I remember as a kid being stoked for those big rushes to hit new quests. Fremmy trials day 1 was incredible with more people than you could shake a stick at, all striving for that sweet horned helmet
When I was younger I primarily played for the quests. Nothing beat playing a big quest on day one.
I'm always surprised how not standardised old quests were and also like how cobbled together they feel. From surprise stealth mechanics, weird interfaces to unique quest minigames and obscure agility mechanics. Can never be angry about quality going up, moreover when the mechanics keep appearing as well.
You should see the code behind some of them. It's amazing half of them even work at all. Game development was very different back then.
Please, yes. Nomad and mahjarrat i want to see touched apon more than any other storyline.
Well we have Nomad in game now so hopefully we can do something with him at some point.
I agree with you but the quests don't need to add much to the game, just expand to lore a little bit, give a couple QPs and give a small exp lamp or something.
With that being said I absolutely love the quests you've worked on, they're all top quality and unlike some of updates in the OSRS, they are just as good if not better than the original quests. The best part about them is for the most part they feel like they belong in OSRS.
Thank you for the kind words. If we can keep the quality, I'd of course definitely love us to do more quests.
Honestly, I am not sure if every major update should get a quest. At times it feels like the community wants quests so badly they put them where they don't belong. For example, while I don't think it was a terrible addition, I can't say Fossil ISland really needed Bone Voyage since it already had its own unlock mechanic in Kudos and the quest didn't add much lore-wise that dialog couldn't have. Back in the day a lot of things were just added with no rhyme or reason; now the community expects a quest from those sorts of updates. I think it is perfectly valid to give the lore for updates in ways other than quests. Like I wouldn't want everything to be told in lore books, dialog, and the like, but if that suits the content then there is no reason to squeeze a quest out of it when there are other stories more deserving of quests yet to be told.
Yeah maybe saying every big update was a bit much. A lot probably depends on what the update actually is.
I do very much enjoy exploring different ways of telling stories and there's definitely other ways of doing it that don't involve a quest. The books I did for the Theatre of Blood will always be a personal favourite of mine.
I definitely agree with you there, which is why I brought up variety. Where this MMO really shines next to others is that our quests typically aren't just "talk to X then turn it in" or "kill X of this creature". Quests like Bone Voyage are a great example of an easy quest done right (the boat steering section was awesome). Misthalin Mystery is another goodie.
However, I feel that some have sailed pretty close to the wind as far as lacking any sort of interesting gameplay goes and that's what I'd like to see less of going forward if the trend of favouring development of novice/east quests continues.
I think it's less about lower level quests being favourable and more about them being easier to make. If we took all six of those Novice quests, the combined time needed to make them all would still be considerably less than the time needed to make one Grandmaster quest. If it was a choice between six Novice quests or one Grandmaster I'd go with the Grandmaster myself in most situations. However, the actual choice was six Novice quests or nothing much of note. At that point it's a pretty easy choice.
As for gameplay, it's inevitable that smaller quests won't be as exciting compared to the larger ones. That said, I still think they have interesting stories and are of a good quality for what they are.
Absolutely, that's understood. Unfortunately, RS3 gets to put an MTX shop button right where the chat button used to be on mobile because that makes money while OSRS quests don't get that kind of attention from the higher ups. It is frustrating to see Jagex operate in such confusing ways.
You guys just keep doing what you're doing with the quests though. I know you don't get a say in that kind of stuff. Hopefully the good stuff shines through and eventually gets the attention it deserves.
When I first joined the team quests were considered a complete waste of time. We've come a long way since then. Even if we don't do as many as I'd like, at least we're now in a place where the quests we do make are given the time and effort they deserve.
You guys do have extremely high quality new quests coming out, I will say that much. Your modern quest design is very clearly a thousand times better than many of the quests from RS past. I do wish that they come more frequently, but only if it keeps this kind of higher effort that has been consistently applied these last few years.
If we could deliver more quests whilst retaining the quality I'd love to do so. Nothing comes for free unfortunately though and we only have so many resources.
What are your thoughts on releasing a quest with every major piece of content released? I definitely think Tempoross and the Ruins of Unkah should have been behind a quest. There is so much lore potential there and I really enjoy the idea of unlocking content like this behind a story. This is why I am so on board with story mode for ToB (and all future raids going forward please). Edit: also wanted to mention another good example that I know cannot be done now, but Wintertodt being locked behind The Forsaken Tower would've made a lot of sense in hindsight.
I don't think every piece of content needs locking behind a quest. In fact, in some situations it would actually be a bit odd from a storytelling perspective to need to do a quest first. That said, I'd love to one day be in a place where every big update has a quest attached to expand upon the lore. A Taste of Hope is a nice example. It wasn't required for the Theatre of Blood but it still came out a similar time and had some tie-ins.
Really don't mean any disrespect here but would like to start a meaningful discussion - we've had, what, like 22 new quests since OSRS released right? Aren't over half of them (12 by my count) novice difficulty and short in duration? The occasional difficult, lengthy quest we've had has been amazing (MM2, DS2 etc) but if we're looking at all the new quests hollistically I think there's still a lot to be desired.
To dampen my own point, I think some of those novice quests were well done (Below Ice Mountain had a little variety in it and a neat cutscene) but the novice quests that are literally "talk to X then talk to X" are not what I'd call quality. And unfortunately there's been more of those than full length challenging mid-game/late-game quests.
