Our latest weekly Q&A was all about Guardians of the Rift!
The stream explored the following:
- Overview of Design and Inspirations
- Accessibility
- XP Rates
- Rewards
- The True Blood Altar
- Runecraft Skilling Outfit Design
Thanks to Mod Elena (Content Developer), Husky (Content Developer) and West (Senior Environment Artist) for their insight!
Didn’t have time to tune in? No worries! You can find a transcript of what was discussed below:
Question #1
Guardians of the Rift was first mentioned back in the 2020 December Gazette, can you talk a bit about what aspects you changed since?
Mod Elena
We’ve changed quite a bit from the original idea. It was first talked about after we came up with the idea during ideation; A couple of days we had to work on any ideas we had. We started out thinking “Okay, Runecrafting isn’t in the best place at the moment – we want to make it better. How can we do that?”. So, we sat down (myself, Husky and West), and came up with a cool idea for Runecrafting.
It took a while before it reached the point that we could now design it, which meant we had a long time to think of ideas before we got to formally start designing. The main changes have been to add more content to the minigame itself. In our prototype that we showed off internally to pitch the project, we just kept the base Runecraft element and didn’t add that much to it; we added a bit of story, but what you were doing – the core loop – was essentially the same: You were mining essence and imbuing essence and then taking it someplace. Normally you take it to a Runecraft altar, this time you take it to the Great Guardian.
Then we added the whole kind of tower defence-esque element to it where you also need to focus on keeping your defences up. You need to protect the Great Guardian while also crafting runes, so there’s a lot more to focus on now!
Mod West
When we were designing this, we were trying to solve the Runecrafting problem; it’s not exactly the most enjoyable skill, so anything that just improves that sort of mechanical flow is good in my books. I’m looking forward to getting some playtesting in.
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Question #2
Can you take us through the basics of the minigame for anyone who may not have read the blog yet?
Mod Elena
The core loop is basically: you obtain a type of essence, then combine the new essence that you find in this place with pure essence. You’ll need to bring pure essence with you. There’s a bank in there, so you can just keep it in the bank. You combine the essence, then you go through a rift – a ‘portal’ – to one of the Runecraft altars out in the world. This is an open-world element: Let’s say that I choose to go to the Nature Altar and someone’s there crafting Nature Runes. I could see them and they could see me while I’m playing the minigame and they’re just doing regular Runecrafting, which I think is pretty cool!
Mod West
This is my favourite part of it as well, just the idea of someone there minding their own business doing some Runecrafting, and then suddenly the entire altar just gets raided by a bunch of people; they’re just like, “whoa, what’s going on?”
Mod Husky
There are also some interesting tech reasons why we can’t instance it. I think the thing a lot of players know is that we can’t have an instance open without anyone in it. If this minigame actively requires the player to leave the instance to go to another alter, we don’t want the instance for the game not to exist when you come back, so I think the open world aspect will be pretty cool.
Question #3
Will players be able to use blood essence or Daeyalt essence in the minigame?
Mod Elena
No, we’ve restricted it to only using pure essence. There are two aspects to it; firstly, there are already a lot of essences, and with the introduction of another one, the mix and match of essences may be confusing to some people. Keep in mind that this minigame will be early in some players’ journeys, so we need to keep it understandable for them.
The other aspect is just balancing; it’s way easier to balance based on just pure essence rather than adding a bunch of extra stuff. When you combine it with the existing things that you find in this place, you create one new type of essence. We need to take into account a lot of combinations of essence, should we allow other types as well.
Mod Husky
The other thing is that we have done something, I don’t agree with it, but a bunch of bosses go, “Oh yeah, have like 10k pure essence as a drop.” maybe not quite, but you get it, right? We’ve got a lot of pure essence in the game, and it’s not being used up. I think this adds a nice dynamic, where you know you’ll be creating a reasonable item sink for pure essence and an actual method people will use. So yeah, if your chat wants to panic-buy pure essence, it might go from two to six GP, I mean, that’s still a triple gold return.
Question #4
Who are the Shield Guardians and the Rift Guardians?! What do they do?
Mod Elena
Officially, their species is referred to as Rune Guardian because they’re made out of pure essence, or rune essence. Some of them carry this rift inside them. They can attune to different ones, such as that one [check out the image above!] I think is mind, the orangey one, but they can have different colours inside like the blue one is water etc.
In the minigame, the Rift Guardians will attack abyssal creatures trying to break through from the rift that we’re trying to close. Within the minigame, its mission is to just attack evil NPCs. The shield guardians are there to protect the Great Guardian, so they don’t attack anything; they just defend the great guardian so he’s kept alive.
Mod Light
Awesome. I’m excited to learn more about them, and I’m assuming if It passes the poll and things like that, we’ll be able to learn a lot more about these mysterious creatures.
Question #5
I think we also have a concept image of the arena itself – West. Can you talk a bit about the process of creating this?
Mod West
So this is just a basic layout plan; it’s kind of the process to create one of these before you do any sort of environment work just to make sure that you have a good idea of how much space will be needed. You get a good idea of the specific assets required for the mechanics to work out so that everyone’s on the same page with how everything is in relation to itself.
The actual layout resembles how it was in the ideation pitch. It has the main essential elements, so the Great Guardian is the octagon surrounded by the square in the middle. The grid there, I’m trying to replicate the tiles in the game, and the actual larger white square around it is the size of our map files themselves.
Ideally, if you’re just using one file, it’s good to try and get all the important stuff in one file. I imagine this environment will go out a little bit further. For this, you just kind of look at mechanics and how everything works. I’m using colours here to point out things that will be interactable, and I’m using classic colours. Hence, things like NPCs are yellow, scenery that’s interactable that sort of light blue, and then just the white is the walls—trying to resemble Runecraft in a way, trying to look at the altars, how they’ve got those giant stone pillars. In terms of actual scenery, that’s the angle we’re going to go. In terms of architecture, I’m leaning towards a Greek look. I won’t go too much into the theming; we want to keep that as a bit of a surprise. We do have some other images I’m excited to show you in the future once they’re all finished. It’s starting to come along quite nicely.
Mod Husky
I’ve just got to say the concept art looks amazing for this. When people see the thematics and where the story is going to take it, I’m quite excited to see players’ first reactions to that..
Mod West
Shout out to a Mod Jerv for the conceptualising; it’s all coming along very nicely.
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Question #6
Did you take any inspiration from ‘The Great Orb Project’ or ‘RuneSpan’? For those who might not know, the Great Orb Project was a minigame in the Runecrafting Guild from 2008, and RuneSpan was a runecrafting update in 2012. I saw comparisons coming up when we published the blog, so I just wanted to know if it was something you looked at from a design perspective.
Mod West
I played it a bit in the back in the day. There are some similarities in going to altars, but the gameplay loop itself is completely different. With Orb Project, you’re up against other players, so it’s like a team versus team, and this is more of a “work together against an evil”.
I don’t think we looked too heavily at them when thinking of what to do; I can’t quite recall.
Mod Elena
No. I don’t know those updates very well either but from what I’ve understood, they kind of drastically changed the skill, and that is not what we’re trying to do with this minigame. What we’re doing is introducing some rewards that are impacting other Runecraft methods, but we’re not in any way trying to overshadow those existing methods. We would rather enhance them via this minigame.
Mod Light
I’ve got a note as well from Mod Kieren: “No, we are not seeking to capture what GOP or Runespan did. Runecraft is a prestigious skill in OSRS, and we are keen not to completely undermine that”.
Mod West
I would say we avoided RuneSpan. Maybe the actual design of RuneSpan wasn’t too bad, but at least the balancing of it and how it just nullified all other training methods is not something that we’re seeking to do.
Mod Husky
I think there’s a question about that later about XP rates, and I’m sure we’ll cover it then, but I think that’s all I’d know about Runespan. I never played either of them. I certainly didn’t look to any for inspiration, given I don’t know what they are and if there are any similarities; maybe that’s just two developers at two different times thinking about how could we improve Runecraftt and coming to similar things. I don’t honestly know if there are similarities. I know that Elena did a lot with the certain nitpicking of the designs and the intricate details.
Mod Elena
Lore wise as well, it kind of makes sense if they were to be somewhat similar because obviously, it’s set in the same universe. The origins of runes and Rift Guardians and all that stuff is the same, and the abyss as well in both games, so it’s natural if there are some similarities!
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Question #7
The blog says that Guardians of the Rift will be accessible to limited account types such as skillers/10hps. Can you confirm whether Temple of the Eye will be possible to complete as a Level 3? Has it been designed with Skillers in mind?
Mod Husky
So I’ve been predominantly working on the quest for this, and it’s something that we are considering as part of the design to allow for a player to get a teleport to the centre of the abyss where the dark mage is.
The current design is that at this specific point in the quest, as long as you have all the quest items you need on you, you get a free teleport there once and only once; we don’t want people being hung on a quest state and just repeatedly getting a teleport to the centre. It makes sense for the quest and why we’re doing it and that stuff so it’s not just a random teleport.
Then there’s another part of the quest where you need to go back, so at that specific point, it’s also the same again, and I think there’s some funny dialogue around why that happens.
The problem is that we haven’t got restrictions for people to just leave on 10hp accounts. If they decide to teleport and just don’t want to progress the quest. At that point, maybe we should do a design where if you mess up the first attempt, you can pay like 100k to redo it or something because we don’t want to have an instant and repeatable way to change up the meta and circumvent going to the abyss to get to the dark mage.
I’m also not a fan of that weird forced interaction either, so yeah. It has been taken into account. It’s a very niche thing with level three skillers, and it’s not a direct demographic we’re trying to target. Still, we’re looking at making this quest available earlier in the player’s journey anyway. Like players who might be doing Sea Slug, if they want to get into early fishing, they might consider doing this quest to get into early Runecraft. Ironmen aside and maybe not having the pure essence, that is one of the goals. So even without the level three skillers considerations, having players run through level 70 creatures, I know they can certainly hit more than tens, doesn’t seem like good gameplay, which is again why those exist.
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Question #8
What kind of XP rates does the Guardians of the Rift minigame sit at different RC levels?
Mod Husky
Sure, so I remember, I mean a slight tangent here, but you know that’s what I do. Back when I worked on the Hallowed Sepulchre, I remember that there was one particular line in the blog that said something along the lines of “this will be slightly more XP per hour than rooftops” and then players looked at that and went “Okay, so maybe like 60-65k, 70k tops because Ardy is kind of that that 60k mark.” Then the content released, and players who practiced it were capable of getting 75k-80k fairly early on – those who mastered it pushed that even further to getting rates of close to 100k.
Players then reacted by saying, “Oh my god, that’s not what you said, you said slightly more”. So the one thing I’ve always wanted to do from that point on is having a lot more transparency with what XP rates the devs are thinking about without explicitly promising/polling XP rates. This is because it can be quite damaging if we say at the early stages of design “Okay this is going to be exactly 45k XP per hour” and then players say “Hey, wait….It’s 55k, you need to nerf it”, or if it comes out at 40k then they say “you need to buff it!”
At the early stages of design, we haven’t gone through our own internal playtesting which includes reflecting on the content we’ve created and determined whether the XP per hour we’re getting is worth the effort we’re asking the player to put in. For example, if when playtesting GoTR we decide it’s so much effort that it won’t be worth doing unless it’s 100k XP per hour then maybe we need to look at making it less complex. Anyway, all of this is just to be more transparent with XP rates moving forward and to provide a ‘ball park’ we’re aiming for. So with all this in mind, the ballpark we’re stating in the blog is that it should be more XP per hour than ZMI to which we’ve seen responses like “well, you’re just going to kill ZMI”.
The truth here is that ZMI is insanely afk and it’s pretty much one clickable with Runelite anyway. If you’re not using Runelite you can just follow someone else to get to the altar and maybe eat some food from time to time. ZMI will probably remain the most XP per hour you can get while training Runecraft as second monitor content, like when you’re watching Netflix or something. Whereas Zeah will be used if you’re requiring something, even more, afk, like if you’re playing another game. With all of this in mind, there’s a lot of talk about Lavas, especially on Reddit and there’s been a lot of comments such as “why does Runecraft need to be a slow skill? Come on, break the meta, Lavas doesn’t need to be the most efficient thing.”
So let’s go with that, and say hypothetically, we make this new content 100k runecraft XP per hour. Are you ever doing anything else? We’ve essentially killed every single other piece of Runecraft content in the game with this one addition, because not only is it the best XP per hour in the game, it’s also probably going to be the most fun method of Runecraft (if our design goals ring true).
It’s going to have a bunch of alternative rewards, it’s going to have a unique pet, and it’s going to be money that you’re gaining instead of losing money from doing lavas. And the response to this might even be “Yeah, that’s great, we want tons of XP and rewards, kill the other content the skill has to offer because we don’t like doing it” and I’m not entirely sure that’s the best way to go about it. The big thing to focus on here is the player not liking the content. Take Slayer for example, and I know some people are going to be like “I hate slayer too, it’s horrible” etc. but for the most part, it’s one of our most popular skills and it’s also one of the slowest. It only gets quicker than Agility and Runecraft once you get to very specific blocklists and repeatable barrage tasks with tons of end game gear.
For the most part, if you’re a more casual player, you’ve got a whip and you’re like 80’s combat stats – just casually whipping your tasks and stuff. You’re probably only getting like 20k XP per hour in Slayer. The reason players don’t complain about it is that Slayer just has a more engaging gameplay loop than Runecraft does, No matter how you train Runecraft, it always boils down to withdrawing essence to do a tedious run to an altar and get barely anything for it and that’s kind of the problem everyone has with the skill. So, instead of what players are asking for now which is to make this boring skill fast so that they can get through it faster, we’re proposing an alternative where we take this skill that many call boring and give it a fun way to train it instead.
Even still, many players have said “it’s going to be dead content if it’s only 60k per hour AND I need to pay attention.” To that, I’d say that it is just a ballpark. All we wanted players to take away from this is that it’s lower XP per hour than lavas and more XP per hour than ZMI.
60k XP is where that might sit currently but this content is also introducing new rewards which will buff lavas such as the Ring of the Elements giving a closer and infinite teleport to the fire altar, and te Colossal Pouch allowing more essence to be carried there at once. We haven’t done the calculations fully at this point to know where lavas will sit with these buffs, but I do believe this gives us more scope than we might’ve originally had to balance this minigame so that the XP per hour is in a good place.
On top of that, this might end up being more XP per hour than Lavas for someone who is not good at Lavas, right? Lavas has a ton of other requirements such as a high magic level for magic imbue, a higher Runecraft level to get better pouches but it also is very precise and specific with tick-perfect actions that not everyone can do comfortably and reliably.
I remember when I tried my first hours or so of Lavas I was barely getting 50k XP per hour: there are a lot of things you can mess up. Like forgetting to take a binding necklace out of the bank, or forgetting to repair your pouches. These minor perfections to the training method do add up and players who can do this consistently are the ones who are seeing the top-end of XP rates, which Lavas offer. So, for someone who isn’t good at Lavas, this minigame might be better XP per hour because it’ll probably have more obvious mistakes such as “I missed a portal which would’ve allowed me to mine a bunch of essences that I missed” etc. Anyway, that’s our general spiel about XP rates.
In general, players are going to want it to be faster. But in truth, we should probably just focus on making it more fun. Maybe in the future, we’ll look to do more Runecraft content that takes things people liked from Guardians of the Rift and maybe discard parts that players didn’t like. I’m sure we’ll get tons of feedback on this moving forward. As I said, we’re in the early stages of design and it’s really hard for us to give a good estimate of XP per hour until we’ve got it in front of us and started playtesting it.
Even then I’m sure players are going to discover metas which we didn’t anticipate and gain additional XP per hour than we originally quoted which we’ll probably need to review to see if we’re ok with it. So, yeah, that was a long ramble about XP rates and it’s kind of how I feel and it also seems to be how a lot of the team feel too after the long discussion we had about it yesterday reviewing the feedback which you all gave.
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Question #9
Is the intention to be the Wintertodt of Runecrafting? Do you think this minigame solves all player problems with RC?
Mod Elena
I think the biggest thing with Wintertodt is exactly what Husky was saying: it kind of just takes over the whole skill. There’s usually not much point in doing regular Firemaking when you can just go Wintertodt and make money instead of burning it up.
Quite literally. We just don’t want it to take over the whole skill; it’s a supplement to the skill, not a replacement.
