Its squareness appeared RS gold to stem from looking at the map square-foot OSRS runs & extrapolating off out so that basically everything in Zeah was square. Most of it happened out of necessity while, sure, there are places around the game world which look like this. I feel the original mapping tools could only load 1 map square at a time, so that naturally resulted in a design style emerging. Both throughout the Classic era when the Gowers would attempt to squeeze as much material into a single map square as possible then even more so during the early RS2 era they would often have several projects on the go concurrently, using different map markers assigned to different devs/projects. Since they filled to the borders each project seemingly tried to increase the distance a great deal of projects ended up looking square and they have in their map squares.
Zeah was a large blank canvas using one cohesive design vision (or at least it should have been) so should not have needed to feel limited in terms on how content was executed by cautiously boxing things off. And that's what occurred. On top of the worldbuilding was non-existent and no attempt was made to guarantee the game world functioned from an MMO standpoint.There was also this ancient impression given in the OSRS group of these wanting Zeah to be this enormous visually impressive place that provided them with a big figure to boast about;"a huge 50% landmass growth!!! Wow!!!", but fundamentally failed to fill it. That was especially true - Zeah was as wide as an ocean with about as much depth. And considering there was not a single underground/dungeon/basement level in the continent.
And when it comes to content that was there, well, that did not exactly elicit excitement or pleasure. With this much content focussing on the incorrect areas of the game. Another misguided look at what was traditionally RuneScapey by incorporating pointlessly grindy things via the favour system (thinking the grind itself was players enjoyed about grinding), then giving the player no feeling of satisfaction for really"finishing" a grind, because you'd just automatically lose the 20 percent of everything you'd gained access to buy runescape 3 gold if you wanted to try any of those other 80 percent of articles there. With all the favour system improvements, I wouldn't predict the favour gameplay all that riveting, from pushing on ploughs. Sure they're all somewhat simple RuneScapey activities, but tradition for tradition's sake does not always produce the results or in this situation gameplay.