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Honestly issues like this are what slowly show the cracks of the development, even if this dialogue is insignificant it still shines a light on how jagex doesn’t even have enough developers to QA test
Bugs are classified according to how much impact they have on players and prioritised accordingly. Lore bugs are pretty much Cs by definition. This one is arguably not even a bug, since dialogue doesn't automatically update with changes to the story, and can't and shouldn't.
“Can’t and shouldn’t” It’s just sad to hear this from somebody who works on a RPG
You can assert this as your opinion of how you think RPGs should work, and that's perfectly fine, but even the majority of single player RPGs produced in a single span of 2 years and shipped complete don't work like this. Expecting it from a 20 year old continually updating MMO just isn't realistic.
This sounds like a good topic for a livestream, I'll put it on my list.
Reading through the dialogue transcript for TotG, Fiara doesn't say much of consequence that couldn't have been said by the other guardians or omitted entirely if she had perished. The only thing I can imagine that would make this difficult is that Twilight of the Gods doesn't require The World Wakes and might lead to weirdness in the niche scenario where TotG initiated to the point where Fiara appears, and then Fiara dies in TWW before the player completes TotG.
I get that it's probably a lot of work for little clear benefit but I think lore players appreciate such attention to detail.
I talked about this in some detail in one of my runescape youtube videos but I'm not entirely sure which one - I think it might have been Icthlarin's Little Helper but I'm not entirely confident.
TLDR you kind of summarised it yourself - a lot of work for little clear benefit. One of the core things that separates a professional developer from a hobbyist (which is for example what I was earlier in my life, and still am in my side projects) is the ability to prioritise what is most impactful, because time is limited. When I'm making something in my spare time I can ignore this if I want, because if the thing I'm working on never actually ships that only really affects me. In a professional capacity, I have a responsibility to my players and my company to devote my efforts to what creates the most benefit to both.
I mean I feel like all dialogue should update with completion of quests for the player’s account it makes the game more immersive
I was more referring to the general attitude
Could you expand on this?
In a game that is jam packed with old things that need reworking and considering jagex seems to be making plenty of money with it’s many revenue streams. It is both demoralizing as a paying customer and sad to see a developer reply that it shouldn’t be expected of them to fix older parts of the game because the game is old.
I'm not saying "we shouldn't fix things". Right now my highest priorities are all fixes (PVM, economy, skills, the way we tell stories, the world building of the game, etc etc). There's an enormous amount to work on and I'm trying to find production solutions to make sure this happens at the same time as shipping new content for people to play.
However, that doesn't mean that I agree that any given thing is actually a problem that needs fixing. To pick a non-lore example, some players believe that it's a fundamental error on our part that some (most) minigames have lapsed into redundancy and there's no reason to play them.
Your original comment was that this "problem" indicates a lack of competence or ability on our part, but that's entirely predicated on the assumption that this is something we should be fixing, which is exactly what I was addressing.
I understand the difficulties behind it Jack. Wasn’t saying other games work like this. Just hoping RS strives to be better than those other games if possible
Let me give a similar example in a different context - open world games are pretty normal now, but back in the days before GTA3 there was a player perspective that the whole world should be interactable. This was a pretty common design ideology and a lot of games were built in accordance with it - for example Elder Scrolls RPGs have worlds in which every building can be entered, which adheres to this design philosophy.
However this isn't "correct design", it's just a way of making games. Skyrim has completely accessible "cities", but one of the costs of that is that the cities are all absurdly tiny. "Capitals" have populations in the dozens. "Villages" have less than ten people living in them. They've traded off the interactibility of the world against the realistic scale of the world, which is a perfectly fine design choice for the game they wanted to make.
By comparison any of the myriad open world games set in Manhattan don't depict the world in anywhere near as much detail as Skyrim (typically you can't enter any buildings except during a mission) but in exchange you get a very large and "realistic" (still not quite to scale but much much closer) urban area to explore. This is also a fine design choice, they just make different tradeoffs.
When I say "other games don't do this" I'm not saying "standards are low so why should we bother?", I'm talking about this kind of tradeoff. There are games which prioritise this sort of absolute causal consistency, but by definition they're smaller games which can keep track of a relatively small number of changes. This trades off against a much larger game where a bunch more stuff is allowed to happen, because the consequence of each of those changes is significantly simpler to implement when you don't have to track its potential impact across the entire rest of the game.
TLDR there's no such thing as "better", only optimised for different purposes.