[2023] New Skill Pitches: AMA Before Polling tomorrow! (Active until 5pm BST today)

Would you not rather have Sea Shanty 3?

It's been amazing to see the level of engagement honestly. Shows the level of interest in this project and how important it is to you all that we get it right.

But yeah, there's loads!! It's almost impossible to read every post/comment etc. Certainly not a bad thing though :)

Hey there! We discussed many options and ultimately combined all the 'good' ideas into the ones that we had. We discussed all the Community suggested pitches and tried to incorporate the positive elements into each of our concepts. The one community-suggested pitch that stood out above all the rest was 'Exploration' and it told us clearly that players really desired to reach and unlock new areas.

The Shamanism pitch I guess was the wildest concept of the three. That one underwent loads of changes as we found out more from players during community consultation. We wanted to make something that was familiar (Production & Gathering) but also be interesting enough to catch peoples' attention!

We've done that in the blog! You can check it out here although we may be removing Question #3 as we're about to hit our limit on survey responses :D

Honestly I know it feels like a copout at this stage... but we don't know! Refinement is the next stage for whichever skill moves forward after the poll. We'll be having more conversations with the community on what you would all want. This will help us make these kind of decisions.

We would definitely want to offer variety and interesting mechanics for the new gathering elements of shamanism. Some could me more traditional, some something new. They'd probably not be like gotr/foundry, but that's not to say a 'minigame' couldn't be part of the skill too.

No it's an open world expansion :P (responding to the easy ones first)

Entirely possible! I certainly like the idea of having some items of higher tier coming from skilling content and not just PvM too. This presents a real opportunity to do that well.

That said, nothing's locked in or fleshed out yet.

Would be a total shame not to do any new underwater areas. Think it is fair to say we'd be looking at stuff like that!

The general feeling here from the team is yes, everything is on the table to be changed during refinement. If Shamanism was the concept players wanted most, but the community has an issue with the name - we would absolutely consider changing it. I don't doubt that.

The interesting part to remember is a name is tied to a thematic - Mod Husky talked about this a bit during the pre-recording here. If players really like the thematic of the Spirit Realm does the word Mysticism or Ritualism work? If so, great.

During community consultation we recocmmended to the dev team that the name has to be straightforward, easy to understand and simple. Whilst Shamanism is certainly a bit different and may not be easy to understand, it was the best word we could come up with to describe the thematic. And when you google it, it does seem to fit. Although feels a bit strange

Speaking from personal experience I really didn't vibe with the name at first. After a few weeks hearing it I am pretty OK with it. Generally we don't want to spend hours on the name unless it was something the community wants us to refine - during refinement we would likely consider it on the table to be changed.

A mixture of excitement and nerves. It genuinely feels thrilling to be in the sessions and the amount of passion everyone is showing for the project internally is great to see.

There's often long discussions on every detail you can imagine as people have different views. When talking about how we'd do this upcoming poll, we were sketching options out on whiteboards justifying the pros/cons of each way of tackling etc.

The nerves is a big part for sure, so much energy has gone into it you never know until the blog goes live, the announcement comes on stream or whatever how it'll be received! We've been over the moon so far really. The response in December to the summit and original poll was amazing.

Reading into the skill should also show that Taming is not "like" summoning. It's hard to escape similarities as each of these skills have the concept of a creature following you however that is purely a reward of the skill.

The core method of how you obtain creatures, what they can do, how they interact with the game world around them and the benefits that they could provide is wildly different to taking some materials, a pouch, some shards and charms to an obelisk and creating a temporary familiar with a specific ability. I understand that It's difficult to move away from that and ultimately it just requires a bit of open-mindedness to how different this skill could be.

In regards to the functionality to existing pets, I'd be curious as to what you would like added to them if they ever got an overhaul. There's plenty of things that they "could" do, but it'd feel pretty harsh gating something very useful behind some big RNG.

I can't see taming in its current form being able to be simply baked into a skill like hunter. There are definitely aspects that could fit in to that skill, for new hunting methods, and potentially even companionship but it would be a very big change to traditional hunter. That's not to say it could never happen though.

I don't think we'd look to retroactively shoehorn a new skill into content like Chambers of Xeric. If there were core areas of the existing game that felt like they would benefit from having some content added in relating to a new skill then the option is definitely there, however I think ultimately it's better to leave content like that alone unless we were going to do an overhaul of the entire game. We could definitely utilize a new skill for future content though!

First thing I'll say is it isn't fully designed or fleshed out and it's totally flexible based on feedback through refinement too.

