Future Update Discussions

[Alg]

Lobby is too kind, if your not reaching required happiness levels it should make training take away xp and make monsters take your gp when they die and just delete like 1 item stack from ur bank every couple of hours.

Perhaps they should just replace all of your items with kittens and/or puppies, rather than kick you out of the game. That would allow you to reach your daily happiness quota more effectively than just kicking you out.

[muggiwhplar]

Unpaid Jagex interns are reading this thread and jotting down notes as quickly as they can. "This is GOLD!"

[Saradomin_Mage]

 

Lobby is too kind, if your not reaching required happiness levels it should make training take away xp and make monsters take your gp when they die and just delete like 1 item stack from ur bank every couple of hours.

Perhaps they should just replace all of your items with kittens and/or puppies, rather than kick you out of the game. That would allow you to reach your daily happiness quota more effectively than just kicking you out.

 

"FFS another puppy????"

 

>Seismic wand turns into puppy.

[Alg]

"FFS another puppy????"

 

>Seismic wand turns into puppy.

>Seismic puppy

 

Not seeing a downside here.

[Urza285]

I'm so going to farm to death the slayer bxp for 120 slayer.

[Ammako]

[qfc]360-361-663-65346821[/qfc]

 

Sick to [bleep]ing death of them reworking everything. This time they go all the way down to the most basic abilities like Slice/Wrack/Piercing Shot which haven't been touched since the dawn of EOC.

 

On the plus side the defensive reworks look good, especially the shield tier related ones.

 

Oh yeah, better sell ascensions/wand@@@@

The thing is, it doesn't matter how many times they try to make every combat style's abilities equal.

Even if combat styles all had the exact same abilities except with different names and animations, the three combat styles still wouldn't be completely balanced; Melee will be at a disadvantage by nature.

If Melee, Magic and Ranged all had the same DPS and stun capabilities, then Ranged and Magic would have higher DPS because you wouldn't have to run around as much to attack your next opponent.

 

Then you could try to make up for it by giving Melee some stronger abilities, but then it would unbalance Melee in many situations.

 

IMO, we should go back to the game's roots; Melee as the main combat style, using Magic to give you bonuses in combat (using those spells to increase accuracy, damage and resistance, maybe add new spells that allow you to apply some kind of elemental damage to your weapon for a certain amount of time?), using Ranged to allow you to attack from a distance (like you wield your ranged weapon so you can get a couple hits from afar until everyone's in melee range, or simply attacking people/stuff that can't reach you because obstacles.)

 

Or they could try to make it so every combat style has different abilities to do different things, but then it just leads to the same problem where one combat style dominates while the other two are used in very rare occasions.

[Sy_Accursed]

The games roots were never melee as the main combat style.

From day 1 there was always supposed to be an equal and fair combat triangle.

 

In some ways you could make melee stand a fairer chance if you made binds/stuns etc work different depending on who you are fighting so that meleers could easily get in close to rangers to do damage, but could not do the same to mages.

 

Really though in my opinion we would be better served by expanding the triangle a bit more so instead of 3 classes supposed to be balanced we have more niche classes and have each class have strengths and weaknesses that would serve you differently against different opponents. In terms of pvp you could never really make it work perfectly, short of making a pvp only combat style that uses all 3 together that was so much better than all other styles in pvp that you'd be insane to not use it.

 

I mean even with the existing weakness setup you could kinda divide the 3 classes into 10 different niche styles with nuanced uses that work for some mobs (of course this would require mobs to actually be built in ways to utilise the features) and not for others.

 

For example:

Air mages could be about movement and dodging they could utilise short range teleports and cloaking enabling them to avoid enemy attention. Their attacks would be fast but offer lower DPS and they'd suffer from being very easy to kill if you can get a hit in.

Water mages could be a healing/buff role that is primarily useful for group pvm rather than solo, their downfall would be they can't really survive/kill anything alone due to weak combative attributes.

Earth mages could be very tanky using rock and earth to make them very hard to kill and utlising natures powers to be able to do a little bit of healing work, but their downfall would be they leave themselves exposed and rooted for a fair while to fire off their attacks.

Fire mages could be pure dps but their downfall is fire is unpredictable and wild so their attacks are mostly areas of effect and can easily hit their own team if not careful.

 

Thrown could be more of an assassin role find kinks in armour and applying poisons and such with the ability to attack from a range (throwing knives etc) and get in close (daggers etc) but again have limitations on def and hp if they get spotted.

Crossbows could be a sort of 'gunslinger' type role - quick firing and able to deal with a solid swarm easily as long as they arent heavily armoured.

Bows could be pure archers who can snipe and get massive hits and have a massive range but are a rear guard as they aren't quick enough to protect themselves well in close combat.

etc.

