zeah

As someone who started playing OSRS when F2P mode was first released, i.e. after the Zeah poll was conducted, I was astonished upon discovering that a large continent, idealised as 50% in size of the traditional Runescape landmass, was actually approved by the playerbase. OSRS was a game founded upon the simple philosophy of restricting the damage that Jagex could cause to a game that was beloved by many. Unfortunatley, however, caprice dictates the updates that the playerbase wills into the game through democratic process. Perhaps they had forgotten that, not too long ago, it was Jagex's rather large, unwanted updates that drove players to leave the game --forever, as they first anticipated. Prior to Zeah, the capabilities of the OSRS team had hardly been revealed: most updates consisted of small mini-games (certainly not contintents), often with many bugs or undesirable side-effects that would not be fixed (or have still not been fixed) for many following years.

The OSRS team have clearly endeavoured on too great a project, one that far surpasses their true capabilities, a brainstorm of egotistical minds who desire to establish their own identity --a clear distinction between "old" Runescape and "their" Runescape. Pathetically, Jagex have achknowledged that creating a new landmass 50% the size of the previous Runescape map was unfeasible, and in a vain attempt to reject their errors the team have bloated the size of their new pet-continent, Zeah.

Everything is too big; it is far too big. The buildings in Zeah are plentiful, large, and empty. The current Zeah (which is only part 1 of 3 or 4) is larger than the entire desert (including Al-Kharid and its northern-mine) despite the latter possessing content which one can complete: quests, monsters, dungeons, (fun) minigames, et al. are in abundance in Runescape's desert. And the desert even has greater variety in its architecture and settlement than Zeah does.

My initial thoughts upon disembarking at Zeah were: 'this place is big, but where is everything?' Someone suggested that this was an intentional effort by Jagex, one meant to replicate the feelings newbies had when they first left Tutorial Island. Although new players were dropped in Lumbridge with little in the way of advice --or at least, advice that was forced upon them-- one could purchase a newcomer map from the general store, talk to the clearly labeled Lumbridge Guide, and, most importantly, use their intuition to guide them. A new player will not exactly know where (a) leads to, but he can assume that (a) leads to (x) or (y) or (z) by examining the enviroment. A new player can assume that a road leads to another settlement, and is likely safe to travel on; he can also assume that diverting from a road may lead him towards a wooded area or swamp with an abundance of monsters; it is also generally assumed that the darker an area, the more dangerous it is likely to be, so a new player will probably avoid mountains, caves and volcanos. From intuition alone, a young new player can safely navigate through a well-designed map.



In Zeah there are no such roads that lead from one distinct area to another. The continent is separated into 5 different zones with incompatible biomes, each radically different from one-another and organised into a square with no transitional regions. Volcanoes, snowy mountains, magical mountains, sand, prairie, and standard mountains all interconnect; at the center of these regions, the "middle", is a statue of a man with a poem written on a plaque --the introduction of the poem seems to be inspired by Lord Alfred Tennyson's Elaine the Fair:

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,
Elaine the lilly maid of Astolat,



Me after having spent an hour or so on Zeah:


I'll write more later...