Mod West
I don’t think the intention for Wintertodt was to kill Firemaking completely. At least, from what I remember, it wasn’t. It certainly did, and I think if we do that to any skill, I suppose it’s kind of fortunate it was Firemaking because it was already a fairly limited skill anyway. Yeah, we’re trying not to make that mistake in the future.
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Question #10
How do these XP rates sit in comparison to existing methods with Lava Runes and ZMI? Do you intend to shift existing methods?
Mod Husky
More than ZMI, more than anything that Zeah as that’s super AFK. Less than Lavas, and more than things like Wraths and Blood Runes.
I think Wraths are like 2m GP an hour or something, maybe just less, maybe 1.8m. That’s not money that we’re trying to compete with in this minigame at all, and Wraths will be even more money per hour with the new Runecraft outfit. The design goal with the outfit was to put a bit more of a reason to get some more money by training your Runecraft relatively high. Now, there’s always the risk that this will be off-set by players doing it a bunch with the outfit and Wrath runes will drop in price but they’ll only come down to the point where player’s stop doing the activity because it’s no longer worth the money, right? Hopefully that settles at a point higher than they are currently.
Gotta look into it for that sort of stuff, but that’s what it should hopefully sit at. They’re all ballpark estimates. This isn’t supposed to be sepulchre levels of super hard. I know people have said, “make us a Sepulchre for Runecraft that gives us a ton of XP”. We’re not quite looking to do that.
The goal is to make the content open to more casual players like Wintertodt is, but we’re not trying to copy Wintertodt mechanics. Instead we’re looking at content like Tempoross and taking inspiration from the mechanics which make you look out for something special like the jumping fish to make it more engaging with a lot more player choices.
It’s not going to be challenging to do it. Still, there might be a lot of like “ooh, do I go for that?” or “do I go for that?”, all of which probably will be boiled down to someone coming out with a YouTube video guide.
I’d like to think there’s more mastery that people will be able to do. I think that Elena was quite into having people be able to 1.5 tick mine if they’re good enough to do it and stuff like that on top of it.
Mod Elena
If it’s feasible, of course. It kind of just depends on the balancing. The way I see it is: I would love for people to put in that extra effort and have that be rewarded a little. But, if that takes away from other people, or if there’s too much of a gap between doing it and not doing it, to the point where it’s just not worth doing the content if you’re not doing it the “perfect” way then that’s not good.
I would love for there to be some sort of method like tick manipulation or similar. A way of putting in extra effort and gaining a bit of extra XP per hour for that.
One way to balance that is, for example: restricting you to only get one essence per time you do it, but allowing you to mine it like really close to the portals where you need to leave from. That way, maybe you do save some time if you do it perfectly because then you don’t have to run so far away to get more essence from larger essence nodes.
Mod Light
I like that the minigame will reward more conscious decisions made by the player. Having that means that it rewards people even more for just paying attention and playing appropriately!
Mod Elena
There’s something called design pillars which are our goal for the design that we sometimes write up at the start of a project; we look back at it underway to make sure we don’t lose our way in the project.
One such pillar that I wanted to stick to for the minigame was: I want there to be a level of randomness, but not to the point where it’s frustrating. That’s something that I looked at Tempoross for, where you have the big fish that jumps up that gives double fish when you fish from it. That’s an excellent way of doing randomness because you can kind of tell when it’s going to spawn. You know that it’s going to be in one of four spots or something like that, which means you can prepare for it. It’s also somewhat random when it spawns, so you need to pay attention, and you could easily miss it if you don’t. That’s a great way of doing randomness, with a mix of predictability.
I’m looking at little mechanics to enhance the gameplay by paying attention like that.
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Question #11
Can you tell the players more about how XP rates are balanced. Especially when it comes to pre-development, during development, and then post-balancing for player feedback?
Mod Elena
Obviously, we’re pretty early in development, and we barely just started. What we have at this point are ballpark numbers. We have an estimate – we know roughly where we want it to sit.
The reason we can’t specifically say what XP per hour it’s going to be is that we don’t know all the little tiny details that affect it yet; we don’t know how long a player has to run from the starting point to getting the essence, combining it, running to the altar and returning (which is only the main gameplay loop).
