A lot of Sailing haters are really uninformed.

In all honesty, to some extent I think every player is uninformed, Yes-voters and No-voters alike.

While we've had a ton of player feedback during development it's been through closed NDA playtests (with hundreds of you who opted in through our surveys) it still hasn't really surfaced with the general community. THAT is what I hope the Alpha will accomplish the most, resetting it all so we all are all on the same page.

I spoke to hundreds of players at Runefest, Yes and No voters alike and the biggest thing seemed to be just vibes. People liked the Sailing vibe and voted yes, people disliked the vibe and voted no, or they disliked the vibe but trusted us so voted yes regardless.

Something I repeated a TON to multiple players at the event is "Blog 17 doesn't change an opinion someone had when they read blog 16" and I think that's so true for Sailing, even the few gameplay snippets we've shown of in-progress work don't fully capture the feeling of being on a boat and Sailing around to see how it fits into the game.

Anyway, to avoid a long ramble, all of this to say is whether you are a yes voter, a no voter or a Guthix sympathetic, we'd really ask that anyone who is mildly interested gives it just a bit of your time. Jump into the Alpha and then give us your feedback. We'll be here. We'll be listening.

We should have a blog going out soon with all the exact details, but off the top of my head, I think a week?

We've decided to remove a lot of the content skips present in the Runefest build because we really do want this alpha to be indicative of launch 1-30 and get feedback around that specifically.

At RF we had to be aware that some players might only have had around 15 minutes to check it out and while that does lessen their experience as a whole, we wanted to give players a lot more freedom over how to spend their RuneFest time the most.

Honestly, we don't do alphas. So we don't have the best frame for what an alpha should be at an industry standard but from my perspective I believe this to be more of a full vertical slice of 1-30 sailing. It's pretty polished as far as art animations and with rough balancing and the only content missing is crewmates and combat which we'd like to cook for a bit longer before showing players.

We had a few talks with them early on just to kind of dig into what worked and what didn't. Naturally some of the learnings don't transfer across both games but just from a design perspective it's always great to get input as to what worked and what didn't especially from a team that had gone through this process multiple times.