10 Updates To Video Games That Completely Broke Everything
6. "Evolution Of Combat" Killed The Game's Popularity - RuneScape
Iconic MMORPG RuneScape was originally released back in 2001, but its status quo was violently shaken up (literally) with the 2012 release of the Evolution of Combat update.
Per its title, the patch attempted to update RuneScape's undeniably rudimentary combat for a new generation of players, but the byproduct was that PvP became massively unbalanced, and for an update intended to "evolve" combat, it ultimately ended up feeling more dull and simplistic.
Above all else, many fans felt that developer Jagex had simply tried to re-fashion the game's combat in the vein of other popular MMOs.
In the years that followed, RuneScape's historic popularity began to crater, and though Jagex introduced a Legacy Mode in 2014 which allowed players to use the traditional combat system, for many the damage was already done.
It's fair to say that Runescape still enjoys tens of thousands of concurrent players at any one time, but EoC caused the brand to take a massive hit from which it's never really recovered.