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Sweet!
One other bit, could you add a rate sword right-click back to egil as well? I love to make ceremonial swords when they pop up but having to go through his intro dialog every time kind of stinks
I'll note it down.
Sweet!
One other bit, could you add a rate sword right-click back to egil as well? I love to make ceremonial swords when they pop up but having to go through his intro dialog every time kind of stinks
I'll note it down.
I agree with this. It's on my list to include as soon as I can find a relevant project.
an update done by 2 mods out of 50-100
I think there might be a bit of disagreement here about what we mean by "mod" or "developer". While it's true that "2 jmods" worked full time on the combat fixes, that's only counting specifically content developers. Not everyone who works on Runescape is a content developer. Sometimes when we say "mod" or "dev" we mean specifically content devs, sometimes we mean anyone who works in development (which includes artists but not say managers) and sometimes we mean anyone working on RS in any capacity.
"2 out of 100" is comparing different things - 2 content developers, but more than 100 staff including non-developers. If we're talking about all staff, it's more accurate to say that 10 even 20 people "worked on it", but because of the nature of their jobs most of them weren't full time just on that project. If we're talking specifically about content developers, there are not, and have never been, 100 content developers working on Runescape.
Let me know when you get to Gower Quest.
Read moreBut 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 b...
At the time of Endgame, there was no intentional "redemption arc" being written. We only started planning for that afterwards.
Read moreI 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...
Read moreWhat??? 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 foc...
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.
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 Sli...
Read morei think you guys should really look at bringing back TAPP. almost all tapp projects were universally loved and created smaller more consistent updates throughout the year.
Gamejam is essentially TAPP but formatted more in the way the devs have asked for. The problem with TAPP is that it was divided up into such tiny blocks of time that it was really hard to get anything done. Gamejam takes more or less the same total time, and blocks it together in a way that's much more effective.
Read moreI think there's a unique issue here.
Fort struck me as a means of solving longstanding issues and 'regrounding' Runescape's story content, whilst Necromancy provided the 'flashy' content.
Necromancy however is a double-edged sword. It's a new combat skill which addressed lots of bug bears (not least new players). But because it is another combat skill, despite being new in many ways and widely used, it is also not-new. And the area that came with it you would not habitually visit. This means that the 'new' stuff in the fort has a lot of weight put on it, perhaps disproportionately so, and feels a bit diminutive.
If I'm honest, I expect this is so unique that there's less to learn from it than may be expected. (Which is not to say that you shouldn't try to learn, obviously.)
However, and I don't mean this in a brow beating way, but I'd suggest the best thing you can actually do, strategically, is announce whatever is coming in the second half of 20...
This means that the 'new' stuff in the fort has a lot of weight put on it, perhaps disproportionately so, and feels a bit diminutive.
Yeah I think this is spot on.
How short can a "1 area focus" season be?
My conclusion is that the fort story taking 2 years to unravel is too long (for how minor most of the updates were). I think a slightly more fast-paced 1-year story would hold people's attention more. And then you can do a "year of the desert", "year of gnomes", "year of elemental workshop", etc. Maybe 6 months for a smaller story?
Conceivably yeah. Something like "gnome finale quest plus five months of gnome-themed combat and skilling updates in and around Arposandra" could be feasible as an off the cuff judgement. Kind of like an expansion but split into six parts.
I can't promise anything like that of course as a lot of people have input on what we do.
I'm not sure it's fair to call the fort updates "minor" but I do get what you mean. To an extent I think this isn't really a season problem so much as a skilling update problem. I'm working hard on trying to fix this but it's not trivial to resolve.
I am not denying it. I am just pointing out his contribution to this project is nothing other than just making a spreadsheet per his own words.
This is essentially correct. I'm not a developer anymore and I'm not currently set up to just jump into game and develop things. That said, don't understate the value of up front designs either.
Because Mod Jack has stated that he wants Runescape to adopt the seasonal update plan. We saw that last year, with the main focus being Fort Forinthry - Necromancy was a sidestep but after that it was right back to Fort.
Community hit lists being so well received should be the first sign for Jagex Leadership. Gamejams, being well received on social media should be the second sign. But hey, more Fort!
Jagex are notorious for burying their heads in the sand, Leadership especially.
I'm very interested in feedback on this. I would say in general that my takeaway is the same as yours, that the emphasis on the fort feels too repetitive across the whole year, and it's not a good approach to continue with.
That said updates can't just be swapped out one for one. If you look at what's happening in a fort update, for example from an environment art point of view, they mostly just add a single building. You can't take an update which is just a single building and use that "budget" to make, for example, a gnome finale or a penguin continuation. We certainly could focus on gnomes, but if we did that, the focus would be on gnomes. It wouldn't (and couldn't) be the gnomes one month and the penguins the next month and the fort the month after that.
