While you'll want to be a mid-level ESB Gold member to enter Menaphos, once inside you'll find a remarkably open town, with just a few areas sealed off till you are further into the expansion's pursuit series. Below the city there is a procedurally-generated skilling dungeon along with an enormous Slayer dungeon, the former offering a fresh and limitless space for non-combat art fostering, while the latter serves as a high level Slayer dungeon with monsters starting at combat level 101.

Of course, that depends on what level you are as you go into the expansion and how fully you want to research beyond the four main quests and 21 level increase to the Slayer skill. That is an unparalleled quantity of content for a single Runescape update, also Jagex's intention to release another expansion of this size in September and December shows this isn't a one-off gesture; it's a new method of playing Runescape.

"ESO Blades Gold is a huge change for us and our current player base in terms of how we deliver content," says lead designer David Osborne. "We're utilized to drip-feeding great, additive pieces of content each week, but that is all about bringing all of that together to give players something they can really immerse themselves - a long-form story, a great deal of skilling and combat content, a growth to a degree cap - all the things you'd want or expect from an expansion"

"It's us moving to the box set mindset," explains merchandise proprietor Joseph Redstall,"we did all these polls last year and we talked about the cadence of upgrades and it was working fine for us. We can do sizeable chunks of content every 2 weeks, but we can not do up to this."