Jump to content

02-February-2009 Behind The Scenes - February


Toad

Recommended Posts

This month we welcome a few new faces to RuneScapes whos who list in the form of giant Slayer beasts. These avatars just happen to be the main focus of our new safe, conflict minigame...Soul Wars! We will also be waving goodbye to a few of our old random events, adding a new feature that will let you sort your quests, building price-checking inventory options for your items, and adding a new distraction and diversion (whose bark is far worse than his bite).

 

 

 

Soul Wars

 

On the deepest, darkest, most mysterious of our backwater islands, an eternal struggle rages, unknown to the residents of RuneScape until now. Structured much like Castle Wars, this will be a quick to access, tough to master conflict-based minigame. The avatars of Destruction and Creation vie for control of the Soul Obelisk, an ancient and powerful artefact used to harvest the souls of the weak and unready. Get ready to grab your blade, staff or bow and battle through Slayer creatures, collecting fragments of their souls to feed to the ever-hungry obelisk. Rewards include combat XP while playing the game, Pest Control-style XP rewards and a few new pets for you to lead.

 

 

 

Random event update

 

Over the last year we've been very keen to make changes to RuneScape's system of random events. After all, no one likes being forced through a long dialogue with a desperate doctor or an over-enthusiastic security guard while they're surrounded by aggressive monsters.

 

The most obvious change in the update will be to the rewards. At the end of most random events, you'll be handed a random event gift box. When you open the box, you'll get the chance to choose a reward from a selection of items including coins, runes, ore, seeds, charms and perhaps even a genie lamp. If the random event previously offered emotes or costumes, you'll be able to choose those from the random event gift box's menu. So whatever kind of reward you want, there should be something in there for you.

 

We're also making a major change to the rate at which random events appear, basing it on your skill total and your record of successfully passing random events. So, if you correctly solve every event you encounter, you'll experience fewer events in the future. On a related topic, the game will remember which random events you get, so it can aim to give you a greater variety of events, rather than always giving you the same random events over and over again.

 

Some random events will be removed from the game. Poison-gas chests, smoking rocks, broken pickaxes and ents will become things of the past. The Drunken Dwarf will be retired as a random event, but he'll still be free to roam the world, handing out kebabs to his mateys. You'll still be able to obtain shade robes, strange fruit and security books; we do not intend to discontinue any existing rewards.

 

Other improvements include allowing you to have more than one set of costumes, giving value to old frog tokens (so dont throw them away!), stopping run energy from draining in the maze and even giving the Sandwich Lady her own café!

 

 

 

Price check

 

Ever found yourself at the bottom of a lonely, dark, depressing dungeon, with only the sound of your Summoning beast to keep you company, when suddenly out of the bleakness come the infamous words price check plz?. Quite often youll want to know how much something is worth, even if you are holding back the forces of darkness at the same time. Because of this often-heard request, we have decided to add it as a permanent feature. So youll be able to click on a button beneath your worn items to open a new price-check interface, into which youll be able to place objects from your inventory (including stacks) to see their trade value.

 

 

 

Quest list interface

 

This month we will also be adding a new filtering option to the quest list in game. This means that you will be able to filter out all the quests you dont yet have the level to do, or filter the list so it displays all your completed quests last to name just a few options.

 

 

 

Evil Tree

 

Also this month we will be bringing you a new distraction and diversion affectionately known as the Evil Tree. This twice-a-day event will focus on providing an alternative to your Woodcutting, Firemaking and Farming training. During this event, a small, innocent leprechaun will be appearing in a variety of locations, using his magical divining rod to try to discover the whereabouts of an exciting new species of plant. He knows that the plant grows into a tree at an alarmingly fast rate, and that budding farmers will be able to use their skills to coax it out even faster; but Farmings not the only skill you will be using...since this tree is EVIL!

 

Well, perhaps for us that twist wasnt so surprising (the name kind of gives it away) but for anyone who hasnt read this it will be quite a shock to see the innocent, naive sapling turn into a menacing and malevolent fiend! Prepare to grab your tinderboxes and axes (the leprechaun has spares), and go toe-to-branch with this new challenge. Evil trees will come with similar level requirements to their less evil counterparts, and will range from normal, simple trees all the way up to elder trees...evil elder trees, of course. Rewards include generous XP in the aforementioned skills, and access to some unique services to complement your Woodcutting training.

 

 

 

Future Content

 

Mobilising Armies

 

Work continues on this tactical minigame, and weve been busily adding new features and continuously developing the game engine to support this new content. Recent additions include:

 

Altering the effect that different races of troops can have on your rewards.

 

Changing the way in which catapults are loaded.

 

Improving the way in which the camera moves around the battlefield.

 

Improving the on-screen information so you know what all of your troops are doing.

 

Updating the tutorial to be more interactive and straightforward.

 

Changing one of the scenarios to feature TzHaar.

