Runescape opens "Wild West" worlds

Players of the world's second most popular online game, Runescape, had the chance to log into a new world today.

This week saw the opening of a set of new worlds that enable nigh-unrestricted player-versus-player combat, a feature that most commercial online role-playing games avoid. On one of Runescape's new worlds, players venturing outside the map's handful of safe zones will be taking their lives (and their hard-won equipment) into their hands. Players who defeat other players stand a good chance of being able to take some of their foe's equipment from their corpse.

It's not quite as lawless as it sounds: a complex system balances risk and reward, so that if you're prepared to play aggressively and risk plenty of loss, you'll stand to reap greater rewards if you're successful. But Runescape's moves make it one of the most attractive games out there for players looking for something a little more challenging than World of Warcraft's low-risk gameplay.

SEE RUNESCAPE PICS

And they'll have plenty of competition. Although free-to-play online game Runescape doesn't get the press its bigger brother Warcraft musters, estimates give it an active player count of well over 1 million. That's enough to put it in second place worldwide -- and for a primitive-looking game that runs in a web browser, that's quite an achievement.

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