 

And then alongside those you can mix in more hybrid and tribrid styles, like maybe 'storm mages' could utilise air and water to produce lightning effects and become an evasive, but slower mage that can hit reasonably hard but can also obscure allies using fog and such or a warrior archer perhaps loses some range and damage but gains defence and a solid melee attack.

 

etc.

[Saradomin_Mage]

The games roots were never melee as the main combat style.

From day 1 there was always supposed to be an equal and fair combat triangle.

what's RSC?

[Sy_Accursed]

 

The games roots were never melee as the main combat style.

From day 1 there was always supposed to be an equal and fair combat triangle.

what's RSC?

 

I said it was supposed to be an equal and fair combat triangle, not that it actually worked in the slightest.

[Saradomin_Mage]

 

 

The games roots were never melee as the main combat style.

From day 1 there was always supposed to be an equal and fair combat triangle.

what's RSC?

 

I said it was supposed to be an equal and fair combat triangle, not that it actually worked in the slightest.

 

There was no combat triangle in RSC, pretty much. Melee was the only style you'd use, you had ranged to fire maybe one hit before the battle started (unless you were piling in the wilderness) and magic was just a supplement to melee, being cast alongside it. Only in RS2 did Jagex try to come up with the notion of a combat triangle.

 

When they added black dragonhide, ranged instantly became one of the better classes because you could get incredible accuracy on top of quick hits, plus the 35% MSB spec got work done.

 

Anyway, most combat updates in RS2 tended to push each class further into its corner of the combat triangle. Melee had low-maintenance weapons with rapid and high damage output, Magic was always the most expensive class with a good variety of AOE/extra effects, as well as the highest (but most expensive) DPS option, and Ranged was the retarded kid that had incredible accuracy but low strength, whose only saving grace was lucky specs for huge damage (MSB, dark bow, dragonstone bolts, hand cannon). Of course, melee got arguably the best corner of the triangle with all the gear they were constantly receiving, though updates towards 2011 and 2012 pushed viable gear to the other two classes at last.

 

Clearly, each of these classes had something unique to fall back on, which made combat more interesting. Your suggestion, though complex, would have also been a good direction that they could have taken the game, to carve out further niches and unique options. At the end of the day, though, this update turns the combat triangle into a combat pancake*. Every class ends up homogenized in damage output and abilities, and the only "triangle" is simply that some weapons hit better against some armours. It's a pretty artificially enforced triangle.

 

This is probably off-tangent from what you were discussing, but oh well.

 

*Originally used term in the 2012 Combat Beta FAQ.

[Sobend]

To be fair to Sy's point, when the game was in it's early stages you could choose what class you could be. Archers got extra range experience, Warriors got extra melee experience, etc. So even though the three classes were nowherere near equal I bet the creators were hoping for some sort of triangle. They just didn't have the technical abilities to do it until RS2.

 

I heard the above fact second hand; did not experience btw.

[Yoko Kurama]

To be fair to Sy's point, when the game was in it's early stages you could choose what class you could be. Archers got extra range experience, Warriors got extra melee experience, etc. So even though the three classes were nowherere near equal I bet the creators were hoping for some sort of triangle. They just didn't have the technical abilities to do it until RS2.

 

I heard the above fact second hand; did not experience btw.

 

It was never a matter of technical abilities. The numbers were purposefully such that melee was the best and that mage and ranger were secondary. They could have easily tweaked the numbers to equalize the triangle, and released mage/range weapons/armours but it was never really a concern or priority. In OSRS, their small and limited team has just done something of the sort, they have released t70 weapons for rangers/mages in God Wars (something the original god ars never had), and they released new shields for mages and rangers from the wilderness bosses. It's not that hard, something of this could have been done in the original RS, it was just never really a concern. 

[Sobend]

 

To be fair to Sy's point, when the game was in it's early stages you could choose what class you could be. Archers got extra range experience, Warriors got extra melee experience, etc. So even though the three classes were nowherere near equal I bet the creators were hoping for some sort of triangle. They just didn't have the technical abilities to do it until RS2.

 

I heard the above fact second hand; did not experience btw.

 

It was never a matter of technical abilities. The numbers were purposefully such that melee was the best and that mage and ranger were secondary. They could have easily tweaked the numbers to equalize the triangle, and released mage/range weapons/armours but it was never really a concern or priority. In OSRS, their small and limited team has just done something of the sort, they have released t70 weapons for rangers/mages in God Wars (something the original god ars never had), and they released new shields for mages and rangers from the wilderness bosses. It's not that hard, something of this could have been done in the original RS, it was just never really a concern. 

 

Not sure what we are calling the original Runescape here, but if it's Classic then there are some technical difficulties I assume. I agree they could have made things more even (get rid of the 20 second wait after casting a failed spell is one) but I would imagine the nature of the game would make melee naturally favored. Going back to my first point, I'm not sure why they would offer players to be mages and archers if they didn't plan on making those on par with melee. Why would you intentionally put someone at a starting disadvantage to somebody else? 