Some points on Shamanism gathering:

• We are keen to add diversity to the gathering methods Shamanism would have. Some being directly new and unique methods, some could tie into existing creatures, including hunter.

• We are also well aware of the charm issue summoning had, we do not want this to be the same. We don't want people who've got 99 hunter/slayer already to feel like they need to do more to train shamanism for example. We'll make sure it's not the case!

• We have some options in what is tradeable, what's untradeable. How vital are these resources to shamanism training? How exactly do you obtain "hellhound blood" - it could be very different to merely killing them and looting something. All still keeping in mind players have said they don't want the skill to be buyable.

The tl;dr is we'll not make it anything like charms & we're aware of the issues players had with charms. The community will have opportunities to help shape it as we go too!

Great question! Refinement stage means everything is on the table to be discussed with the community. We mentioned in the pre-recorded Q&A that augments may be completely removed from the skill if players preferred it that way.

A lot of players vibe with the thematic but may not see augments as a reward space. It's important to keep in mind that you're voting on top-level concepts - the augment side of things would be something we'd consult heavily with players on, and if most players want us to remove it, we absolutely can. We can also look at augments just touching skilling or experiment with them in a different way. The devs had some ideas about spellcrafting as a reward space potentially where you craft a new item from shamanism, and that item contains an existing spell which you can hold on your character. That opens up a load of potential opportunities for players which could be fun and doesn't necessarily mean flat power increases

The short answer is yes. We can look at ocean updates in the future - but realistically the skill is best chance of doing that any time soon.

I do believe the skill can make an ocean expansion far stronger too giving it a unique opportunity to tie into the depth of systems and sense of a progression only a skill can really offer.

The feedback on being a "trainable skill" is noted, we are confident we'll design something strong here and you and everyone else would have chance to shape that in refinement if sailing moves forward.

I feel particularly uneasy about upping requirements on existing content to include the new skill (even where it makes sense).

That leaves scope for many players to have the quest complete but not have the new requirement.

If players are particularly keen though, I'm sure we'd remain open to it.

edit: There'll certainly be scope in future quests :) We're also a big fan of each skill coming with a small intro quest too to form a strong starting point for any of them.

Everything is on the table during refinement, at present our design doesn't offer this but we'll be sure to keep community suggestions in mind if it was the one that proceeded through! The main thing we've done is kept things super open-ended because we don't want to sink too much dev time into the top-level concepts and instead let the community decide on what they want. Skilling augments are potentially a middle-ground where players aren't as cautious in comparison to Combat related augments

We've actually not thought too much about it! Last time we lead with a cape design which in hindsight was perhaps a bit too forward... I think it will ultimately come down to whichever is chosen and we'd probably want a colour combo that hasn't been see before. Blue and brown works really well for Sailing, Shamanism and Taming are perhaps a little more abstract. A yellow base would be nice as that would be quite unique, although quite loud. Quite fond of a dark grey myself, but not sure which that would be most suited for.

Mod Ayiza created an 'explainer' video back in December & mentioned it on the Winter Summit but the TLDR is that we can go back at any stage of the process before a skill is locked in at a 70/30 vote. Once it's locked in - if at all - we will continue to work with players during a beta and beyond on fine details. We want a skill that works for you and makes you excited.

Depending on your feedback at ANY stage before locking it in we may go back to Community Consultation and/or presenting entirely new pitches based on your feedback. We hope that we've been able to offer you something that appeals. If your favourite pitch hasn't made it through after the skill pitches poll (the one that starts tomorrow) we can still incorporate lots of feedback into the design.

Missed opportunity.

Milking the blood of a hellhound maybe? Shamanism update?

We could easily do a raid that is based off any of the 3 pitches to be honest - a raid in the spirit realm! Underwater or on a mysterious island? Or what if there's a raid you had to complete alongside your tamed creature who knows?

To your question, it certainly wasn't to give sailing an unfair advantage, it was more that it's an easy example to get the imagination going of what you could potentially find at sea.

General feeling is no from the team after I asked. The reason is that going to 120 doesn't feel Old School, especially for only a single skill and not others

You can vote that you liked all three skills in the multiple choice question as that will really help us in the long term understand community appetite

It ultimately depends on how much content is included in the skills. There are complex aspects to all of them but at this point I can't confidently confirm that would be the case.

The community will definitely get a chance to input on this kinda question. For us it'll depend what the actual activities end up looking like, feeling like to play - the level of intensity, the level of profit you may/may not expect and so on from any given method.

We'll be utilising betas and further consultation as we go to help shape stuff :)

If we don't lock content behind Sailing it feels a bit boring and not viable to train. During community consultation we got the impression that the community wanted some pieces of content/areas to explore which were locked behind the skill. The existing map is also locked off in some ways through quests and other requirements.

Sailing isn't supposed to be Agility on Water so we're trying not to treat it as such. We're instead looking to create content on water and make you feel good about training the skill so you can venture into deeper and more dangerous areas. The idea of having lands that have never been stepped on and feeling good about your ability to traverse more territory seemed quite appealing from what we can see. I would hope that we could keep content exciting enough and enjoyable enough to train so that it would feel great when you get there. :D

From the wonderful Art team...

We'd gone quite psychedelic in our first experiments into the spirit realm, which have since been reigned in but it will certainly be something 'other worldly'. Probably not quite as grim and dark as the Upside Down in stranger things.

It would be nice to perhaps explore the spirit world itself having multiple biomes for lack of a better word , to give it different emotional vibes . We imagine upside down is a bit much, but having the contrast between a happy spirit realm and a sad/darker one would be cool.

Once we have a better spec of what happens there during refinement we'll have a better idea of what we're designing for. Deffo can't go wrong with a emotionally versatile setup!

Hope this helps!

Sort of.... but also not really. There could be things to do within the spirit realm that have impacts on the regular game world, but I don't see it working exactly the same personally. We'll have to see if it makes it to refinement though!

It gives us a chance to intro the skill, a small bit of tutorial and kick off the narrative background to it too.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a requirement! Nor is an "intro quest" something we're locked in on doing at this early stage

We considered it and had at least one question for Bard in the survey we sent out, which 44,000 players completed. It wasn't popular enough in the survey to warrant us recommending we re-visit/pitch it as a new skill.

The first thing we did was focus on "design pillars". Essentially these are the keystones of the project, no matter what skill we do, it should meet these criteria.

1. Is a healthy addition that is deeply rooted in the game
2. Provides meaningful progression
3. Appeals to a variety of player types
4. Is enjoyable to train

We did it first because you're entirely right with that problem. It has to fit into the game, not feel out of place. It should feel like it was always meant to be there!

There's a lot more info in the first blog we did on this found here :)

Yep that's definitely a possibility - not one we want of course so we'd have to make a call as to where dev resource is best served. We're hoping that by working with the community super early on we can make something you want and we're open to your feedback every step of the way

We joked about this one and said you'd end up in Davy Jones' locker but we honestly don't know at this stage. This one seems like more of a technical question that we'd work on if Sailing was the pitch that came out as most positive in the poll

Yes, trade it over, once it's traded you have to press alt+f4. After that, I'll trade you back the trimmed version.

It may do! We don't know exactly yet but we really think the spirit realm is a strong part of the skill and want to lean into what that could offer.

Both from the perspective of a place to gather unique resources for shamanism but also as a place to unlock and house new content.

Cool reference. Elena understood it and explained it to me (A Link to the Past). :D

OK so first one about Shamanism. The reality is that we've had to stop ourselves from over-designing a lot of these concepts. It's something we'd love to hash out further if it was the concept you all wanted most as a community. For me personally I have played a bit of Horizon Forbidden West. In that game you have a device which sits on your ear and it allows you to see stuff which isn't there. You can see footsteps and it acts as a really cool guidance tool to progress the game so I am excited to see what we can do with the over-arching concept of Shamanism. I love the idea of having a way to tap into both realities - I'm VERY curious to see whaa we could do!

The sailing Q's. Realistically we wouldn't give access to the entire Sea straight off the bat and as you improve your Sailing level you can access more dangerous areas. I don't think that we should *ever* be overly cautious about expanding the world as it's one of the #1 things that players want from content/new skill (new areas to explore). Our goal with any piece of content is to bring up more activity to the game and a new skill would be super hype overall for the playerbase. People might be out at sea for the majority of time on release but it'll eventually settle imo

We generally think all three concepts are solid otherwise we wouldn't have pitched it! I think a lot of this is personal preference, we're players too and we have different opinions. Ultimately we want a skill that the community is happy with and excited about. This is an expansion for our game and we want players to be excited about the future of OSRS. Bit of a cop-out answer but all three pitches have great elements to them. I don't think it's possible to have a skill tick *every* box

If something doesn't pass to refinement but proves really popular there's absolutely no reason why we can't revisit it, if it's something the community wants

Mostly just looking to answer any lingering questions before the poll tomorrow. Refinement will depend on which skill goes through

The survey is still there in the blog post we're just worried about the impact of 40k responses on an older survey that has already been taken by 10k people when we're already close to hitting a cap. We'll run more surveys once we know what skill we're refining (which is actually where we need the feedback most).