A key part of the way I've had to approach thinking about joined up content basically comes down to this maths. Back in the day art was so lo-fi that more or less anything could be put together very qui...
Read moreI don't recall Mod Jack showing up in a Gamejam. He might have made a comment afterward, showing Jagex's interest in approving and implementing such an update.
At least, Mod Jack is not being accredited in the Woodcutter's Grove update:
I don't usually have time for game jam, but the baseline tier rebalance was something I put together a while before. I have lots of designs for little reworks knocking about, but it's no easier for me to just make things happen than for anyone else. I try to squeeze them into updates when I can, but the needs of the update itself come first and I also have to be careful about treading on the toes of the developers.
(The reason I pushed hard for the woodcutting changes is that they were blocking multiple other things, like being able to add new hatchets, being able to improve the woodcutting mechanics, etc.)
Regarding the multiple tables when the system changes, silly question but could you just do what was done with Vorkath "new system, you need to claim your current streak before doing more kills"?
As long as it was a rare enough occurrence (and potentially paired with advanced notice), it'd not result in much more than the usual complaining?
No - allowing you to claim your current streak requires the previous system to be in place.
Read moreYeah bad luck protection is a great example.
Features always have cost and benefit to be compared against other features. Design time, dev time, risk, etc compared to how many players does it affect and how much of an improvement is it for those players. BLM doesn't affect that many players, but it affects them a great deal (since dry streaks feel awful). That pushes it up the priority list compared to other things.
Having multiple different systems increases the cost of actually fixing the problem, which then pushes it back down. That's also likely exponential in practice. These numbers are probably lowball, but say it takes half a day to design a bad luck system and one hour to apply it to the handful of bosses that use that system. That's 1 day of work, pretty good for how much it will improve the game as a result.
Now say we have 5 different drop systems. Now we're up from 1 day to 5 days, which is a much worse deal. More than that, though, five days isn...
This isn't a hypothetical example by the way - this is exactly what happened when Shogun and I sat down to start making progress on this problem. We got around the initial time problem by doing it in the evening, and we "hacked" the prioritisation a little by sneaking some hygiene work into Raptor's Rampage, but the basic time issue still remains to be addressed, which is why Shogun is chipping away at it in game jams.
If you want a meaningful luck effect and bad luck protection, it would be a lot easier if boss reward systems were at least similar to each other (in implementation).
Meanwhile streaking is a completely different system that is difficult to manipulate without, for example, just one day changing people's Telos chests completely for no reason.
Yeah bad luck protection is a great example.
Features always have cost and benefit to be compared against other features. Design time, dev time, risk, etc compared to how many players does it affect and how much of an improvement is it for those players. BLM doesn't affect that many players, but it affects them a great deal (since dry streaks feel awful). That pushes it up the priority list compared to other things.
Having multiple different systems increases the cost of actually fixing the problem, which then pushes it back down. That's also likely exponential in practice. These numbers are probably lowball, but say it takes half a day to design a bad luck system and one hour to apply it to the handful of bosses that use that system. That's 1 day of work, pretty good for how much it will improve the game as a result.
Now say we have 5 different drop systems. Now we're up from 1 day to 5 days, which is a much worse deal. More than that, though, five days isn...
Read moreThis reply would make more sense if you could provide a valid reason as to why all drop tables should work the same across all bosses all of a sudden.
We talk a lot about technical debt and design debt, and this is really what that looks like in practice.
Maintaining 10 systems takes 10 times longer than maintaining 1 system. Even more if some of the systems are significantly more complex, and probably longer still because complexity doesn't scale linearly. Maintaining unnecessary systems is bad because time spent doing that is time not spent doing something else - like making content.
It's worth maintaining multiple systems if they're important and hitting fundamentally different things - like you can't fold bosses and quests into a "single system" in order to make maintenance simpler. Drop tables, by comparison, are a relatively simple concept and while it's not that there's no possible benefit to having different bosses work in a different way, from a cost/benefit POV the tradeoff is significantly worse.
Posting a top level comment for visibility, but Monado replied:
You and I both know this is about Jagex making it so skill expression/ceiling isn't rewarded economically above a certain point.
In a sense this is true, but also a little misleading. Skill (as in player ability) is (and should be) rewarded, but it's currently rewarded in at least four different ways:
All of these multiply together - the problem isn't that higher skill is rewarded, but that higher skill is rewarded exponentially via multiple explicit mechanics.
What's not necessarily obvious externally is what a technical problem loot streaking is. It's not, as some replies are implying, a lack of willingness on our part to put th...
Read moreThat's it I'm removing it again.
RemindMe! 15 years