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Gielinor Gazette: April 2020
Welcome to the April edition of the Gielinor Gazette! This month we’ll be updating you on everything the team’s been working on, including The Hallowed Sepulchre and changes to the Settings menu. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin!
Project Updates
Here’s a look at some of the projects that’ve been keeping us busy:
Darkmeyer: The sudden shift to working from home has unsurprisingly had an impact on development, but work continues to progress on the vampyre citadel of Darkmeyer and the accompanying quest, Sins of the Father. The team has been coping brilliantly, and we are confident that we will be able to deliver the update sometime this summer.
HiScores Hijinks: The load time of the HiScores system has been drastically improved. To do this we had to increase the minimum requirement to get onto a Boss HiScore table. We’re still monitoring the situation, and we’d like to decrease the killcount requirement over time – particularly for TzKal-Zuk.
Leagues: We've already made great progress on the design for the second League, which is something the team are all super excited about! We learned a lot from Twisted League last year, and we feel that the second League will address a lot of the pain points we heard about in feedback.
Early Game Improvements: We recently released the Gatherer Path into the wild and can now reflect on its impact on the early game experience. We're expecting to run a test with some Tutorial Island changes soon – but the team is currently focusing on a top-secret project which we hope will give players something awesome to engage with while we’re all in lockdown.
Clans: Mod Boko is just about finished up on the work to port the core of the Clans System to Old School - a major milestone for the project! Once the work is completed on Bounty Hunter and the Death Rework, we can start developing Clan content in earnest. We're also in the process of figuring out which cool features we’ll have time to work on before release so that we can deliver a really polished Clans System for launch.
Group Ironman: Group Ironman will be built on the same infrastructure as Clans, so unfortunately we can’t move the project forward until Clans is further down the line. The good news is that although there’s still some refinement to do, we’ve established the core elements of the design. We’ve also started to work on the HiScores support that Group Ironman will require.
A Kingdom Divided: The next quest in the Kourend storyline is still in the very early stages of design. Right now, we’re coming up with rewards, which will include a new selection of powerful Arceuus spells.
Achievements (PvM): We’ve started concepting a way in which high-level players can challenge themselves with fiendishly tough restrictions on boss fights and track those challenges in a way they can show off to others. Achievements would be a great medium for this, although they’re still very much in the concepting stage. We hope to move into development sometime after League 2. Achievements would run the gamut of difficulty, from ‘Kill the Giant Mole without taking any damage’ to ‘Complete The Inferno in under 70 minutes’.
Account Security and Log-in Issues: Ongoing service attacks and log-in issues are impacting other projects, including the Account Security work. We’re coming up with long-time solutions to these problems and reviewing what we can do to help players in the short-term. Stay tuned!
PvP: We're working through the tons of feedback you gave us in response to the proposals in last month's Gazette. We've made changes to our Bounty Hunter proposal, which you can find here.
Soul Wars: Last month we talked about our initial prototype for bringing Soul Wars to Old School. The community response was hugely positive, so we're currently working on turning that prototype into a playable chunk of content. We're currently investigating what changes should be made, if any, from the original Soul Wars. As always, if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them!
Settings Menu Overhaul
As Old School RuneScape has grown over the years we’ve added more and more features to the game, and as this list grows players want the ability to toggle each on and off. Each time a toggle is added to the game's current Settings menu, it becomes a little more bloated. We often end up putting options in weird places just because that’s the only place with space! We’ve also noticed that the categories aren’t really that intuitive – for example, the option to turn unlock messages on and off is included in the Audio menu.
The solution? To completely overhaul the Settings menu, tidy it up, and make it so that newer players can find the setting they’re looking for in the place they’d expect to find it
Step one is to create more space by changing the menu from a side-panel to a modal interface that will pop-up in the middle of the screen. This menu will be sliced into clear, understandable categories that accurately describe the settings within them – Display, Audio, Chat, and Controls. At the top of the panel will be a search bar which you can use to jump straight to the setting you’re interested in.
Of course the most important options, like attack styles, will stay on the side-panel where you’re accustomed to finding them.
Before going ahead and changing such a key part of the game, we wanted to gather some feedback. What would make or break the settings menu for you? What can we do to help make it more intuitive? Which settings do you use most often?
Let us know your thoughts on the official forums, Discord, Twitter or Reddit. We’ll keep you updated as we continue to refine the design in the coming months.
Dev Insight: Hallowed Sepulchre
The Hallowed Sepulchre is a brand-new Agility minigame, where you’ll use your wits to clamber over obstacles and dodge traps as you seek the treasures of an ancient Saradominist crypt in the heart of Morytania. It’s a super cool idea – but how did we bring it to life?
- Step One: Inception
- Step Two: It’s a Trap!
- Step Three: Creating the Sepulchre
- Step Four: Rewards!
- Step Five: Preparing for Release
That's it!
Hopefully this has provided some insight into the development process here at Jagex. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading, and we’ll see you again next month for even more behind-the-scenes news!