A very valid point and we're cognisant of this too. We feel if we go too far down that route OSRS would lose some of its identity.

Essentially that is to say, we'll try and strike the right balance between meaningful rewards and not adding an exhausting burden to other skills.

We can design this to suit :) This depends on how these buffs/boosts take place, what exactly is augmentable? Are they permanent? Temporary? How complex is the system to get them? Just exactly what do they impact? We don't know the absolute answers on these things yet.

Like with everything OSRS, we're keen to get powercreep right and at a level the community is happy with. All of this will be kept in mind throughout refinement regardless of which skill moves forward!

If this was the one concept that went through to refinement, we'll have a conversation with the community about where the augments should be in the game and what they should affect. Totally understand the anxiety around it. We've left it open-ended so that the community can decide

Hey there!
- Spirit Realm is not going to be instanced but we don't know what it looks like yet, so we have no idea if it's an overlay or separate area.
- Kieren said no to retroactive skill reqs on our recent Q&A.

I think it'll be both :) Existing underutilised resources and some new stuff.

The full launch of any new skill wouldn't be in 2023. Release depends on what skill it is and what players determine during refinement. :) We know that it's important to get this right, and we need to take the appropriate time to provide great content for players to enjoy on release. It's very possible we could have a playable Beta in 2023 if we managed to 'lock in' a Skill within the next 3-4 months but that's being very optimistic

Similar Q answered here

Similar Q answered here

There are aspects to it which could be completely friendly to Lvl 3s but there may be content that's much harder or gated off. A bit of content for each skill will be accessible but like with other skills it may become problematic to access all of it, e.g Monster hunting in the Sea could give Combat XP. We'll probably think more about it in refinement! <3

100% there is reason to ask questions, we believe in all 3. Each has huge potential and we're genuinely happy with whichever goes forward.

Perhaps its just because it is easy to present "omg imagine all the stuff you can do at sea!!" so it seems that way. We're only human!

You're right in that the community will obviously help shape it through refinement and beyond.

That said we're very aware of not wanting to take it too far. There's a balance to strike. It is an interesting reward space but we don't want to add a heavy cognitive burden on what is currently fairly straightforward.

At this point it's too early to say what will be stackable or not within any of the skills as we're not sure which skill is going to be refined and haven't dedicated lots of design time into it. We have pledged to work with the community on the 'nitty gritty' parts of the skill so this could be potentially revisited then. I'd say vote on your favourite concept and keep us in the loop to your feedback every step of the way!

Same

Maybe!

This is definitely one for further down the line in refinement, however I love the idea personally, and would absolutely love to see some group content on the sea

Assuming you're asking how you obtain them (procuring), we talked a bit in the blog about toys/lassos/food to obtain these creatures which could have nice tie-ins to other skills. You might have to go to a new area where you track the creatures (tieing in to Hunter), or there might be events between you and the creature where something happens where you need to react or find it different food/toys etc. :D

We asked a load of questions about other skills in the community consultation survey and found out players had mixed opinions on Summoning but they liked animal companions as a principle. So we came up with Taming! I think Kieren put it well in the Discord Stages Q&A when he said OSRS deserves it's own skill and not something necessarily that is mostly copied from RS3.

It's been hard to get people on board with all the possibilities of Taming as a skill. And would've really liked to see more discussion about that. People got really excited about the sea/spirit realm as new areas to explore but there are possibilities of new areas associated with Taming which maybe we haven't done enough to talk about. We wanted to keep things quite open ended on our end but it would've been great to discuss that. We emphasised a lot that pet abilities are completely up to refinement and I think maybe it spooked a lot of players who compared it to Summoning

I'd love a future in which we had multiple new skills but I think the key thing for us is to firstly prioritise ensuring the first new skill is a success. It's no small feat. If it goes well it could open up a ton of possibilities to explore more in future

Check out the pre-recorded Q&A for a quick answerto this as Elena explained it quite well here how it could work (2:06:52)

From a dev POV:

Easiest = Shamanism
Middle = Taming
Hardest = Sailing (so many expectations/player suggested demands)

But on the flip side you may also end up in a situation where the reward space for Shamanism is more difficult to balance and could take longer to implement depending on what the community prefers. So it's anyone's guess really and we'll know more about scope once we know which concept you all prefer

We don't have the ability to do a ranked vote in our current polling system unfortunately - hoping the current approach is OK in lieu of that!

