It’s hard to find a game without IAP (in app purchases) these days and that’s a shame as Pay 2 Win really isn’t about skill, it’s just how much you can sink in. That said, developers often need to incentive to keep developing a game and to pay for the costs such as servers, etc. I remember there were a few games that were Pay to Play on the horizon, but after their announcement, they never seemed to materialise. Anyway, I’m waffling. Basically I’m okay with an upfront cost or a subscription, I just want a good game which appears to have longevity and as few events as possible. I want to play when I want to play as opposed to when the developers want me play.
You gotta pick your battles, you know? The game still has content in it from 2001. The same company still makes the “regular” version of RuneScape alongside OldSchool, and while its graphics are more sophisticated, they’re also more inconsistent and have a tendency to look cheap—and regular RuneScape is filled to the brim with microtransactions. On desktop you can play OSRS using a third party client called RuneLite, which does have some graphics improvement plugins, most notably the 117HD plugin: