We’re bringing back Bounty Hunter. What more is there to say?
Okay, just joking – there’s obviously quite a lot to say. We feel it’s high time we made good on our promise to revive this fast-paced PvP minigame, which has existed in one form or another throughout Old School’s 10-year lifespan.
You’ll notice that we’re not seeking a greenlight for Bounty Hunter itself, since we’ve already promised to bring it back. However, we plan to involve the community in several rounds of polling to get the final content just right. We want to work with all of you to build something that disincentivises shady behaviour while rewarding players who engage with the content in good faith, in the hopes of returning this much maligned minigame to its former glory.
For those not in the know, Bounty Hunter pits players who fancy a spot of PvP action against others of similar combat levels, with similar amounts of wealth at stake. You step into an area, get assigned your bounty, and hunt them down!
Killing your bounty acts like any other PvP kill – you get whatever items they weren’t protecting, plus an extra reward for dispatching your target.
Bounty Hunter occupies a special place for those of you who feel like traditional, ‘Edge-style’ PvP has been displaced by No-Honour and Outlast PvP interactions. For Bounty Hunter, we want to put the fast-paced, reset-heavy style you know and love at the forefront, so that people taking their first tentative steps towards brutally murdering their fellow players aren’t starting out at the deep end.
In the Summit, we also proposed bringing back Bounty Hunter Craters. These first appeared in RuneScape in 2007, bundled with the removal of Wilderness PvP – fortunately for PKers, we’re not planning to block PvP everywhere else this time, and the addition of craters will not massively change the overworld map of the Wilderness.
While they won’t look the same, or be in the same location as previous craters, they’ll functionally be the same thing. The key takeaway is that we’re separating combat brackets into zones players must choose to enter. This makes Bounty Hunter as opt-in as opt-in gets, which frees us up to get experimental with the content in ways we haven’t in the past.
While any and all rewards will be determined by community consultation and various rounds of polling, we want to reward would-be Bounty Hunters (or pesky Rogues) with rewards in-line with the Ancient Warrior equipment you know from Last Man Standing, Deadman Mode, or the 2008 release of PvP Worlds in RuneScape.
We want the rewards system to feel worthwhile for actively engaged PKers without incentivising gold farmers to ruin everyone else’s fun. In doing so, we might just open up account builds that haven’t been seen since the earliest days of Old School RuneScape – could this be the glorious return of 20 Defence accounts?
Emblems and killstreaks are also key elements, allowing players to opt-in to extra risk and challenge themselves to rack up rewards before cashing out. We’re looking forward to exploring exactly how this system will work in the coming weeks.
The long and the short of it is, this update will bring back the same Bounty Hunter you know and love… but better.