We don't know at this stage but we're aware of this as a possibility and we'll definitely keep a close eye on feedback throughout. Hopefully players can continue to work with us and tell us their constructive opinions so we can avoid proposing something that players don't want! This process only works if we work together on it

We think it's a cool reward space but it could stand on its own. I think some players would find it less worthwhile to train so we'd invite players during refinement to talk about this with us. Spirit realm is quite appealing and could be more of an emphasis if augments were not popular

Up to community to decide (refinement)

Depends on how the first goes really! I certainly hope we can do more skills beyond this one if the community is keen to keep em coming.

We used the community consultation survey for the basis of a lot of our design but when we looked at how to explain concepts we found the AI art tool quite useful, especially when we made early presentations for NDA Players etc. We also tried using it to come up with alternative names for our wildcard Shamanism pitch

If it does not pass a 70/30 lock in poll it won’t be added to the game. We hope that we can work with players to come up with an idea that excites you and genuinely creates an expansion to OSRS which players love

I think that’s one area where we admit Taming has suffered because we haven’t given enough for players to imagine about. It’s definitely a learning process. I wasn’t around when we polled skills in the past but a huge issue with previous skill proposals was that players weren’t bought in enough and didn’t get to influence the skills early on. Hoping we can change that by getting the community involved right from the start now.

If it doesn’t get enough support as a skill, we wouldn’t proceed with it further. Players don’t want us to continue pushing something that they haven’t voted for (which is clear from the Account Builds stuff earlier in the year). I don’t personally see it fitting into Hunter or Farming either so not sure on that

It’s really open ended right now. With our new polling approach we want to figure this out during refinement and even beyond. It’s promising to see such a desire for Shamanism to expand on lore I’ve seen lots of people mention Guthrie which is cool. The great thing about skills is they can grow indefinitely and can have content for years to come after release.

Reward space discussed at 49:20 in our Pre-Record here for Sailing. I’ve seen a lot of players say that the reward space for Sailing is perhaps less scary than say augmenting fear from Shamanism which may be a good thing depending on what kind of player you are. At the end of the day we know that Rewards need to feel worthwhile. During refinement we can figure this out more if it’s the pitch most players like

It’s possible but we would rather add something than take something away. Meaning if we ever changed old content we likely wouldn’t add a new requirement or make it more difficult to do, instead adding Qol. An example was given during a Q&A where Kieren/Ayiza mentioned tapping into the spirit realm to unlock a door etc which might progress your quest faster.

I’m not a developer so I can’t really answer it from a design perspective. But knowing that Elena and Husky are working on the project should be reassuring in a sense. They both created Guardians of the Rift which is really well liked in the community. Husky in particular created the Hallowed Sepulchre. These devs truly know what they’re doing and how to make a skill fun and rewarding. The dream with Sailing is to make the entire ocean into playable fun content which will just provide more areas to explore. We don’t mind comparisons to Slayer because it’s one of the most liked skills but it won’t just be about sea monster hunting as there will be tons of activities to do at sea and areas to explore

Generally speaking, a day one release where you’re training a different skill in order to train a new one just feels bad. On the other hand, we also see the community wants the new skill to integrate well with existing skills. For example hunter with Shamanism. So we have a task to make under-utilised skills feel more rewarding whilst also making it so you can enjoy levelling the skill on release. Difficult to know at this stage but our preference is for everyone to be able to train the skill

Early designs did consider this but it’s difficult to make a skill non buyable and also a good item sink, instead we might consider putting the item sink into the reward space of the skill. Elena talked about this on the pre-recorded Q&A a bit!

Love some aspects of it, in general I think the community said one of the main draws of a new skill should be to unlock or to explore new areas of the game which I don’t think the inscription pitch necessarily had.

It needs to not be confined in one area of the game, have an integration with existing skills and areas and offer a reason to train it. I’d love to know what aspects of the updated sailing pitch felt mini game-y and hear more from the community about this topic. We tried our best to avoid this with all 3 pitches

It’s not something we can avoid unfortunately as we aren’t there with you when you vote! All we can do is be transparent and communicate with the community. I see the community as partners in this and so hopefully no matter what the outcome we can work together to make the best skill. We have taken steps to say in our comms that this doesn’t have to be OSRS’s only skill if more than one is popular. Our current approach will ask you what you think about all three pitches so that we can make a better decision on which is the concept which is widely accepted/liked