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My friend works for the military and wants to play Runescape while deployed overseas. He currently plays OSRS on the Steam Deck via Bolt Launcher.

Is there a way for him to play the game offline at all?

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I spent some time researching this because I couldn't find an answer, but the tl;dr is yes, but not officially.

First: None of these methods use Jagex accounts or servers, and I couldn't find a good way for Rs3 or OSRS. These are all remakes of different eras.

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    While this will allow you to play runescape offline, can it run just in the Steam Deck or does your Steam Deck needs to connect to your locally running server (and therefore it is not really offline fully since you still need a connection)?
    – Zibelas
    Commented Jun 18 at 17:46
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    @MooingDuck why do you ask me? The answer points out where to find servers, my comment was pointing out, that if the server can't run on the steam deck directly, the game won't be able to run offline.
    – Zibelas
    Commented Jun 18 at 20:54
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    -1. This is a bad faith answer. And this doesn't even technically answer the question either, since these are all non-official, private servers, not "remakes". They are definitely not OSRS in any capacity. May I know why you self-answered listed a bunch of private servers without clearly marking them as such? No actual runescape players would even consider playing a private server in place of the official server.
    – user318092
    Commented Jun 19 at 6:34
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    @Voile these are all clearly marked as unofficial remakes at the very beginning of the answer.
    – Jacob is on Codidact
    Commented Jun 19 at 8:20
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    @Voile yes, but not officially. ... None of these methods use Jagex accounts or servers I think it's pretty clear that they are unofficial private servers but I do agree that the answer is more like a "no, but here are some similar alternatives to runescape" rather than "yes but with some caveats"
    – John Doe
    Commented Jun 19 at 11:59
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Dr-Bracket provided some good answers, however, being former military who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd like to point something out. The internet out there is not as bad as you might think for games like Runescape. You might still be able to play it multiplayer. After all, I still played World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King when deployed on the internet out there in group heroic dungeons, even with the latency.

Games like those aren't as bad for a connection as you might think. They don't take up much more bandwidth than an IRC chatroom. The real problem is the latency, or the time between you performing an action, the server receiving the your action and you receiving it's response to your action. That time might be quite high. Even still, that can be mitigated if you know what you are doing. For a game like Runescape, I'm sure there are many articles about playing it overseas already.

There is a different issue if there is packet loss. If the internet on the base where you are located has such a bad connection that packets are frequently dropped rather than delivered, your connection could be dropped repeatedly. In this case there isn't much hope for playing, or really doing anything else, on this internet connection.

If you can find out before you deploy what the state of the internet is from someone else stationed there, that would be best. That way you can plan better. I can only provide my own experience.

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    This doesn't answer the question OP asked
    – Cherona
    Commented Jun 19 at 7:33
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    @Cherona It's a frame challenge really, this answer says "you have an XY problem, your friend doesn't actually need to play singleplayer". I'd say it's reasonable enough in this case.
    – Yksisarvinen
    Commented Jun 19 at 12:59
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    Runescape is almost like a fast turn-based game with its 600ms game ticks. For most activities, it's very forgiving for high-latency connections. I used to play with people from Venezuela, Pakistan, and other countries not known for their stellar broadband connections. As long as the connection doesn't drop entirely, it's mostly fine.
    – Edward
    Commented Jun 19 at 15:34
  • @Edward eh, for most non-combat things it will probably suffice, like fishing, crafting, cooking, etc. But if you want to do raids, high-level PVM, PVP, etc (a giant portion of the game basically) you'd want a sub 100ms ping, ideally way less than 100ms (for OSRS at least)
    – Timmy Jim ♦
    Commented Jun 19 at 16:32
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    @Questor I'm far more likely to land here after searching for "play Runescape offline" than "my oversees friend in military needs runescape offline"
    – VLAZ
    Commented Jun 20 at 13:57
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You cannot play the Official Runescape game offline.

It is an MMORPG. It talks to a remote server in order to function. Without that remote server connection, the game doesn't work.

Dr. Bracket gave an answer on how to play a game like runescape offline. (though as a warning your single player characters cannot be exported into most of the multi-player servers).

The Cthonic One states that you can probably play the game online because, runescape was designed to function in 2000's era internet (high latency, low bandwidth). It first came out when the internet speed was 64 Kbps. And latency was a couple hundred ms. It

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    This answer doesn't provide any new information, it just summarizes the others.
    – Pyritie
    Commented Jun 21 at 9:52
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    @Pyritie None of the other answers explicitly call out that the reason one cannot play official runescape offline in single player... Is that it is an MMORPG which needs the server in order to function.
    – Questor
    Commented Jun 24 at 18:12

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