How would you rank the 3 pitches in regards to difficulty to implement?
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
From the skilling blog:
Our third pitch presents a solution to this problem, incorporating the item sink into the reward space rather than the training method.
It wasn't clear to me what kind of item sink is happening in the reward space for Shamanism, care to clarify?
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)
Is there a possibility to have all three?
i understand its more work, but it could be spread out
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
Are there any elements of these skills you haven't seen much discussion about that you think the community needs to be talking about more? Anything you think we may have neglected to talk or ask you about?
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
Was Summoning ever considered?
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.
First and foremost thank you all for the amazing job you’ve all done. All the pitches look quite fun.
In regards to taming what sort of emergent gameplay could a player expect to see? A lot of focus has been put on the training of our new friends and I was curious about how procuring them could potentially function.
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
When the skills move forward into refinement will there be any thought about how well the skill will function for ultimate ironman?
This is primarily about shamanism with most of the components being untradeable (and presumably not stackable?) I am worried that it might be extremely tedious for UIM to train with lots of back and forth between different sources of components. The closest comparison that currently exists is herblore, but at least one of the components (herbs) are easily stackable, which makes it much less tedious than it would be if you had to fill half of your inventory with two unstackable components.
I know it is a small community, but I am curious nonetheless. Regardless of the answer I am sure an effective training method will be found, just wondering if you put any thought into it when designing the content.
Thanks for all your hard work communicating details around the pitches, can't wait to finally have a new skill added to the game.
...
At this point it's too early to say what will be stackable or not within any of the skills as we're not sure which skill is going to be refined and haven't dedicated lots of design time into it. We have pledged to work with the community on the 'nitty gritty' parts of the skill so this could be potentially revisited then. I'd say vote on your favourite concept and keep us in the loop to your feedback every step of the way!
Hey Light!
First off, congratulations for the successful launch of a widely well received skill poll. I think all three concepts are awesome!
My question for the team: Will all three skills be able to be trained by a level 3 skiller? Ironman skillers?
Thanks for the AMA and to the team for how much communication there’s been on the skills.
There are aspects to it which could be completely friendly to Lvl 3s but there may be content that's much harder or gated off. A bit of content for each skill will be accessible but like with other skills it may become problematic to access all of it, e.g Monster hunting in the Sea could give Combat XP. We'll probably think more about it in refinement! <3
I know this might be nitpicky, but if shamanism is chosen, could we please have poll about changing the name of it?
Similar Q answered here
Will the name of Shamanism be changed or was your internal decision finalised already? I’ve seen many people suggest a dislike for it already.
Similar Q answered here
Assuming a perfect scenario, is there an ETA on when a new skill will be fully released?
The full launch of any new skill wouldn't be in 2023. Release depends on what skill it is and what players determine during refinement. :) We know that it's important to get this right, and we need to take the appropriate time to provide great content for players to enjoy on release. It's very possible we could have a playable Beta in 2023 if we managed to 'lock in' a Skill within the next 3-4 months but that's being very optimistic
If something like Shamanism passes. Is the spirit realm going to be separate from other realms? Just trying to see how it'd interact with like the Mahjarrat and such. Would any quests retroactively have certain skill reqs?
Hey there!
- Spirit Realm is not going to be instanced but we don't know what it looks like yet, so we have no idea if it's an overlay or separate area.
- Kieren said no to retroactive skill reqs on our recent Q&A.
I love the idea of Shamaning introducing augmentations. Could these be focused towards skilling gear to reduce people’s fears about power creep?
This seems to have been left intentionally very vague, but that seems to have just drummed up anxiety in the community.
If this was the one concept that went through to refinement, we'll have a conversation with the community about where the augments should be in the game and what they should affect. Totally understand the anxiety around it. We've left it open-ended so that the community can decide
I'm sorry, but a "limit on survey responses" does not seem like a very good reason not to run a survey. Presumably this limit can be increased by paying the survey company, and presumably Jagex can afford to do so. The surveys are by far the best ways to collect this feedback, as they are the only form of feedback not to have responses influenced by the social pressure of the social media platforms where you otherwise collect feedback.
