2001's RuneScape has been played by over 100 million players worldwide, making it the world’s largest Free-to-play Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, as recognized by the Guinness Book of Records. The game is set in the medieval fantasy realm of Gielinor, an open-world landscape of kingdoms, regions and cities that are home to a myriad of monsters and magicks, and propel players into a multitude of quests and adventures.

Launched in 2013, Old School RuneScape is a collaboration between players and developers. Embracing its nostalgic heritage, hundreds of thousands of active players control the direction of the game with an in-game polling system. Featuring adventures for solo play through to 100-player strong raids, Old School RuneScape caters for every brave adventurer. Since 2016, Old School RuneScape has established itself as a competitive game with the seasonal free-for-all Deadman Tournaments, where winners receive huge cash prizes and membership.

During Old School RuneScape’s Summer Summit earlier today, the developers revealed the return of two fan-favorite limited events, the announcement of a lock-in poll for OSRS’ first new skill (Sailing), and a tease for a brand-new, content-rich area: Varlamore!

Sailing has been going through the refinement stage of development and has now reached a point where the community will get to share their feedback via a lock-in vote. Provided this vote passes, Sailing will enter full development and progress towards beta.

During the Summer Summit, the OSRS team shared some insights into how the skill is evolving. The Sailing skill update will feature the biggest area expansion in RuneScape history, as the open ocean becomes an explorable environment. Sailing will fulfill players’ seafaring fantasies with customizable ships equipped with a slew of facilities that can be used to train the Sailing skill, allowing players to eventually captain progressively larger ships. The Sailing lock-in poll is open for voting now.

Meanwhile, Deadman Apocalypse sees the return of the highly competitive variant into OSRS. Players start from the beginning of the game and proceed to hunt down other players, monsters, and loot as they compete for exclusive rewards. Deadman Apocalypse features breaches, where any number of powerful bosses can spawn in the world. Although deadly, they are a source of strong equipment, so they’re bound to be hotspots for PvP activity. Deadman Apocalypse is a high-risk, high-reward way of playing OSRS and runs this Friday, August 25, until Saturday, September 16, featuring a $25,000 prize pool.

Another event beloved by the community makes its return as Leagues 4: Trailblazer Reloaded races back onto Old School RuneScape. Leagues is a time-limited event that starts players with no items or XP. They adventure across Gielinor with boosted XP and drop rates, a custom task list, and lots of powerful relics to unlock. Leagues is a great way to test players’ OSRS skill and knowledge in a fun, creative challenge.

Leagues 4: Trailblazer Reloaded introduces new tasks, relics, areas and, of course, all the updates that have come to the game since Trailblazer ended in 2021. In the Desert Area alone, for example, players can now explore Tempoross, Tombs of Amascut and Desert Treasure II, which weren’t available in previous Leagues. This game mode will launch later this year.

Finally, Old School RuneScape’s next big area expansion has been announced as Varlamore. An isolated kingdom opened up for exploration, Varlamore is full of new bosses, skilling activities, quests, and the introduction of the Hunting Guild. Varlamore has so much to offer that content will be released across multiple game updates. The first update will arrive in early 2024 with two new quests that kick off an all-new storyline.