According to Wiki, Arposandra is one of three unreleased cities in Runescape, along with Palingrad and the Underwater City. While it would be neat to be able to visit all three, only Arposandra has the level of in game content and focus to make releasing worthwhile. The fact that it has been over 12 years since the last gnome quest is also unfortunate, and that other non-EGW related lore is not being prioritized.
Leave a comment with your thoughts.
External link →Never gonna happen until we get a new lead designer. Mod jack doesn't want to finish old stories because "everyone that was invested in them has left or forgotten it now so it isn't worth doing". I'm paraphrasing but that's basically what he said.
That's nothing like what I said.
I am sorry Jack, I am not trying to be a dick or put words in your mouth, but I paraphrased that quote from one of your design streams.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1810414293
I will quote the part I had a problem with verbatim, and say what I took from it. If I misunderstood, I'll take my comment down and apologize.
...Generally on the topic of storylines, like why do we have to have a storyline, why can't we just have miscellaneous updates, like we used to? It's quite a complex topic, it's probably a large topic in its own right, I think the short version of that would be that you can't get people on board and caring about a storyline that you only check in on once every year. You just can't. Like, people will have forgotten. You can't engage them with characters.
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Some of you will have been waiting to find out the ultimate conclusion to the desert storyline, essentially some of you will have started that as children and are now adults. And you've kinda...lived the entire transitionary period of your lives, waiting for that question to be answered and it still hasn't been answered. And most of the people that were at some point interested in the answer of that question have lost interest, they don't - they aren't there anymore. Like, that's something they did when they were children. And they no longer care. And it's, you know, you still wanna find out the answer to that question but it's too long. 10 years is too long, to start a story and conclude it. So, we need to just have stories that are told on a relatively sane timescale.
Maybe you are right and this topic does need it's own stream, because my understanding from this philosphy is that old questlines are just never gonna get finished. You don't want to just post a continuation of a quest randomly and then come back to it later, you don't want to continue the storyline because some people have forgotten about it. So where exactly would a gnome or desert continuation fit in an update schedule? What were we supposed to take from this, have I misunderstood?
Yeah as you say it's tricky because it's a huge topic.
The section you quoted wasn't about not doing finales, it was about how we need to finish storylines when they still matter, not just leave two years between quests. Basically the situation where some questline is still not finished is bad, and my priority is making sure we don't keep doing that, hence the "we should push ahead with a specific storyline to finish it" attitude.
All that said, I'm not against doing old finales - I would go so far as to say we should do that, but there are just a bunch of factors. We can't just "ship Arposandra" - the anticipated scope is huge, it's not a monthly update, it's the environmental focus of the year. I actually pitched "Desert Finale" for the period that became LOZ, and in retrospect if I could go back I would push it harder. (Part of the consideration is that at the time Rowley was busy with Necromancy, and I think we'd all prefer that he was involved.)
Stage 1 of lore design for me is always "how do we tie Robert the Strong/ gnomes/ desert/ Necrosyrtes/ daemonheim into this?" but it doesn't always (or often) survive the cut.
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