01-Sep-2010 - Behind the Scenes - September

Romance blossoms during September in a brand new free-to-play quest, coupled with some rather elite achievements for our most experienced of members. If you’re not busy planning for the Bonus XP Weekend, why not swat up on your legal drama, as we prepare for the latest batch of court cases?

Court Cases: Back in Session

It’s been busy recently at the Seers’ Village courthouse, with cases closed and wrongs righted by those of you skilled enough to argue, examine and accuse, all while wearing a stylish wig. The court case update will consist of 11 new cases (as mentioned in the Back in Session blog), each far more fiendish than those released earlier in the year. Interrogate witnesses in the field, use viewing orb magics to investigate crime scenes and discover incriminating fingerprints for yourself as you uncover the truth behind some of our most popular personalities.

Cases once again navigate through a wide range of issues and characters from Barbarians vs. Mages (looking at RuneScape history from two conflicting perspectives), round Evil Dave, past Professor Oddenstein vs. Ernest, and taking a sharp left turn at the Sandwich Lady. Rewards still focus around Attack and Defence XP, but also include a barrister’s top, and a judge’s gavel that comes with an appropriately themed emote to let you conduct your own brand of justice.

Bonus XP Weekend

As you know from the newspost last week, we’re planning a second Bonus XP Weekend to take place from 3-6th September. We’re taking a slightly different approach this time, though, so do read the newspost or the Second Helping FAQ blog to learn more about this update. It’s a great time to train up those skills you’ve been neglecting, as well as work on your main attributes, with plenty of time to mix and match between all sorts of content.

Elite Achievement Diaries

The Elite Achievement Diaries update is one we have been discussing in our blogs as early as November last year and, finally, we can talk about the release. We are adding some epically high-level diary tasks to all of the Achievement Diaries, and some new hard tasks to the Lumbridge diary. Requirements include stats as high as 95 Prayer, 96 Fishing, 93 Slayer and 92 Firemaking with an inferno adze.

With new challenges come new rewards, of course, and the elite clothing comes with some useful perks. The highlights are access to a new mining area where there’s an NPC who exchanges ores for certs, more Slayer points from Lapalok, High Alch spells for the explorer’s ring and log chests for the beacon network. Not only that, but there are also improvements to the existing diary rewards AND some huge XP lamps? FTW!

Z-buffering

Improvements to our engine will bring a major graphical improvement to the game in the form of z-buffering. This means you will experience less 'clipping' issues (objects/scenery cutting other objects in half or sticking through each other) and find that scenery 'layers' on top of each other in a more predictable way. This will see improvements to high-paced game content like PKing and allow players to better see the threats around them.

Upon release, the end result will be fewer graphical glitches in software mode and we get faster OpenGL! This also bodes well for the future, as we can now design even more impressive areas and characters, particularly for OpenGL. It also allows us to improve the interaction between players in the future, such as multi-player emotes.

Gunnar’s Ground

Love is in the air in this month’s planned quest: Gunnar’s Ground. What can happen when a dwarf poet is rendered speechless by his love for a Fremennik chieftain’s daughter? You’ll face RuneScape’s first poetry composition puzzle and learn about the history of how the Barbarian Village came to be.

This is a brand new quest for the free-to-play game and will be replacing the old Romeo and Juliet quest. As we have often said in the past, we’re always trying to improve our existing content, but some elements just don’t age well and are often best removed entirely from the game; we feel that’s the case with Romeo and Juliet. Don’t worry, though: nobody will lose out on Quest Points or rewards.

In other news...

We also plan to speed up the Shantay Pass, give compost bins the ability to tell you how full they are, increase the clickable area of rope swings and allow you to define the colour of your Clan Chat.

Have fun!

Mod Mark
RuneScape Lead Designer

Elite Achievement Diaries! Awesome