We don’t know how long that will take yet because it’s not made yet. There are so many subtle little things that add up to the total XP per hour, which makes it hard to determine beforehand. We’re not going to know specifics until it’s ready to go, but we can keep refining it and keep trying to make it stick to that goal that we set initially.
Mod Husky
There are also a lot of factors like, first of all, it’s a team game. I know someone in chat was asking what’s up with solo XP and team XP. So there are way more factors at play, like what if the player fails the game?
Say we make the game hard, and players fail often, then it could then be different XP rates to someone who succeeds a lot.
We’re probably not, but just to throw an example.
Traditional skilling is super easy to estimate, like fishing. Ignoring tick manipulation, you fish every five ticks we set the percentage chance at this level we set the highest percentage chance at 99; you can just interpolate and say if I want the XP per hour to be this, it’s going to be 30k at level 50, and it’s going to be 70k at level 99. Done, super easy to give, and a particular amount, right? Even rooftop courses. Each animation takes a set amount of time to complete and walking to the start of the course again is a fixed amount of time so it’s super easy to estimate right?
It’s just that it’s not possible with something this complex, especially with a lot of mechanics in the early design stages that we’re not sure of, right? We’ve talked about like shield batteries and charging up the guardians and mining the essence and then we could implement it come to test it and be like “this mechanic feels pretty bad”.
Let’s change it, scrap it or do something else that makes it better, right? There are so many things we don’t know. We’re going to have to wait until playtests. We’re probably going to get a bunch of feedback from people on the team who all have different opinions and have to make what we believe is the correct decision.
Mod Elena
Yeah, it always comes back to that point you had about trying to make it fun. If we have to scrap something because it’s not fun, then yeah, that’s fine, but it may affect XP rates.
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Question #12
What considerations are you taking into account when designing GotR? It looks like there’s a rewards rift and then a rewards shop. Can you talk a bit more about those two elements? Why did you decide to make some rewards random and then some purchasable?
Mod Elena
It’s so that players can time cost it. Let’s say you want to go for the new Runecraft outfit. If I were to go for that, I could kind of estimate how many pearls I can get per hour. Pearls are the new currency from the reward rift. They’re going to be something you get at quite a steady rate, similar to the Spirit Flakes at Tempoross. You can kind of estimate how many you’re going to get, and we aim to do the same here, which means that you can calculate roughly how long it will take to get the full outfit, instead of relying on this RNG goal.
Other rewards we feel more comfortable with being RNG related. There’s also the element of where it fits lore-wise. I don’t know how much we’ve said about this, but the wizards of the Wizards’ Tower will be somewhat involved, and they tend to be more aligned with Saradomin than other affiliations. The reeward rift is more aligned with the Abyss. We have some new items: the Abyssal Needle and the Colossal Pouch; they’re both very much abyssal things that fit better with the rift, so that’s why it comes from that. Meanwhile the outfit is human-made. It’s quite wizard-like so it makes more sense to come from the wizards.
Mod Husky
Yeah, I think there was also like, as you said, kind of like Tempoross. We quite like the reward sort of part of Tempoross; you stockpile all these resources, for us, it’s elemental and catalytic points or energy or whatever you want to call it. One of each, I love the idea of reaching into a Rift Guardian or a Portal Guardian, you know, whatever you call in and like seeing what you pull out of the Abyss!
I also like the idea of like that’s essentially the pool at Tempoross, and the Abyssal Pearls are like the spirit flakes but then imagine there’s just a shot to spend your spirit flakes on because there are some rewards that are more RNG and some that are pretty you know easy to calculate how long I think it just adds a bit more fun and flavour and who knows what else you might pull out of the abyss right there all these items that could get lost there sounds quite fun.
Mod West
Yeah, it also loves the whole winter stored crate problem where everyone just fills their bank full of crates and then it gives just a more usable way of claiming your reward.
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Question #13
Why did we opt to go with a new pet rather than adding a roll for the existing Rune Guardian pet?
Mod Elena
We had this discussion yesterday when going over the feedback from players. People were a bit back and forth about it because, on the one hand, we feel like this content deserves its own pet. We have strong faith in this being good content, and we think it’s going to look amazing, so why wouldn’t you want its own pet from this?
On the other hand, we’ve also had the feedback that this is not a boss, it’s more like a skilling activity, and we already have a Runecraft pet; the Rift Guardian. So why not get the Rift Guardian from Guardians of the Rift?
