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About this blog
New subheading! Lore.
Entries in this blog
Post Quest Implementation
"Elf city will be available to everyone"-regardless of requirements-says Jagex
The Truth is stranger than fiction
Space Station 13: first impressions of a free game you should ALL check out
Dwarf Fortress: pt 3, Guisemined, even more characters! Sobend makes a fantastic artefact! Vote for somebody to become Count!
Dwarf Fortress: not a story, but a detailed update. Histories of avarice and mettle.
Dwarf Fortress: pt one, Reepicheep (including fancy screenshots!)
Dwarf Fortress: Anyone interested in some posts about this?
I would go through the dorfs, nickname them after anyone who commented (significant dorfs, first, others later).
I would then play the game, and post updates on anything significant, obviously including anything significant done by a nicknamed dorf.
For the most awesome example of how this can turn out, see the SomethingAwful lets's plays, like Boatmurdered, Gemclod, Bronzestabbed, Headshoots, etc etc. I'm currently playing a fortress called Guisemined. If you don't know what Dwarf Fortress is, think "Rollercoaster Tycoon, but in ASCII, with dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world, and much more complicated". As an example of how the fortress is going, we've endured multiple recent ambushes and small flooding problem, but the legendary hammerdwarf has made short work of the underground shale fortress and the location in general is expanding smoothly. It's fun! If you're interested (or just want to see what a sample post would look like) post, giving a nickname (I'd expect your Sals name), and a profession range (there are lots of jobs, but they fall into the categories of Noble, Soldier, Miner, Woodworker, Stoneworker, Ranger, Doctor, Farmer, Fisher, Metalsmith, Jeweller, Crafter, Mechanic, and Peasant Hauler). Or, you can give a migration wave number. And you can give a gender you'd like to be too if you want! I can't promise to honour any of these choices, but I'll try not to ignore them. Please be interested.
RuneScape: the Divination post-release AMA categorised
Non-competitive: positively social where possible
A 'free' training option, with no waste products you didn't want to make
Tie-in with the new age and the evolving story of RS
Note that these aren't all goals we set ourselves: many of them came down from Mod Mark. There are always things I wish we'd had more time for, but I'm happy with the results. It's changed a lot as we went along, but it's difficult to point at any version and call it the 'original design'. At one point it was something completely different, and you can now look forward to that as part of the next skill. Main challenges were big design questions about exactly how we manage the stuff above and fit it all in with the way the game works. We had to ditch a lot of ideas for reward/product objects because they'd ruin something or other. We also had to think carefully about this skill was different to previous ones, because while it's always tempting to fall back on 'well Mining does it like this' but some of the things Mining does were ones we didn't want to replicate. Ana: That's a really interesting question. We went through a really, really long design stage for Divination. I remember we thought transmutation would be a much larger part of the skill than it is now. We had all sorts of ideas for it, and they just didn't work out. We also had some ideas that when training you'd have to put more effort into finding wisps - so you'd have to track them across the world, but it was decided that this would be pretty tedious for a full skill from 1-99. There was also mention of wisps in crowns, which I think Mod Avatar is still determined to get in game! Ana:
I've been working on the skill since the release of The World Wakes at the beginning of March. The design of Divination actually started before that (February or perhaps even January) but other mods were working on it at that point.
The XP rates weren't changed or adjusted in the run up to release. I'm afraid I don't really know any more about them being different on the wiki - just that nothing changed from our side.
Ana: I think I've said elsewhere that the skill was in development from February/March this year. It was talked about a lot before that but didn't actually start production until then. I'd agree that the training areas are all very similar so I can understand why it would look like it wasn't a lot of effort! I think we spent the most time on design - this project had a massive design phase when compared to others. We knew it would be a high profile, important and much-anticipated release so we spent a long time just to get everything how we wanted it to be. There's also a lot of behind the scenes stuff which you wouldn't automatically think of - for example adding Divination to loads of interfaces and systems which show and use all the skill information. Ana: The skill hasn't been in development for 3 years. It's been in development since about February this year :). Divination was intended to be a simple skill - it's a gathering skill, like Woodcutting or Fishing. Dungeoneering is a very different skill to compare it to - and we were never aiming for that level of complexity. Also, I think it's worth bearing in mind that all the other skills have had years of additional content added on to them - which Divination hasn't had yet. The most effective way of training is converting memories into XP (of course there are boons and enriched wisps and enhanced XP that allow for more effective ways within that - but basically you want to gather memories and convert them into XP if you want to train the skill). The items are there as 'rewards' - you don't get much XP for making them but they should be useful elsewhere. If you're only interested in XP then there's no reason to make the items other than the boons. It is planned that the energy from Divination will be used in the next skill. Ana: The biggest challenge was probably the design - there were a lot of people involved because it's such a large project, and we spent a lot of time making sure everyone was happy. It was also very difficult designing a new skill that would fit into a 12 year old game with so much content in it already. About orb colours and other graphics: Ana: There aren't any plans [to change orb colours] at the moment. It was something we discussed during development and internal feedback - but as there are 12 tiers it's difficult to get 12 obviously different colours and it was anticipated that it might look a bit odd. In the end it was determined it would be better to differentiate them with size and shinyness, rather than colour. Ana: There are no plans to change the springs currently. If we get a lot of feedback on it then we'd obviously look into changing it :). Q: Why do all tiers have the exact same graphics/colors/animations as the previous camp? -Hew: It would be nice if I had a graphics person here, but the principles are that: The animations are consistent, because they represent roughly the same thing each time. There's also a steady progression of models that look similar but gradually get more complicated, because they represent more complicated versions of a similar thing.
The colours do vary, but they're similar because it was hard to get a range that would make wisps clearly relate to one another while also fitting in with the game world.
There's a lot of things to consider when choosing colours and making the graphics for things like this, and we had lots of thought and lots of discussion. The cheap/rushed version could have clashed with things, been ugly, been hard to see or loads of other problems. Hew: We thought long and hard about the colours and had lots of discussion about it with the artists. They're different because they have quite different requirements: the wisps are shades of blue because it goes well in lots of different terrains, without colour-blindness problems, while the energy varies more because you have more chance to need to see the difference of multiple kinds together. About related quests/lore: Q: Will there be any major quests to go along with div in the near future? because I feel like it needs it own story. -Ana: I hope so! Perhaps Mod Hew would be able to say more on this one, but there is certainly some underlying story to Divination which I really hope will be explored in the future. Q: When i train divination what exactly am i doing lore wise am i gathering guhtix memories or energry from his barrier? 2 if the answer to the above is guthix memories then why dont really learn anymore about the history of guthix like with the spring event. -Ana: May in the skill hub has some dialogue about this if you want to get more information, but I'll try and summarise :). When Guthix died, his energy spread across the world. The edict 'shield' around Gielinor collapsed, and the power from this fused with Guthix's residual energy to become the wisps. When you gather from the wisps you are getting memories (Guthix's) and energy (edict shield power). Separately, the battle of Lumbridge has disrupted the life force of Gielinor - and the energy rifts around the world are a result of this. The memories you are gathering are made of the same 'force' (as Guthix drew his force from the earth) so by returning the memories to the rifts you are essentially 'healing' the world. For the second part of 1 - This is something we considered during development. It was kind of decided that lore should be kept somewhat separate from the training of a skill. If you want to just train and get XP then getting story bits pop up all the time would be really very annoying - especially considering the time it takes to level up to 99. That's why we tried to incorporate it with the chronicles, and hopefully it can be explored with future content too! Q: Why can we only have ten chronicle fragments what is up with the messages we get while hand them in and why not just give us more guthix story? -Ana: The reason for having a maximum of 10 chronicle fragments is to encourage you to hand them in rather than hoarding them. The messages are deliberately vague because once you've handed them in a few times, we anticipated many people would stop reading them and we didn't want those people to miss out on important story progression. Q: where do the memories go when you put them in the energy rift -Hew: Back to the world spirit (Anima Mundi, whatever you want to call it), which/who is very grateful. Ana: I mentioned this somewhere else on the thread - but the reason [chronicle fragments] are short little proverbs is because we anticipated that players who just want to train to 99 are going to see a lot of them. If they were longer people would probably get bored or annoyed feeling they were forced to read them every time and we wanted to avoid that. Q: Did Naragi diviners train divination? -Ana: I wouldn't have thought so - as the Divination we know is only possible due to Guthix's death, and the events of the Sixth Age :). That is an interesting connection though - perhaps something we could use later on! About the economy: Q: However, with the Sign of the Porter and a Pak Yak, players are able to hold up to 88 items before banking. How do you see this affecting the economy? -Hew: Bank runs are pretty quick these days, so the economic impact of the extra inventory space should be relatively small. Porter also isn't free to make, so players will make their own decisions about which commodities are worth teleporting and which aren't. Another thing we discussed was whether we wanted to change the flow of gathering so dramatically: I wanted to make the change but was a little afraid of it, but Mod Mark was happy to give players that option and so we did. Hew: At the moment we're happy that the value of transmutations will change over time with the market. It's more of a convenience feature than a direct money-maker, although there'll be times when it'll turn a profit in the right market (and if you're watching it so closely it sounds like you'll be ready). About the companion skill and the future generally: Hew: The new skill will use energy, but also plenty of other things. There might be some features where a Divination level is an advantage. So mechanically, there'll be that kind of link. But from a lore/narrative perspective but they won't line up like Mining and Smithing: it'll be a slightly more complicated relationship and I hope we can tell some interesting stories there. Hew: 'Two weeks' [until the use of xp lamps] has been mentioned a couple of times, but I don't think that's a final decision. I'd expect more like a month. Hew: We're not planning to change XP rates. To provide a decent high-score race of the kind that lots of players like and to give you a good feeling of continual improvement we made it the kind of thing you can't just burn through in short time. Q: Will the rewards improve? -Ana:It's still very early days, and I'm getting the feeling from the forums that the rewards haven't really been explored that much yet so hopefully people will find their intended uses :). Other than that, we're always watching feedback so if rewards are clearly under-used then that's something we'll look into - but I think it's worth waiting a while for the skill to 'settle in' first, rather than making knee-jerk changes. [Explaining 'intended uses'] Well, what I was mostly thinking of was divine locations. I've seen some feedback on the forums where people are making them, and thinking that's their daily use of divine locations up - when you can harvest from other people's in addition to that, to get a lot more resources. I also think that the Signs of the Porter may be prove to be more useful than feedback would currently indicate - especially at the higher levels when they teleport more items. In general, I think a lot of people are wrapped up in training at the moment so I'm hoping when that has died down we'll see more feedback about the rewards too :). Q: Clan citadel divination? -Hew: Not yet. We'll wait until there's some more work on Clan Citadels: we'd like to get more people using them but there's lots we'd like to do this year and next, so I don't know when that will be. Hew: The idea of transmuting 'backwards' is really interesting; I like that. We might be able to do some cool stuff with that. When Mod Avatar originally came up with the idea (or a slightly different idea, which I stole and changed) he was thinking of transmuting across, and I'm looking forward to doing something with that too. At the moment there's a deliberate choice between portents of restoration and food. While it's possible that we could make new versions with other