Mason

We’re half way through the current world event against the World Eater known as Tuska, and as of now things are looking pretty bleak for the Runescape world. Well, it would if we didn’t have the exterior perspective of playing a game and knowing that nothing actually all that terrible can happen because, you know, Jagex kinda needs to keep the game running to make money. Unless Solomon is going to sell Tuska-proof fallout shelters for $19.99 to ensure our avatar survives the apocalypse (don’t get any ideas, Jagex…), it’s safe to say that if Tuska crashes into Gielinor that any actual circumstances would be pretty marginal to the game as a whole. It remains, rational thought would dictate that this would be a bad thing. However, there are many out there that welcome our new boar overlord. Even more so, there are many that also believes the whole thing was rigged from the start and Jagex wants the players to lose the world event. It’s a big conspiracy! A big ol’ cosmic apocalyptic conspiracy.

Let’s explore the last theory here first: Jagex wants the players to lose. After the first few days, there were plenty of players saying that Jagex wanted players to lose. Day after day Tuska won out, prompting players to stop doing the event daily entirely because they saw no point if they were destined to lose. Now, I can say with some confidence that yes, Jagex wants us to struggle and see Tuska as a strong and actual threat to the world. To say that they want us to lose though is maybe giving them too much credit. With world events, it can be very hard to know how much effort players are going to give. Every world event has been tweaked as it went along, so this one shouldn’t be seen as any different. Since this one is a month long, they probably knew that players would lose interest, but by how much and when would be impossible to determine. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility, in fact I would honestly expect, that Jagex would simply play it by ear as to how much effort would be required to defeat Tuska day by day. In fact, given our current win streak, Jagex may have overdone it because now it seems they are setting us up to win. Maybe they wanted us to really win all along – a whole new conspiracy! No matter which, I doubt either to be really true. To say that they are rigging the world event as to how much effort is needed is really giving them a lot of credit for foresight, and I really don’t think their track record supports this Illuminati level of planning and expectation. What is more realistic is that they are adjusting the threshold to make it look like we are doing better when in reality our efforts are actually less. It does make for a good story that we were getting our butts kicked and then all of us, led by the world guardian, banded together in unison to defeat the mighty Tuska. This is the story I’d want to write if I was Jagex – not illustrate that the player base is lazy and couldn’t legitimately win within the original parameters of the event.

So maybe the players will win the majority of the days after all, even if it is with a little divine developer help. Looks like Gielinor won’t become a virtual Mad Max-like world, but what will happen? There’s plenty of clues that point to how this event might end and those play host to plenty of conspiracies. There has been hints from Mods (which are not the best source of information as far as speculation, as they are some of the wildest dreamers among us by design) that the end of the event will bring a large landing crater by Tuska, or parts of Tuska, around the world. This makes sense, and giant pork roasts raining down from the heavens isn’t really all that frightening – definitely not enough to change the overall game of RS. Besides, we have meteors fall and crash into the planet all the time, of course they aren’t Tuskan sized, but none the less the surrounding area of even the largest meteors are unchanged. This theory is also supported by the fact that when the teaser for this world event happened, meteors fell and the parasites that are now on Tuska’s back walked around the meteor and could be killed. If all that happened was a whole lot of these fell across the planet, I think we’d manage just fine.

Then there’s the Zarosian theory that he will be involved in defeating or at least mitigating the damage done by Tuska. Makes sense, as the Zarosian Emissary can be seen on Tuska and has dialog pointing out that Zaros is aware of Tuska’s presence and monitoring the situation by keeping an eye on the other god’s involved. However, when talking to the emissary, he gives little information other than that Zaros “will protect his faithful”. There is little doubt that no matter what the outcome is, Zaros will at least have a presence when whatever happens with Tuska does go down.

You have to admit, this world event is host to a lot of interesting speculation and uncertainty that other world events didn’t have, which is refreshing. The idea that a long-lasting effect could remain from a world event is nice, but we all know that Jagex won’t plan for anything too crazy to happen. Hopefully, no matter what of these conspiracies are correct, we are left with something a little more interesting than another crater like the one near Lumbridge.