devtrackers.gg
The problem is they just TOLD us he grew and never actually showed the steps. Explicitly, the followup to Death of Chivalry was done offscreen and would have been a huge contributing factor to showing his humbling but they just tell us it happened.
I see what you mean by this but technically speaking this is inaccurate.
We planned out a long term character development for Saradomin (this was before Desperate Times where we were planning out the EGW storyline).
You are of course welcome to criticise that development as it exists in game, but neither the plan nor the execution assumed the existence of DOC2. While we were writing Azzanadra's Quest, the inclusion of Owen meant that we had to make a call on whether DOC2 had yet to happen, and we let Stu make that call himself and write the dialogue himself.
You can certainly argue that his personality change is a bit abrupt. Actually part of the reason that I took the crown away was so that we had the option of using that as a cruder, more explicit explanation for why he seemed to undergo such a personality shift if we felt it was necessary, but largely it seemed to go down well.
In part it's clunky because it was a sort of course correction to Sliske's Game Saradomin who is intended to be a grey, nuanced character but had ended up being interpreted largely as a zealous villain. As with a lot of similar issues, we had a choice of explicit retcon (for example, just retconning Garlandia which is one of the primary issues) or trying to work with it in a more nuanced way. We chose the latter and while the results aren't perfect, I'm quite pleased with what we were able to achieve.
What??? We absolute do see it.
In SE we see him stripped of his godhood and going through regaining his humanity. He realizes he needs to remember what human perspective is like and doubles down on focusing his efforts to ensure mortal life can be as peaceful as possible.
After that we see him willing to work with us to help in the elder eggs search, and find him pretty infuriated when he realizes just how simpy and haughty his followers have become that they weren’t letting others call him for help. When he loses his crown that same day and most of his knights instead of blaming others he focuses is on Zaros as to blame and goes to force seren to start taking some responsibility for her family.
They mobilize the protection of the monolith from Zaros and when Nex shows up Saradomin uses himself as bait to lead her away. If you read the battle reports that are written from his perspective you also learn that while fighting Nex he was expending energy and focus to magically shield their combat away from mortals. Nex taunts him about this and he gets physically hurt because of this but he continues to focus on protecting them over himself. He fights to the bitter end until the monolith battle is done.
He is willing to join us in protecting and draining the eggs while we figure out what to do. Over the course of the elder war we watch Saradomin exchange views with the other gods and gradually he changes and shifts. When the chips are down Seren betrays us, Zamorak betrays us, and Armadyl is ready to give up to. But not Saradomin, he is ready to fight to the bitter end to protect this world even if it’s hopeless. Bringing up Armadyl’s own earlier lessons showing how it’s changed him and this inspires Armadyl to stay rather than succumb to defeatism.
When the war is over Saradomin with his daughter now by his side we see begins working to genuinely make amends where he can. We see him call people in one by one listening to their pleas and how they were negatively affected by him and he works to make amends. At times losing his temper but quickly getting it back under control with his daughter being an anchor. Except the final time where Adrasteia loses her temper with the godless Icyene that wants to just hold a grudge. But Saradomin calls Adrasteia, admits she has a point, and does listen to her and decide to leave this world because his care for this world is more important than his lust of power.
During this Zamorak launches a full scale invasion and joins directly in the fray fighting it where he can. When he realizes that the only options are engage in a bloody war, give up his ideals and yield to zamorak, or be banished he chooses banishment. Partly because of the godless’s words but also partly because he recognizes for all the good he genuinely wishes…his very ideals will always invite conflict from others like zamorak. So he accepts this fate and decides not only will he leave this world but he will focus all his efforts for the rest of eternity to give Zamorak the conflict he so craves and thus won’t be able to focus on Gielinor.
Then he makes one last sacrifice before he goes, he orders Adrasteia his daughter to stay behind and help guide people in his stead even knowing it means they may never speak or see one another again. He uses the last of his power and time before banishment to announce to the world Adrasteia’s role so that she has some backing to help her out.
Great summary.
I wonder if the disconnect here might be that the game content is very much showing, but what it's showing is that he's different, but not why he's different.
We didn't really have any intention to show that some specific event had prompted him to behave differently. It's more about illustrating the person that he is, that he is wise and good intentioned, but angry and arrogant. Some of this borders a little on retcon, but at the same time I think it's a little dangerous to try to pretend that we can redeem a character who seems to be genocidal by having them spank their inner moppet or whatever.
I chalk it up to a lack of screen time mostly. The entire gods return saga was a huge undertaking, I get that, but while the vast majority was good, there are some parts that fell to the wayside, and I feel this was one of them. I see the intended direction, but it always felt like it was missing a piece to really make it click in proper.
I went through the entire player choice era erring on the side of Zarosians because largely they were generally upfront about how much one should trust them throughout the progression of the story; the further the story went the less give and the more take from the faction made it more difficult justify it which was a good way of showing the characters off; ultimately during the same story chunks that painted Seren in a darker light and highlighted Zamorak's more noble demon aspects also brought to the forefront the reasons to not support Zaros and actively go against him. Zamorak and Seren, for what the end result was, were also shown to consistently be self-serving at the core so their arcs were smoother.
However, for Saradomin, if you weren't 100% on board with him from the start, he did not attempt to give you reason to change your mind about him until the literal Endgame and you likely would not see him much during it by virtue of prior choices. This is why it comes across as detrimental to the narrative telling us he had a change of heart or epiphany about the way he handles his godhood rather than showing us that more content could have made smoother.
But it still has that large unseen gap between DoC and Endgame. We never had interactions with him where he actively proved a change in character between DoC where he is set up to have this effort to right the wrong he did and humble himself under the knowledge he isn't an infallible being and has grown too arrogant. We skipped straight to endgame before we really got interactions with him directly again, but to have it all crammed in optional, possibly even barred due to player choices, encounters during a time of duress. Being brought down to mortal status is a great catalyst with the seeds started in DoC, but missing something in between DoC and Endgame throws off the natural flow of the redemption arc, to me anyway.
He has a lot of "sins" under his belt, and fully redeeming him in the cosmic scale was never something that could be done, but sliding him back to a more white shade of grey was clearly the goal. He got there eventually, but depending on player choice and bias going into the player choice era, he does have a gap in character development that DoC sequel would have addressed had the time and development been there.
At the time of Endgame, there was no intentional "redemption arc" being written. We only started planning for that afterwards.