 (not counting a rapt few such instances from earlier years). Because of this, there may even be more than 270 versions of RuneScapethat have been lost.
Finding older versions of RuneScape will help, among other things, in the creation of fan websites compiling the changing visuals or presenting stories of specific items. In addition, it will be possible to recover unreleased versions of soundtracks (as was the case with the variant of Billy and Bob from 2005), previously unseen maps or other content cut from the game. So there is hope for fans to see what might be lost forever without their intervention.
Former players can help
The Archive project has been in operation for quite some time, but its creators keep reminding us about it . Every RuneScape player can contribute to the recovery of older versions - all they have to do is to have had downloaded the game client at least once in the past. There are two options for finding out if the files are still on disk. The first uses a special serch tool, which will automatically find them. Alternatively, you can find the folders yourself (e.g., "C:\WINDOWS\.file_store_32" in the case of older versions of RuneScape 2).
If one finds the versions of RuneScape from a few-odd years ago, the creators of the Archive project would be grateful for sharing them, for example, via an anonymous Google form or a Discord server. All RuneScape Archive links can be found here.
You do not have to worry about the leak of your data - if you decide to share old RuneScape files, these will only contain information about in-game assets, not about your user account. In addition, having or sharing older versions will damage neither RuneScape 3 (that is, the Steam version) nor Old School RuneScape.
Any help is welcome, because despite the commitment of fans, files from the 2004 version have been recovered from a few to a dozen percent (depending on the format). The later the release date of the version, the more has been collected.