 

If we're talking about early Runescape 2, in early 2005 (about a year or so after classic), Barrows came out giving mages and archers tier 70 weaponry. This was an important step to making magic and range more than a complement to melee, although I would definitely agree that it wasn't equal. It's also important to remember that tiers of weaponry was not nearly as important as it is today. A magic shortbow could easily pierce through torags for instance.

 

Either way though, I'm saying that Jagex probably intended to make the classes eventually equal the moment the game opened, not during late RSC or RS2. We won't know for sure unless the creators elaborate more; this is all speculation. I think they eventually realized that melee was going to be at a natural advantage because no ammo is required and stuck with it.

[Ambler]

http://runescape.podbean.com/2014/04/12/story-exposed-part-1/

Latest podcast, basically explaining how quests are made. Not much information about future releases, but:

Elf Grandmaster quest is confirmed to be 2-3 hours+ in length

[Sy_Accursed]

A big concern I got from that podcast is they spoke of immersive quests being self-contained and globe trotting do it yourself quests as something different entirely. And speaking of the later as 'nostalgic'

 

I think this viewpoint is entirely removed from what (in my experience) most players feel - self-contained quests feel LESS immersive precisely because they are self-contained, you may be immersed in that particularly story but you feel kinda disconnect from the game as a whole, especially when arbitrary requirements exist, because you are not applying your knowledge and your skills to be immersed in the quest you are being handheld through and fed everything you need on a platter.

 

Globetrotting, DIY quests conversely are nothing to do with nostalgia. It's to do with feeling really immersed and engaged because this story reaches all over Gielinor and it relies on your expertise and knowledge to track down things and uncover lost secrets in plain site.

 

Of course there are nuances to this - having to trot all over with very little purpose or source really basic common items is a pita, but as long as there is a purpose to it it feels great to be so engaged with the quest and its ties into the world at large in a more tangible sense than 'oh this has foreshadowing consequences that you may or may not see happen in the next decade.' Equally self-contained works well for novice content and in certain instances (eg Frenskae self-contained worked reasonably well because it made sense to be entirely there).

 

It also somewhat concerned me how they spoke of not really having series curators anymore and letting any keen dev jump on something - I can see how this has upsides (e.g. finishing a quest series after dev quits) but it also gives me some concern because giving too much free reign like that (Aside from osbourne poking the lore in to order) results in story lines being utterly ruined. Botd being a perfect example of this - self contained its a nice little story even if some of the quest features are rather derpy because they don't achieve anything (king ignores your chaos dwarf research and the spies have literally no impact on anything, at all), but the story as a whole in the context of the dwarf arc? It's pure garbage - it fails to address any of the plot points raised over the course of the series in any meaningful way half of them are just dropped and not mentioned at all whilst the other half are just twisted in a very unsatisfactory way e.g. the villain has just given up.

 

Just because a dev is keen does not necessarily mean their ideas will do a storyline justice, bigger series really need that stronger curating hand to keep them on track of what has been built up already and not chaotically crash between different ideas in each installment. Of course part of the dev quitting curator problem would be much more easily avoided if they actually made an effort to get series done and out the way in a relatively small amount of time and made sure a series creator wrote a strong design document outlining the entire series that can be referred to if they leave. I don't think it'd be too much to ask that every broad story arc that spans many quests but isn't a linear series gets at least 2 quests a year and that any linear series gets at least 1 quest a year. I know they can't really do that with many of the older series because they got them all to finale point and budgeting simply can't handle doing all the finales at once, but at the same time I feel they should not poll the players or w/e on it and just go ahead and make a real targetted effort to clean up some of these older story lines before seeding too many new ones.

Like sit down and make a plan so that by 2020 we WILL have had conclusions to elemental workshop, myreque, pirates, gnomes and desert pantheon series. And so that we will have at least seen some progress in the newer/smaller/looser series like the temple knights.

[Urza285]

http://runescape.podbean.com/2014/04/12/story-exposed-part-1/

Latest podcast, basically explaining how quests are made. Not much information about future releases, but:

Elf Grandmaster quest is confirmed to be 2-3 hours+ in length

That's quite concerning. I wish they stuck with their desires to have a 24 hour quest. I hope that they keep the content play through totaling at least 12 hours. So that means unlocking the city within 2-3 hours, finding all the lore within the city, and unlocking the full potential of the first 4 clans in 4 hours (?). Leaving 16 hours for elf city quest pt 2 and the remaining 4 clans?