The survey is still there in the blog post we're just worried about the impact of 40k responses on an older survey that has already been taken by 10k people when we're already close to hitting a cap. We'll run more surveys once we know what skill we're refining (which is actually where we need the feedback most).
It feels like most of the initial useful feedback on the skills has already been gathered, what with the survey, multiple discord chats and livestreams. What sort of feedback do you most want to see at this stage?
Mostly just looking to answer any lingering questions before the poll tomorrow. Refinement will depend on which skill goes through
I know you guys have said that you can vote saying you like multiple skills, but ultimately only one can pass.
I personally think Shamanism looks the best immediately, but that sailing has the most potential to add to the world - it will just take a long time to implement.
Would it be possible to have a poll that isn't years away to ask about sailing, if it doesn't pass this round?
If something doesn't pass to refinement but proves really popular there's absolutely no reason why we can't revisit it, if it's something the community wants
There has been lots of focus on what skill the community wants, which we all appreciate, but not much talk about what the jagex team wants to get from a skill.
Which skill do you think would have the healthiest impact on the game? For example, would sailing help create an easier format for expanding the RuneScape map further without risking breaking existing areas? Would taming help create a way to correct longtime design issues that don't have a clear solve? Would shamanism add another layer of item sink to help prop up the value of skilling items?
Thanks!
We generally think all three concepts are solid otherwise we wouldn't have pitched it! I think a lot of this is personal preference, we're players too and we have different opinions. Ultimately we want a skill that the community is happy with and excited about. This is an expansion for our game and we want players to be excited about the future of OSRS. Bit of a cop-out answer but all three pitches have great elements to them. I don't think it's possible to have a skill tick *every* box
Read moreLove that you’re doing this AMA, and so appreciative of the community engagement with these skill pitches.
I have a question for each of my top 2: Shamanism and Sailing.
Shamanism: Have you spent much time brainstorming the spirit realm and how it might function? I personally can’t get A Link to the Past out of my head, and would love to hear what sort of existing inspiration you might be drawing from with this concept! Side question: would we be able to see ‘ghosts’ or outlines of nearby players who are currently in the opposite realm from us? Would help reduce player dispersion!
Sailing: On the topic of player dispersion, my biggest concern with Sailing is that we’re doubling the game geography, which means spreading out our players much further than today. Has the team thought at all about how to keep the game from feeling empty with so many players moving to the ocean to train existing skills? In a similar vain, I’m concerned that Sailing will bring many...
Cool reference. Elena understood it and explained it to me (A Link to the Past). :D
OK so first one about Shamanism. The reality is that we've had to stop ourselves from over-designing a lot of these concepts. It's something we'd love to hash out further if it was the concept you all wanted most as a community. For me personally I have played a bit of Horizon Forbidden West. In that game you have a device which sits on your ear and it allows you to see stuff which isn't there. You can see footsteps and it acts as a really cool guidance tool to progress the game so I am excited to see what we can do with the over-arching concept of Shamanism. I love the idea of having a way to tap into both realities - I'm VERY curious to see whaa we could do!
The sailing Q's. Realistically we wouldn't give access to the entire Sea straight off the bat and as you improve your Sailing level you can access more dangerous areas. I don't think that we should *ever* be overly cautio...
Read moreWith sailing, what would happen if you logged out in the middle of the sea?
We joked about this one and said you'd end up in Davy Jones' locker but we honestly don't know at this stage. This one seems like more of a technical question that we'd work on if Sailing was the pitch that came out as most positive in the poll
is there a possibility a new skill doesn't get added if the poll results repeatedly show players don't want any of them?
Yep that's definitely a possibility - not one we want of course so we'd have to make a call as to where dev resource is best served. We're hoping that by working with the community super early on we can make something you want and we're open to your feedback every step of the way
devtrackers.gg