[2023] We are currently at 247 quests! In two quests after Dead and Buried, do you think Jagex will have something special planned for our 250th quest?

We are, but personally I don't see 250 as a milestone that we should derail the storyline for. It's also awkward given our current ongoing uncertainty about which miniquests actually count as quests - so we could have had an elaborate plan for 250, and then reclassify Unwelcome Guests and now it's 251.

I'm very focused on delivering quests, lore and stories (as well as other things). That's exactly why I don't consider a fairly arbitrary number to be an important issue to prioritise over other aspects.

For example, if Fort Forinthry had no quests, and only skilling updates, and we saved all that quest time up and used it to make 1 250 quest, would that be better? IMO, no.

Right, I don't see any strong precedent in Chosen Commander - it's an important finale with some cool lore, but it's not a celebratory quest in the way that RFD was.

There will definitely be a quest at 250.

I'll explain this more later in the year, but it'll have to wait for more announcements and information first.

Dimension of Disaster was explicitly planned to be a celebratory 200. Chosen Commander I'm pretty skeptical about - it was probably a coincidence, and nothing about it seems celebratory even though in retrospect it is a very significant quest.

Every quest is special.

This is kinda what I mean about derailing.

Like say we have a great quest coming up which would be perfect for that 250 feeling in a similar way to Chosen Commander. With our current planned storyline it happens to fall on 249 or 252 or something.

Should we rearrange stuff to make sure it hits 250 exactly on a technicality? Say that really great quests needs 2 quests to lead up to it properly. Should we cut those quests, and tell the story less well, in order to make sure that the highlight quest hits some arbitrary number? This is telling the story less well in order to make numbers line up nicely, which IMO would be irresponsible storytelling.

That's what I mean though like... right now we're doing much more and more coherent planning than ever before. It's actually lack of planning which makes it easy to switch things around.

As I mentioned at the start, Unwelcome Guests wasn't intended to be a "quest" in the sense that anyone would think to count it towards the total number of quests released. As it happens, the team did a great job and shipped a "miniquest" to which players responded "this is a perfectly good quest, it should be a quest and give a quest point".

We agreed and responded to that feedback by adding a quest point, and now Unwelcome Guests "counts". If we had arranged an elaborate schedule to make sure that a certain quest launched as 250, we would have had to say "no, sorry, we're not adding a quest point to Unwelcome Guests because it will throw our completely arbitrary numbers off" or tell the devs "make sure you don't put too much effort into your miniquest, we definitely don't want the players confusing it for a quest". IMO both of those would be bad for the game, but when you say "plan better" that's the sort of thing that would have to happen.

Right now we're getting to launch more frequent story content than we have for a long time by being a bit laid back about it - the devs are being asked to include some story with their updates, but we're not being strict about whether it is or isn't strictly speaking a "quest" and we're not setting minimums for length, quality, etc. (Obviously this is different for the headline quest months like Murder on the Border, but for the skilling and combat focused updates.) That gives the team the freedom to do what they can with the time available, and the results so far have been surprisingly good. According to the schedule, we have only shipped 1 quest this year so far, but we've actually got "more quest content" than that and IMO that's much better for quests and the game than trying to line up some specific quest with some specific number.

The other obvious elephant in the room is that the only reason we're anywhere near 250 is because we recently reclassified some other miniquests and non-quests as quests. We could undo that, or we could classify a bunch more as quests and overshoot. Again I don't think that whether a miniquest is classed as a quest should be decided based on whether it interferes with a milestone - that would basically be making design decisions not based on whether they're right for the game, but whether they're good for marketing. I'm kinda surprised to see players advocating for that.

I think I should mention, counter to what I've said elsewhere in the thread, that it's 250 that I'm specifically skeptical about. I don't think Chosen Commander sets any real precedent that X50 quests are celebrations.

I wouldn't apply the same logic to 300, which obviously has a much stronger precedent set as a huge milestone.

I get where you're coming from, but my take would be almost the exact opposite.

Devs who are here excited about the game have their heads down making the best content we can. We have to account for business factors because we're professionals and we want the company and game to keep going, but what we want to do is make great content.

Lining numbers up isn't a passionate creative thing, it's a business thing. It's a way of creating a marketing moment to drive engagement. I don't mean that's a bad thing, but it's kind of up the other end of the spectrum from raw passion. The sorts of things that devs don't like, but have to accommodate for for the good of the game from a business perspective, are things like "you need to change what you're doing to make a great marketing moment".

I've been thinking about this overnight.

I still don't agree with the precedent set by Chosen Commander, and I don't think X50 is a particularly significant milestone. That said, regardless of my opinion on the subject, clearly a lot of people in the thread do think that so it's worth taking a second look at.

Here's what I'll do. If I see an opportunity to arrange content in a way that makes the 250th quest something a bit special, I'll try to make that happen. I can't promise anything, because as I've mentioned in my other examples I'm not going to go to devs and tell them to lower the quality of their work in order to accommodate it.