thresholds (or change the thresholds in certain level bands) we'd only do so if it didn't make the items too complicated and confusing. Some recipes would be dangerous: I agree with your example. Maybe they're all dangerous, and I'd check before we decided to do any of them. But there are things here and there that might benefit from players being able to even them up a little... Q: Will there be any more skills with similar combinations? -Ana: I'm not really sure, to be honest (perhaps Mod Hew would be better to answer this one?). With Divination we had the challenge of releasing a 'supporting' skill to a skill that doesn't exist yet, so we needed to make it a supporting skill to existing skills, too. This challenge won't come with the next skill as Divination will already be out, but I don't think that would mean it would ignore other skills, either. Sorry, slightly vague answer :). Q: Is there any chance that the wisps will last longer in the future? -Ana: There aren't any plans to do this currently. Q: Is there a chance for multiple enriched springs to spawn in the future or last longer? -Ana: Again, there aren't any plans for this currently. The enriched springs will last longer based on how many people are on them. When you interact with an enriched spring, if you have any memories in your inventory it will consume one and give you an enriched memory automatically. This causes the enriched spring to last longer. Each player can only do this once, and the enriched spring does have a maximum duration (after 4 players have donated to it). If it's only you on the enriched spring it really won't last very long, but if 4 players have donated to it then it will last much longer :). Q: add a couple of lines of code to allow Max to say random things? I've seen no end of players slandering him in front of his face- would be funny if he called everyone noobs ;) -Ana:As for Max - Mod Chris L, who created him and updated him for Divination, was actually looking into this. He wanted to give Max a response if Max overheard anyone calling him a bot ;). Hew: Remember that the extra training methods for other skills typically launch over time after the skill itself. As much as we'd love to launch something as broad and varied as Woodcutting with all the things that have been added post-launch, the game is bigger and more complicated than ever and the effort it takes to build a skill and safely plug it in everywhere has grown too.
RuneScape: what are the consequences of teleports?
RuneScape: the grind is bad, and a change would be good.
What I Did On My Holiday
Total War mod concept: Star Wars (episode none): A New Pope
This video has over 28,000 views
The duel arena: 11 ranting rules
Anyone else play Dwarf Fortress?
Dammit Mod Mark, Brink of Extinction is hard :(
Cool artwork by someone else: also, the gnome guide is done
Coming soon: guide to gnomes
Review: The Void Stares Back
Solve a weights puzzle to go through security check 1
Fight pests, and solve a crafting puzzle to go through security check 2
Solve a 'tetris' like puzzle to go through security check 3
Chat to some knights, grab a sword, go through the portal
Fight a game of 'conquest', which is rather strange
Choose for Jessika or Korasi to die
Fight and kill Pest Queen
My chief problem is that while the puzzles seemed like they were just security checks (something I expected to be over quickly) they were very tough indeed (contrary to expectations of the average black knight goon) and rather formed most of the quest. If the knights had teamed up before the puzzle section and we'd all been working through them together, it would have made more sense and built up the capabilities of Grayzag. The game of conquest, while interesting, also felt very strangely placed: its inclusion feels incredibly forced and it doesn't make much sense for you to use a chess-like system...or for the pests to abide by the rules. A second and tougher pest fight with Sir Tiffy, Lord Daquarius, and Korasi all fighting together would have made more sense. The choice of who dies was interesting, and a strong inclusion throughout the series. It felt like a choice that had some weight, though I had no difficulty whatsoever in choosing to save Korasi, a strong and productive void knight, and kill Jessika, a naive and foolish scientist who got us into the whole mess and had barely been useful once in the series. The boss fight itself was strange. Initially I was slightly confused, but the Valluta did explain things very well. I felt it was slightly buggy, but I think that was just my poor technique. It was something of a challenge, though largely because of its length rather than because of any actual fear of death. As such, it was a little more of a grind than I anticipated: I stood there and hacked away at the queen, stunning when appropriate, until she died. A lot more could have been made of the 'reinforcements' idea: given that we had already summoned a conquest squad (those are extremely powerful) and we were a few rooms away from a literal army of black knights, it was bizarre that they came piecemeal in equal numbers and barely contributed at all. If I'd had 20 black knights to take care of the pests the queen summoned and 2 conquest squads to remove the void drones and help me shoot the queen