Old School Runescape Dev Tracker

Remain a huge fan of the concept but self admittedly we've struggled to design ideas that we think genuinely work - with continued room to expand into several more alignment sets.

It's one thing for us to design 2 or 3, but realistically this system benefits by getting to 7 or 8 as in the image.

The question is how do you get the balance right and create meaningful different use cases for the sets? Does it become tedious as just another thing to switch based on your activity?

Skilling prayers are a popular idea but how do we do it so it's not just a case of now bring prayer potions (and potentially max prayer bonus) to every skilling activity with just another thing to manage.

I don't think we're closed off to ever contemplating this again but for the forseeable we aren't revisiting this, though perhaps someone will have an S tier suggestion of genuinely balanced and well thought out ideas. There's lots of awesome ideas amongst the ...

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.

Pretty sick, I'm a fan of bringing chainmail into BIS too

Edit: seems like we'd have some serious tech constraints doing this in 3D due to how chainmail works with render order. 😮‍💨

You couldn't be more wrong. Everyone working on Sailing is so incredibly passionate and pouring their heart and soul into it. If Sailing goes down we're all going down with the ship. (But I'm confident it's going to be amazing)

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'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.

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

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 b...

im aware of at least 2

In fairness, if we do get to write a sort of 'custom exceptions' list for the Horn, we could in theory roll it out to stuff like Veng Other in those same scenarios - would warrant some more thought around whether any 'weirdness' might ensue but I think in principle it sounds sensible.

Will be raising this with the team because you're right that a lot of armour for a long time has been 'this is how the bottoms look' and it could be neat to double down on a more 'old school' vibe with a leg/skirt variant. Not able to make any promises, but can assure you that the team will chat about it!

You spun this up crazy quick, nice work! Different strokes, personally more of a fan of the muted Inquisitor-esque palette than more heavy red/black but can for sure see people vibing with this

Just as a note before too many comments come in and I get drowned: the team are still open to feedback on the concept and naming, so absolutely feel empowered to share your thoughts and let us know where you're at!

Think a lot of folks just felt like 'Soul' was a little uninspired, so the team sought something they felt fit the concept a little more!

Totally fair, I thought it might be a little split for people. Personally a fan of the more medieval approach and tapping into some of that nostalgia with it kind of looking like 'remember Dragon armour? this is him now'

Absolutely open to further name changes if players get behind it, of all the things that would get us panicked while polling, this is pretty far down the list - so that bodes well!

Will leave that for the team working on that project in their next blog update, it's not something I've been focusing on!

Think this is less abuseable than the older iteration since it's limited exclusively to group-focused encounters as-is. We're already allowing Irons to effectively 'benefit' from Raiding/killing Nex/etc. with other players anyway, do you reckon the Soulflame Horn still crosses a line in the sand?

As is your prerogative!

Wrong update, that's the Doom of Mokhaiotl from Varlamore!