Glyphscape/World

The world
RS3 features a far vaster world. Generally, dimensions are all increased by a factor of 10, so that the entire world is roughly 100 times larger. Each world also supports 50x as many players as each RS2 world did, so at first only a handful of worlds were made available. Since getting anywhere takes about ten times as long now (sometimes as long as an hour), most settlements (ie. towns) offer a far more enhanced variety of features which make it more or less unnecessary to travel as often. Players often settle down at such settlements. Teleportation is now far more valuable and thus expensive; there are also cart/carriage/horse transports available for a fee which speed up travel but do not eliminate down time.

Player owned houses
Since there is now so much open space, player owned houses are placed directly on the map, where all can see, and so the tiles of the world are thereby used up as residential districts. Player owned houses are now often significantly larger than they were previously, and also came with an easement. The value of real estate continually rises as more and more people arrive in the world and desire their own homes. While villages may have only a few dozen slots available, the sprawling cities often have hundreds.