from a distance, we would have eliminated the threat in no time. It was almost a bit strange that the portal the queen used didn't stay open longer: you could have had a pitched battle with the queen and I locked in a deadly duel while the void, black, temple and white knights all struggled on around me to repel invading monsters, much in the way that The World Wakes involved a pitched battle with one particular army (goons) against another (elites) while I defended an objective. This struck me as a missed opportunity. The aftermath left me with mixed opinions. While I was pleased to meet the Valluta, see Grayzag brought to justice, meet all the leaders of the knightly orders, and so on, it felt frustrating that they were forced to say that while Grayzag had caused the pest invasion everywhere, the void knights could not stop fighting pests (because the minigame had to continue to exist). This could probably have been handled better: you could give the void knights new employments, you could turn Pest Control into a training activity, you could say the scale of the pest invasion is vastly reduced, whatever. If I was commander Tyr and the pest invasion had been ceased, I would have a number of new duties for knights to fulfil guarding ancient guthixian sites, for example, lending assistance to the Burthorpe guard that fights the trolls invading Taverley, building a proper fortress, and setting up multiple ways for the void knights to be summoned from alarms. But that's just my personal fanfiction. Finally, the rewards weren't bad. Korasi's sword, while I'm not certain of its use yet (stats of a level 68 weapon but requirements of level 78), looks badass. They've updated it for EOC, and it looks great. The elite void armour, while slightly less exciting, was nonetheless welcome as an alternative to the strain of purple that taints the original one, although in stats it's very disappointing: they have +2 prayer for each piece...and that's it. So it's essentially paper armour with the changes EOC has brought, and useless unless you're against a very weak slayer task. Having said that, the deflector is rendered more valuable than ever by it. The xp was welcome and felt suitably balanced (har har). I suppose it didn't have quite the 'oomph' I've come to expect from Grandmaster, something that could have been rectified by making the elite armour and sword much more powerful: certainly the sword used to be exceedingly dangerous, something that could be rectified by giving it a passive effect like the godswords, of healing, prayer renewal, or even magical damage. So, my verdict? The Void Stares Back is a quest with decent rewards, challenging puzzles, an interesting fight, and a great plot idea. However, it suffers from poor pacing, an inability to make you emotionally connect with heroes and villains, a few legacy issues, and a lot of missed potential. As such, I'd rank it the least interesting of the grandmaster quests; however it is still a very worthwhile addition to runescape's quests as a whole.
Demon Mobs, Demon Slayer, and Retired Randoms: a review
Oh sweet, Zaros guide's on the RS community round up
Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter: great film, here are the !spoiler! flaws
Used their kind as grunts. I have no idea why vampires were sent into the front line, but if they're supersoldiers, why not just attack the Union army's generals etc?
Wear leather. It looks badass, but it makes a big creaking sound if you're trying to sneak.
Not use guns. This happens far too many times, where a gun would be tactically sound but is forgotten about.
Not wear armour. A lot of the time, they're in a melee. Armour would be tactically viable, but they don't use it, and get stabbed in the torso far too many times. Just a coat of mail would be effective, but something for the throat would also be useful.
Missed out on securing power and influence. The vampires are all bankers or merchants...the richest owns a single plantation. Why they haven't become kings and other dictators in their many years is somewhat surprising: they have almost every opportunity available to them.
They don't assassinate Abe, which is odd because he's often vulnerable, most vampires are expendable, and they can turn invisible. Instead, they hurt his boy. Why doesn't Abe have mirrors around the house?
What does Lincoln do wrong? His axe needs to have silver on the handle as well. Way too many times, he blocks vampires with it and they strain against the wood. If it had silver on it, they would be burned, and he'd have a great advantage. Also, vampires wouldn't be able to grab his axe that way.
His axe head isn't entirely silver. If it was, he could use it as a mirror, which would be pretty powerful.
A lot of his fights could be more easily resolved with guns. He sneaks up on vampires many a time, and if a silver bullet is all he needs, he could finish them without a difficult melee.
Lincoln never wears armour, which is also odd, especially when he goes to a plantation at the Vampire's request to go and fight them.
Good movie, though. But I would have gone about things differently as a vampire. Also, I have a dwarf vampire in my Dwarf Fortress game, and have found her: she's the captain of the guard, and blasted good at swordfighting.