[strilmus]

I guess it just comes down to better documentation

 

Since you pay these people to have ideas and make designs, they should have notes that anybody can understand, even though they think that since they're going to be doing it, they don't have to write it down

[Rohanonrs]

A big concern I got from that podcast is they spoke of immersive quests being self-contained and globe trotting do it yourself quests as something different entirely. And speaking of the later as 'nostalgic'

 

I think this viewpoint is entirely removed from what (in my experience) most players feel - self-contained quests feel LESS immersive precisely because they are self-contained, you may be immersed in that particularly story but you feel kinda disconnect from the game as a whole, especially when arbitrary requirements exist, because you are not applying your knowledge and your skills to be immersed in the quest you are being handheld through and fed everything you need on a platter.

 

Globetrotting, DIY quests conversely are nothing to do with nostalgia. It's to do with feeling really immersed and engaged because this story reaches all over Gielinor and it relies on your expertise and knowledge to track down things and uncover lost secrets in plain site.

 

Of course there are nuances to this - having to trot all over with very little purpose or source really basic common items is a pita, but as long as there is a purpose to it it feels great to be so engaged with the quest and its ties into the world at large in a more tangible sense than 'oh this has foreshadowing consequences that you may or may not see happen in the next decade.' Equally self-contained works well for novice content and in certain instances (eg Frenskae self-contained worked reasonably well because it made sense to be entirely there).

 

 

 

As some one who never particularly enjoyed quests (I mainly did them for the rewards not the content itself) I have a bit of a different view point to this. I assume by DIY quests the Podcast is talking about the more traditional approach to quests where you glob trotted all over the map to complete objectives dependent on your skills and/or what you have in your invent and the self contained quests are more akin to 'The World Wakes', 'Missing Presumed Dead' and 'Fate of the Gods'. 

 

Now personally I absolutely despise these DIY quests and never felt particularly immersed doing them because I felt like all I was doing was pointless filler or banking because I forgot a chisel. Let's take WGS for example. WGS had a great story which I thoroughly enjoyed but my god did that quest drag on! Instead of actually fighting Lucien I was:

 

Hunting glorified pigs

Faffing about with rose tinted lenses and super herbs

Hope you've got Lunars on!

Actually you need to be back to your normal spell book lol

Think you've found the stone of Jas? Hope you've brought your sickle and Druid pouches for some more faffing! 

 

Nothing broke the immersion more for me than getting to a really important point of a quest then having to draw a circle on the floor because I forgot one key item. 'Oh the stone of Jas is actually here? Oh wait, need to fetch a sickle, brb!' Now I under stand a lot of people do enjoy this kind of quest and I can see merits to it however DIY quests really aren't for me.

 

On the flip side however I have been really enjoying the self contained quests.The story is constantly progressing,  the parts where you interact are puzzles and combat instead of some random collection objective and Key items are available at hand so there's hardly any need to bank. The only time I had to bank in FotG's was when I had been bested in combat, not because I got to the end of Frenskae to find I had forgotten to bring Zaros a pot of rose fragrant flour. 

[Sy_Accursed]

That's a fair argument for your opinion, but my point was less about what I think of as immersive vs not immersive than it was about Jagex's choice of language specifically labelling self-contained quests as immersive and DIY ones as 'nostalgic.'

 

After all immersion is entirely subjective and therefore should not be assigned as an attribute they give a certain quest format, whilst equally just because it was how most quest used to be does not make it nostalgia that causes enjoyment of that format.

 

But equally it was a comment on the fact that as a long term player with a good amount of fansite usage and an avid quester I'd say I'm pretty well informed on what the 'average' quester is feeling and the vibes I get from people is, as stated, the exact opposite of what Jagex decided to use their terms for. (NB: For the sake of this argument I am using 'quester' to mean people who actually enjoy quests and their content, not players who just do quests for the rewards because it is my belief that in developing quest content they should be more focussed on what people who enjoy quests want than trying to appease people who just wanna ignore it all and rush for rewards.)

[Ambler]

Ana decided to not kill off a god for once and give us a DG update teaser...

[Saradomin_Mage]

So besides cosmetic pets, we'll be able to buy cosmetic titles too?

[Urza285]

So besides cosmetic pets, we'll be able to buy cosmetic titles too?

You have to admit that dungeoneering titles are much more exciting than the floor accolades.

[Sy_Accursed]

A full compliment of stalker and kalger titles wouldnt be too shabby

 

the bloodchiller

the riftsplitter

the pummeler

the thunderous

the warmonger

 

Plane-freezer

Night-Gazer

Shadow-Forger

Flesh-Spoiler

World-Gorger

 

The hope devourer and the runebound could work too, but the rest of the bosses dont really lend themselves to titles

[Ned]

I hope getting titles is more interesting and challenging than just buying them with tokens.

[Sy_Accursed]

I hope getting titles is more interesting and challenging than just buying them with tokens.

Well as rewards they kinda gotta be in there, but it'd be nice if atleast you had to kill 1 (preferably more) of tht boss first.