PvP Arena
This month, the Emir’s Arena (otherwise known as the PvP Arena) opened its gates to adventurers seeking glory!
If you didn’t know, there are three main builds you can use in the Arena: Max/Med, Pure, and Zerker. These will be on a weekly rotation just like the PvP World Rota in the order:
We’ll be keeping you in the loop via the weekly game update newspost, just as we do for the PvP World Rota.
We’re not quite done with the PvP Arena and the team is keen to see more player-run tournaments and community-run events in the future. For now, keep cracking skulls and having fun!
Activity Adviser
One of the later updates this month was the Activity Adviser, the artist previously known as the Content Recommender.
This in-game tool will highlight activities relevant to your account by measuring your progress and seeing what big, exciting content is in store next. It automatically tallies up your skill levels, quest status, recent activity and other essential stats to figure out what adventures you might be interested in! For the moment, the Activity Adviser only suggests quests, but we expect to include skills, minigames, and other categories later.
It’s a fantastic tool for new and returning players and helps to give a bit of direction in the big, big world of Gielinor.
However, only a select number of players have been selected for the initial testing phase. We plan to expand it after we’ve looked at the feedback and made any necessary adjustments to the system. We’re also looking to include new categories like skilling, transport, minigames and more!
If you’re one of the lucky few who already has access to the Activity Adviser, we want to hear your thoughts – check us out on any of our social channels and tell us what you think!
We had a great livestream recently where Mods Daizong and Squid answered questions surrounding the release and our future plans for the Activity Adviser. If you missed it, check out the VOD here:
Now that the Clue Scroll Helper (and a bunch of other activity helpers and highlights) are out in the wild, we’re knuckling down to work on the mobile interface layout we spoke about all those aeons ago.
We’re also interested in loot – namely, ground item overlays and loot tracking! These are by no means small undertakings, but we’re excited to share our progress and talk about it more in future.
You can also join us today at 17:00 BST over on Twitch, where we’ll be discussing the recent update and the future of the C++ Client:
Jagex Launcher
In case you missed it, Mod Shadow from the Publishing Platform Team gave us a very technical look, behind the scenes of the Jagex Launcher.
If you want to know more about the process behind the Launcher and a little into the future, then check out the fantastic newspost here.
Tombs of Amascut
If you’ve been sleeping in a sarcophagus, you might have missed that we recently revealed the release date for Tombs of Amascut! Mark your calendars for August 24th and prepare yourself to face off against Amascut and her corrupted forces. From the giant crocodile Zebak to the fallen warrior Akkha, you’ve got a lot to look forward to with our next raid, as it’s the most diverse one we’ve created so far.
Being able to choose the order you take on the bosses and giving you the option to scale the difficulty with Invocations means you get to play Tombs of Amascut your way. Each run should feel fresh and exciting!
We’ll have plenty of things to show you in the run-up to release day, including videos, livestreams, and a few other extras, so stay tuned to our socials to get all of the latest ToA information!
Quest Speedrunning is an exciting new game mode that’s coming soon. How soon you ask? Well, today we can announce that we’ll be running a beta for Quest Speedrunning in September. Assuming all goes well, the full launch will then follow in October.
For anyone unaware, Quest Speedrunning challenges you to complete iconic quests in record-time, using separate worlds with their own save profiles. At launch, just a few quests will be available, but more will be added over time.
We’ll be bringing out a dedicated blog to go over all the details, so keep your eyes peeled!
2022 and Beyond
Right now, we are at a very critical stage of determining the direction for the rest of the year and onward into 2023. We want to make sure that the bits and pieces we show you are things that we can commit to. Although we can’t say much yet about the future of Old School, we’ve got some very exciting stuff in the pipeline, and we can’t wait to share more. Please stay tuned for more updates regarding the rest of the year in the near future.
Alright, alright – we had hoped to keep this one under wraps for a while longer, but the absolute deluge of Ratcatchers posts has forced our hand. Here’s the good news: for the last few months we’ve been considering the possibility of rewriting some of the earliest quests in Old School RuneScape to bring them up to our modern editorial standards.
With the advent of new game modes like Ironman, Leagues and Quest Speedrunning, players are more likely to play through older quests than ever before. The downside is that most of these quests were written a very long time ago, before we had a consistent set of guidelines for content creation. We’ve seen loads of posts calling out poor grammar, spelling, and structure – and we think it’s unfair that such iconic content should be let down by a few typos.
Eventually, we aim to bring more older quests in-line with our current standards, but for now, we’ve settled on three, just to see how things go. These three quests are the subject of frequent player complaints, so we thought they’d make excellent test subjects. They are:
- The Feud
- Ratcatchers
- Legends’ Quest
We’ve already piggybacked on the diversity and inclusion changes we spoke about last time to give The Feud a few editorial touch-ups, with changes that we hope will make the narrative of the quest more obvious and stop it losing momentum in the middle.
Next, we’ll be focusing on Ratcatchers, which requires the most extensive changes by far. Planning is still in the early stages, but we’ll be completely reworking the story and characters, as well as fixing the quest’s ‘unique’ dialogue formatting. We’re also working on a few technical changes which should make the quest’s pain points a little less painful. We know this is something you’ve all been asking after for a while, and we’re excited to give this quest the polish it deserves.
Lastly, we’re looking at Legends’ Quest. This iconic piece of content sits somewhere between Ratcatchers and The Feud in terms of the changes required – by no means does it require a total rework, but there are more fixes to be made than we initially expected.
We’d also like to highlight that the Quest Rewrites are not taking dev time away from all the other wonderful content we’re working on. As a support team, Editorial are able to use our time to work on this project behind the scenes while the regular development teams work on all the big, fancy stuff. It’s a low-cost project that we reckon will have a big impact!
We really do feel that Quest Rewrites are critical to the new and returning player experience, and we can’t wait for you to play through the new-and-improved versions for yourself!