We see both sides as a team. We agreed on just offering the pet to the players and see how you all feel. It’s being polled, so if we’re leaving it up to you guys: if you want the pet then vote yes, if you don’t like it, then vote no. It’s as simple as that.
Mod Husky
I put out a couple of tweets about it right, and I think by the way people responded, they’re like, “oh, Husky doesn’t get it; he’s being abrasive!”. I think it’s just because I ask directly what the issue is and try to spark discussion! The big one is people didn’t like the Soul Wars pet and it’s a minigame.
I believe that we put a label on Guardians of the Rift as a minigame, but it’s not like Soul Wars; it’s not like Castle Wars; it’s more akin to like Zalcano, Tempoross and Wintertodt in that it’s legit skilling activity with its own training method so to us it kind of feels like it should have a pet.
The more I delved into it, to like communicating on Twitter and reading Reddit, the more there is no consensus from the community either!
You know some people will say there should only be one pet per skill and everything else should be transmogs from that pet right which if we go with that solution people who have, say, all the hallowed marks for a Dark Acorn (for the Dark Squirrel) but it’s useless because they never got a squirrel, right? So this is kind of useless reward that you know they’ve consistently gained but nothing for them!
There’s also that element of like well, if it was random and rare, they might not have got it anyway, right? I think there’s still something magical to the whole ‘getting a pet’ from a more casual player experience. I’m just going to say, this is not a pet hunter’s experience. But a casual’s experience where they go “oh my god this is the one pet that I got!” or “it’s one of the two or three pets I’ve had” – they then feel super connected to it. I think that’s diminished when you reuse an existing pet.
Ultimately, that’s why we’ve put it to the players, right? You said we’re going to have this abyssal pet, I think or is that a poll as well? I don’t know which way you’ve done it, but if it’s put to voting anyway to see what you guys think.
I think there is a poll question. I also said this on discord, and some players could take this the wrong way, but I think the biggest frustration as a developer is that players just don’t tell us why they don’t like something. Instead they’ll give us another reason as to why they don’t like it. For example, do players really feel like “minigame pets” shouldn’t be a thing or is the truth that they just don’t want to do this particular piece of content for a pet? I mean it’s a very selfish reason, but it’s still a valid reason we need to know about, right?
I wish people would be more transparent about that stuff because, like the weaker reasons of, like, “we already have a Rift Guardian we shouldn’t have a second one”. It’s like, okay…We’ll make an Abyssal pet that fixes that problem for you entirely, right? There’s a lot of other things that are like soft arguments. I wish some players would just be honest and say “I don’t want to do Runecraft again because I already have 200m XP” or the runecraft pet already, or both. Or even just, feeling forced to go into a minigame to train a skill they’ve already got at 99 and “I don’t want to get any post 99 XP”, I mean, they’re kind of selfish reasons but that’s still a valid perspective for someone to feel when they’re thinking about what time investment they want to put into the game.
As far as pet hunters go, and I recently watched the Sae Bae podcast (the one Ayiza was on) and I kind of agree with the sentiment that: as a pet hunter you surely want more pets to come into the game so that the flex of being a pet hunter is even bigger. It also helps diversify the grind.
Realistically, I think a lot of players are just really getting close to finishing that grind and I think they’re getting attached to being close to finished that grind especially if they are currently in the 40s of pets obtained out of 49 or even if they’ve completed it. These players just don’t like us either uncompleting their grind or making it one step further away.
I could be wrong and I think there are also a lot of other valid reasons that people might not want pets that I might not even discuss here and I agree that a pet isn’t for everybody I think it’s just as I said it’s a whole big sort of discussion about people who have got a bunch of different opinions of pets they can’t agree with each other and going back to what I said that’s why we’re putting it into voting and just saying hey like let us know what you think.
Youtube Time Stamp
Youtube Time Stamp
Youtube Time Stamp
Youtube Time Stamp
Youtube Time Stamp
Youtube Time Stamp
That’s it for the planned questions, however, Mod Husky made sure to answer some rapid-fire questions at the end of the stream. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fit those answers into this week’s transcript due to our word count limit. If you’d like to hear them, check out the timestamp here!