 

As we have said before, this minigame is different from anything ever seen before in RuneScape. The more we test and play through the content, the more features we know we need to add to make the game work the way we want it to. This means that weve not been able to launch it as early in the year as we had initially hoped, but we will give you more news as soon as it is available.

 

 

 

Have fun!

 

 

 

Mod Mark

 

Lead Designer RuneScape

smellysockssigbyblfazer.png
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 281
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

NO QUEST!

 

Thats what I was going to post :(

 

 

 

All the stuff that's coming this month sounds good.. but where are the quests :(

 

Also we already have a D&D that gives firemaking exp (Phoenix) so thats a little dissapointing, would have preferred to get more farming exp instead of the firemaking (im already 99 fm)

 

 

 

Randoms retiring... yey, randoms giving charms as reward... even more yey :D

612d9da508.png

Mercifull.png

Mercifull <3 Suzi

"We don't want players to be able to buy their way to success in RuneScape. If we let players start doing this, it devalues RuneScape for others. We feel your status in real-life shouldn't affect your ability to be successful in RuneScape" Jagex 01/04/01 - 02/03/12

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Better not nerf slayer with that new minigame with slayer beasts... with "pc style rewards" Minigame does seem fun and team based, but just concerned the rewards arent slayer or summon xp :P

smellysockssigbyblfazer.png
Link to comment
Share on other sites

NO QUEST!

 

Thats what I was going to post :(

 

 

 

All the stuff that's coming this month sounds good.. but where are the quests :(

 

Also we already have a D&D that gives firemaking exp (Phoenix) so thats a little dissapointing, would have preferred to get more farming exp instead of the firemaking (im already 99 fm)

 

 

 

Randoms retiring... yey, randoms giving charms as reward... even more yey :D

 

 

 

:) Seems an ok month

 

 

 

EDIT: Removing some pesky random events and adding new rewards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

hoping the slayer monsters in the mini-game are any good, just got 88 today :D

 

 

 

but yeh where are the quests.....

nekusig2fcopy.jpg

 

There are three sides to every story: There's one side, there's the other, and there's the truth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Slayer update, how did I know it. And thank GOD for the other updates.

 

 

 

Holy crap, no quest though... but we are up to 149 quests now... right? Guess they're working on something for #150.

Started free trade with 1.5m cash. 2 weeks later, have hit max cash 2x.

 

PvP drops: 359 Brawling Gloves, 11 Vesta's Longswords, 41+ Zaros/Ancient Statues

9 Dragon Full Helms, 3 Dragonfire Shields on the old PvP loot system

 

Brawler guide is being finished!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I couldn't honestly care less about the mibolising army thing myself. I'm sure lots of people are looking forward to it, but it always sucks when I see them work really hard on a piece of content I know I'll never have any interest in.

This website and its contents are copyright © 1999 - 2010 Jagex Ltd.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We're also making a major change to the rate at which random events appear, basing it on your skill total

 

 

 

That is the only thing that caught my attention.

2376/2376 total achieved - May 2009

 

Retired Dec 2009

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anyone remember hearing what happened to that random that was gonna be a wondering gnome? I think they were going to call him Sebastian Gno perhaps?

This website and its contents are copyright © 1999 - 2010 Jagex Ltd.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am very...uninterested in this month. Quite frankly, some of the "updates" they're doing aren't all that interesting to me. The most significant of them is the "Random Event" update that they promised all the way back in 2004.

 

 

 

The quest reordering? Junk. The quest journal outlined what quests you could or couldn't do with just a click. The price check feature? Junk. Unless it does the ENTIRE INVENTORY all at once, it too, is just another useless script.

 

 

 

Quite happy to see another D&D released, but I'm a little weary of what it offers in the way of experience. We already HAVE a D&D that trains combat and firemaking--most notably the Phoenix D&D. I would have rather seen different skill, like Herblore or Runecrafting, as the reward. Still, can't argue with free EXP...right? TBH, one of the updates they SHOULD have done was rethinking the way they class D&D's. As far as I'm concerned, the Jade Vine, Bork hunting, and other similar things are all D&D's, since you can do them repeatedly after x-amount of time passes.

 

 

 

Can't argue with another minigame, I guess, even though it's yet ANOTHER PvP minigame... So long as it doesn't provide runes/arrows/food, I'll be happy. They say it's Castlewars-esque, so that shouldn't be an issue. When will they stop neglecting skilling minigames, though? I crave another Vinesweeper-like game! Or Great Orb Project game! Those are fun and useful minigames, in my opinion. Don't know about you.

 

 

 

And LOLOL. It seems like Runescape is desperately trying to tailor Mobilizing Armies into more classy "Armies of Gielinor" minigame. Found this to be quite funny. Who wants to bet that the release of Armies of Gielinor on Funorb was just a subtle way to get Runescape Player beta tester feedback while simultaneously gaining more Funorb+Runescape subscriptions? Those clever monkies.

hzvjpwS.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.