JagexLight

Early designs did consider this but it’s difficult to make a skill non buyable and also a good item sink, instead we might consider putting the item sink into the reward space of the skill. Elena talked about this on the pre-recorded Q&A a bit!

Generally speaking, a day one release where you’re training a different skill in order to train a new one just feels bad. On the other hand, we also see the community wants the new skill to integrate well with existing skills. For example hunter with Shamanism. So we have a task to make under-utilised skills feel more rewarding whilst also making it so you can enjoy levelling the skill on release. Difficult to know at this stage but our preference is for everyone to be able to train the skill

I’m not a developer so I can’t really answer it from a design perspective. But knowing that Elena and Husky are working on the project should be reassuring in a sense. They both created Guardians of the Rift which is really well liked in the community. Husky in particular created the Hallowed Sepulchre. These devs truly know what they’re doing and how to make a skill fun and rewarding. The dream with Sailing is to make the entire ocean into playable fun content which will just provide more areas to explore. We don’t mind comparisons to Slayer because it’s one of the most liked skills but it won’t just be about sea monster hunting as there will be tons of activities to do at sea and areas to explore

It’s possible but we would rather add something than take something away. Meaning if we ever changed old content we likely wouldn’t add a new requirement or make it more difficult to do, instead adding Qol. An example was given during a Q&A where Kieren/Ayiza mentioned tapping into the spirit realm to unlock a door etc which might progress your quest faster.

Reward space discussed at 49:20 in our Pre-Record here for Sailing. I’ve seen a lot of players say that the reward space for Sailing is perhaps less scary than say augmenting fear from Shamanism which may be a good thing depending on what kind of player you are. At the end of the day we know that Rewards need to feel worthwhile. During refinement we can figure this out more if it’s the pitch most players like

It’s really open ended right now. With our new polling approach we want to figure this out during refinement and even beyond. It’s promising to see such a desire for Shamanism to expand on lore I’ve seen lots of people mention Guthrie which is cool. The great thing about skills is they can grow indefinitely and can have content for years to come after release.

If it doesn’t get enough support as a skill, we wouldn’t proceed with it further. Players don’t want us to continue pushing something that they haven’t voted for (which is clear from the Account Builds stuff earlier in the year). I don’t personally see it fitting into Hunter or Farming either so not sure on that

I think that’s one area where we admit Taming has suffered because we haven’t given enough for players to imagine about. It’s definitely a learning process. I wasn’t around when we polled skills in the past but a huge issue with previous skill proposals was that players weren’t bought in enough and didn’t get to influence the skills early on. Hoping we can change that by getting the community involved right from the start now.

If it does not pass a 70/30 lock in poll it won’t be added to the game. We hope that we can work with players to come up with an idea that excites you and genuinely creates an expansion to OSRS which players love

We used the community consultation survey for the basis of a lot of our design but when we looked at how to explain concepts we found the AI art tool quite useful, especially when we made early presentations for NDA Players etc. We also tried using it to come up with alternative names for our wildcard Shamanism pitch

Up to community to decide (refinement)

We think it's a cool reward space but it could stand on its own. I think some players would find it less worthwhile to train so we'd invite players during refinement to talk about this with us. Spirit realm is quite appealing and could be more of an emphasis if augments were not popular

We don't know at this stage but we're aware of this as a possibility and we'll definitely keep a close eye on feedback throughout. Hopefully players can continue to work with us and tell us their constructive opinions so we can avoid proposing something that players don't want! This process only works if we work together on it

We don't have the ability to do a ranked vote in our current polling system unfortunately - hoping the current approach is OK in lieu of that!

From a dev POV:

Easiest = Shamanism
Middle = Taming
Hardest = Sailing (so many expectations/player suggested demands)

But on the flip side you may also end up in a situation where the reward space for Shamanism is more difficult to balance and could take longer to implement depending on what the community prefers. So it's anyone's guess really and we'll know more about scope once we know which concept you all prefer

Check out the pre-recorded Q&A for a quick answerto this as Elena explained it quite well here how it could work (2:06:52)

I'd love a future in which we had multiple new skills but I think the key thing for us is to firstly prioritise ensuring the first new skill is a success. It's no small feat. If it goes well it could open up a ton of possibilities to explore more in future

It's been hard to get people on board with all the possibilities of Taming as a skill. And would've really liked to see more discussion about that. People got really excited about the sea/spirit realm as new areas to explore but there are possibilities of new areas associated with Taming which maybe we haven't done enough to talk about. We wanted to keep things quite open ended on our end but it would've been great to discuss that. We emphasised a lot that pet abilities are completely up to refinement and I think maybe it spooked a lot of players who compared it to Summoning

We asked a load of questions about other skills in the community consultation survey and found out players had mixed opinions on Summoning but they liked animal companions as a principle. So we came up with Taming! I think Kieren put it well in the Discord Stages Q&A when he said OSRS deserves it's own skill and not something necessarily that is mostly copied from RS3.

Assuming you're asking how you obtain them (procuring), we talked a bit in the blog about toys/lassos/food to obtain these creatures which could have nice tie-ins to other skills. You might have to go to a new area where you track the creatures (tieing in to Hunter), or there might be events between you and the creature where something happens where you need to react or find it different food/toys etc. :D