no video game will ever be able to replicate the feeling of satisfaction in OSRS when you finally level smithing to the point that you can craft yourself a whole new tier of equipment

every set of armor is exactly the same except color, but the feeling of achievement I got from changing the color of my armor was incredible every time

other MMOs have never been able to replicate this for me and I think it’s partly because OSRS has very clearly distinguished tiers, with each one clearly (IMO) flavored as better than the last:

• bronze (brown)
• iron (grey)
• steel (light grey)
• mithril (purple-blue)
• adamantite (green)
• runite (azure)

I love that the fourth one in the list is already getting into uncanny fantasy metals. I always imagined mithril as incredibly light yet just a bit stronger than steel. then adamantite as something heavy and cold to the touch, which is supernaturally resistant to damage. and finally runite (since runes in this world are the source of magic) as something that’s charged with magical energies that actively resist attacks, almost like having a forcefield

in WoW-style MMOs I tend to feel like all equipment is interchangeable. like each item is kinda just a series of numbers to slot into my character’s stats, to make them imperceptibly higher. but there’s no flavor that makes one clearly look and feel stronger than another - because there aren’t distinct tiers/themes of armor

so I like the OSRS approach a lot more. even though it’s literally just a series of zero-effort palette swaps, the difference is so much more tangible to me

IMO even Runescape itself wasn’t able to replicate the satisfaction of the metal tiers. it tried with wood tiers and leather tiers but they just weren’t the same. like for woods (used to craft bows, among other things) you have:

• regular wood (brown)
• oak (light tan-brown)
• willow (a near-identical shade of light tan-brown)
• maple (okay this one’s a bit pink but it’s still a subtle difference)
• yew (tan-brown again)
• magic (finally an interesting color! this one’s a nice deep azure)

so the problems with this IMO are:

• I don’t know much about wood but it doesn’t feel to me like yew is better than oak, for example. they both just sound like normal types of wood
• the colors are often way too similar so it’s hard to even visually tell which type of bow you’re using. that means upgrading your bow can be pretty visually unsatisfying

come to think of it, Skyrim did this too with its armor tiers. it’s just that the order is a bit more muddled and confusing. I still like a lot of the flavor though - honestly a lot more than in OSRS, even (I could probably gush about the different Skyrim metal tiers for a while, actually. I love almost all of them)

but it didn’t leave that much of an impression on me, and I bet that’s because:

• you don’t really have to work for higher-tier armor in that game. you just wait for the level scaling to increase and then every enemy will start dropping high-tier armor
• I never played as a type of character who wore heavy armor. I always ended up using the dark brotherhood armor instead
• I always play Skyrim in first person, but OSRS is third-person only, so of course I would notice my character’s equipment more in OSRS

it’s interesting how many little things added up to make armor tiers so meaningful to me in OSRS