According to our official categorisations (which admittedly I don't actually think are visible anywhere in game), there have been 20 quests released since the launch of Old School. Of those 20, 6 are Novice, 7 are Intermediate, 1 is Experienced, 3 are Master and 3 are Grandmaster.
There's definitely been a bias towards lower level quests, but that's not too surprising considering lower level quests are generally shorter and therefore quicker to make. That said, I don't think a shorter quest is necessarily of lower quality than a longer quest myself. Length and quality are two separate things.
this is sorta what i was getting at with my "avatar" analogy.
The gods would though a Marjarrat ritual be able to have "avatars" or generals walk on the planet due to a spell causing a loophole in the edicts. Edit: The god wars generals don't count. As they are all literally just commanders meant for a holy war and nothing else. They (to OSRS knowledge) don't serve any other purpose. I mean "generals" as in right hand men/women.
The gods not being allowed to directly interfere with the world, but be able to directly whisper in their ear of the "Prophet" of each god.
Either that, or each god getting "reincarnated" in a signficantly weakened form, fighting to find a "long lost Mahjarrat spell" that will enable them to reconnect with "mother" (again, assuming OSRS sorta follows RS3 with the elder god lore, if at all.) and reclaim their original power.
Instead of having all gods, in their full power just casually strolling around Gillenor f**king shit u...
Ah I see what you mean. Yeah that sort of thing seems quite reasonable. Kind of like the ending of Temple at Senntisten.
Sorry but how is releasing 1-2 quality quests per year (and the rest 5 minute novice quests) regarded as overall quality?
While stuff like DS2 is obviously higher quality than quests in 2007, I'd say the overall quality back then was better simply because it wasn't a sea of Novice quests with the very rare DS2 or SOTE popping up.
Of the last five quests, two were Master, two were Novice and one was Intermediate. That doesn't feel like a sea of Novice quests to me. In fact, when you look back, most quests released in 2007 or earlier were either Novice or Intermediate. Master quests were a rarity back then and Grandmaster quests didn't even exist.
Also, to be fair on my original comment, quality and length are two very different things. A quest can be high quality without being very long.
That's kinda pessimistic about your work, man. Skyrim and other games have random mini quest generators- take item to npc, get reward kinda stuff. That's filler. Imo the thing OSRS has on basically every game, are the quests. Shit's fun man. How many quests are you guys workin on releasing in the next year?
You make a valid point. I guess I've often been somewhat critical of my work.
As for how many quests we're working on, I guess that depends what you class as working on. There's not too many in development right now but we have designs for a huge number of quests.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind a split storyline with old-school being how the world would be if guthix isn't found and killed and the gods never return. We could maybe even have something similar to the world wakes quests where sliskes plan fails? Or maybe guthix still makes us the world guardian without needing to die because the edicts the edicts weaken and we can have storylines of stopping gods from coming back to geleinor. Who knows, but split storylines can be good, for example, the legend of zelda.
I guess it kind of is that already in many ways.
speaking of porting rs3 content and quest sequels, have you guys ever considered rag and bone man 3? theres been plenty of osrs unique enemies added that I feel like we could have a strong roster of new bone droppers. I also loved killing the skelly horror for the free weekly clue
It would be a nice and easy one to wrap up, but probably not the most exciting story to finish.
It would also be possible to have those much larger quests broken up into smaller quests, something to string right into the next bigger part of the story. So instead of having constant escalation with the difficulty, maybe intersperse an intermediate quest in there or a novice one. For example, if the part of while Guthix sleeps has a separate quest where you gather the heroes.
It's one option. Need to be careful that it doesn't end up feeling like filler though.
I really like your perspective on this. I think the gods should never come back, not directly like in RS3. Proxy wars with their generals will always be more fun. When you make everything high stakes, nothing is high stakes and it makes some of the simpler and enjoyable content seem out of place. I do hope we get more lore, and I would be fine with a return of Zaros, but not in an RS3 fashion. More like how Saradomin, Guthix, and Zamorak are now. There, but not directly.
Well Zaros is the Empty Lord. Him being absent but secretly having an influence would be very fitting.
can u stop typing ty
No.
However, to be honest, I'd be disappointed if we ever went down the god route in Old School.
This. So much. To quote myself in a thread about porting RS3 content over:
I'm pretty cool with RS3 content being ported over (as in; made fitting, not just copying it 1:1 and calling it a day), but please do watch out with major plot points. The fact that Guthix for example is killed off in RS3 genuinely disgusts me, it killed the entire 'ominous things going on in the background' vibe that RS3 had, and OSRS still has has for me by overly bluntly throwing it in the players face. It opened the floodgates for overly 'epic' quests that took out all of the wonder and fantasy for me.
I'd personally like to see the Hazeel Cult get a followup, and I'd love to see what you guys can manage to do with Elemental Workshop 3 to name a few intermediate quests.
Some of us actually made a prototype for Elemental Workshop III in our free time a while ago. Hopefully we get some time to finish it off at some point.
Hopefully, the Desert isn't too far off, but Varlamore is probably going to take a while. Also, I'm still hoping Acheron gets visited with the final Fremennik quests, so that would likely (or perhaps hopefully) come before Wushanko Isles.
I'd like to do Acheron before Wushanko as well. We haven't really thought about things that far ahead yet though.
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