EoC Q&A Transcript
Hey everyone!
Once again we have the transcript from last week's Q&A in which we talked about and answered your questions on the Evolution of Combat!
1. What made you feel that RuneScape needed the 'EoC Update'?
Mark: I think really the question that should be asked is how come it’s taken so long to do the evolution of combat? The combat system is adorable in its current state but it’s really reached the end of its life. It was becoming increasingly difficult for us to do anything with combat and we’ve had the most awesome ideas in the last few years. The old combat system just didn’t allow us to achieve the full potential for those ideas. For a long time, I’ve really wanted to improve the combat system; make it more fun, make it more engaging and allow players to really personalise the combat options that they have available to them. The old system just didn’t allow those things. It’s fun in a lot of ways but in other ways it wasn’t so engaging. For a lot of people combat was just clicking a monster and you’d sit back and wait for it to die. You might drink a potion; you might eat some food and then in the really high levels of combat you find that you’re manipulating between loads of different interfaces and you actually spend more time playing around with different interfaces than you actually do in combat. The new combat system really gives you loads more cool things that you can do. It looks great, it sounds great and it’s much more fun and engaging. It’s exactly the kind of thing that we wanted to do and we’ve wanted to do it for a long, long time. The new system will allow us to do really cool things in the future as well, particularly towards the top end of the game. For a long time the equipment that players have had to use has sort of ended around level 75, level 80 and it was just getting impossible for us to do anything really cool to the top end of the game and that is what the new system is going to allow us to do. It’s going to allow us to make some awesome content for the hundreds of thousands of players that have achieved really high levels in the game.
2. Is there another update that is of a similar gravity to the EoC that we can relate to?
Mark: I would say that it is definitely as big as the change we made from RS Classic to RS2. In terms of development effort it’s certainly as big as the RuneScape HD project that we did back in 2008. It’s really been a massive thing.
3. And how did that work out? What was the sentiment of the community when you went from RS Classic to RS2?
Mark: It was quite similar actually to how it is now. A lot of people really enjoyed the kind of things that were trying to do. A lot of people were just obsessed with the old game, really. There was a lot of three-hit combat and a lot of the old names that you used to see in RuneScape had things to do with three and hits and things like that. You’d be bound in three rounds of combat with your opponent that you could run away. There were all sorts of tactics in the wilderness in trying to get the first hit on other people. We changed a lot and we wanted to change a lot more but we didn’t really have the ability to do it then and we certainly do now.
4. How was combat back in the day in RS Classic? Do you remember it?
Mark: Yeah. I used to be quite a PKer in classic but it was a very different kind of space. It was very dominated by certain types of equipment and I would say it was very melee-focused as well.
Pi: I was a tank mage so I can argue with that.
Mark: There you go. It was a very different game. We’re very pleased that we made the change back then. It was very important to us and we needed to modernise the game. We needed to make it more accessible to a player that was playing the game then, really. Games change so much; RuneScape is an 11-year old game now. We’ve been going for a very long time and we have to keep refreshing the product. We’ve had weekly updates for a hell of a long time and it’s really important to always come up with new ideas, new features, new abilities, new game play and this is no different.
5. Will the EoC be what changes RS2 into RS3 which was leaked either intentionally or unintentionally in the CEO and VP live stream? And if so then will the transition between RS2 and RS3 be like the transition between Classic and RS2 way back when?
Mark: We’ve been planning the EoC longer than we’ve been thinking about anything like RS3. We were always intending to make those changes to the game. It’s nothing to do with RuneScape 3 whatsoever and certainly there won’t be any dual servers running at the same time; that’s not the plan.
6. Can you tell us anything about RS3?
Mark: No, I can’t. We’re still thinking about it. We’re still looking at different technologies and it’s very exciting. I’m not surprised that MMG mentioned it at all because everybody’s really excited about it and I’m sure we’ll have more information on that for you in the future. I’m not spilling any beans.
7. Would you consider making non EoC system worlds?
Mark: It’s not actually possible for us to do that. The fundamental changes to the combat systems are game-wide so we can’t maintain the old version of the game and the new EoC at the same time. It’s just not possible to have two worlds running with different systems and even if it was, we’d have to double all the development work we did. It’s just not the right thing to do.
8. If the evolution of combat doesn't satisfy the community would you consider removing it?
Mark: The reason why we’ve released it as a beta is so that we can make sure the community is satisfied with the update that we’ve done. It’s an absolutely massive change to the game. We have made loads of changes since we launched the beta worlds. As I’ve said in the past; we’re not going to launch it until we feel that the community is satisfied with what we’ve done. That’s why we’re not rushing to launch it now. We’ll keep changing it; we’ll keep reading the feedback. We want to be comfortable with it and we want our players to be comfortable with it as well.
9. What do you say to those members who claim they will quit once EoC is released because it’s too big of a change?
Mark: I think one of the key things at the moment is that we don’t have a tutorial. Everyone went into the beta very excited when we first launched it and they had problems trying to understand exactly how to use the system. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who don’t understand things aren’t going to enjoy what we’ve tried to do. They’ve gone in there, they’ve got confused; they’ve died to a few boss monsters that they haven’t died to before and they immediately reject the system. We keep changing it, we keep building, and we keep working on the feedback that we’re given. We’re going to be introducing a tutorial quite soon so we need to hear your feedback. Whilst I appreciate that people get angry and they just say they want to quit or that they don’t like the system, what I really need is their quality feedback. It’s so rewarding for us when we talk to passionate players who’ve got real ideas about things that we can do to improve things and that’s why we’ve launched it as a beta. RuneScape is a game that updates all the time. We’re always reading posts on the forums to do with people that don’t like certain things and who say they’re going to quit. Some people do, most people don’t. I remember someone saying they were going to quit just because we changed the smiley faces for the friends list. I loved those old smiley faces but it was certainly not a reason to quit the game.
10. Since September has come and the Evolution of Combat has not been released yet, when will it eventually exit the Beta stage and enter the live game? And what is the hold up?
Chris L: I’d say the holdup is you lot (laugh) but actually, the holdup is because we are taking the beta seriously and we’re taking your feedback seriously. A lot of other games and products say that a beta is a bug test for us. We don’t view you as our QA team although that’s useful. Like Mark just touched on, we really are scouring those forums and I’m making myself present in the beta game and I know that Pi is as well. It’s not being released in September and it won’t be released until we’re happy that you guys are happy and we’re going to keep communicating that. We really listen to an incredible amount of feedback on this. I think 80% of our changes have been since release. It’s not really the same system it was a month ago. It’s changed a lot. I could reel off updates right here but just check my last post on the forum and you’ll see that all of that stuff is player driven and that’s not the first thing we’ve done. It’s something we take seriously and passionately.
Pi: I spend my first hour of every day, every morning scouring through all the feedback that you leave on the forums. It’s really important for us, and at the end of the day we’re making this for you and we want you to be happy. Give us your feedback; be as harsh as you like, I’ve got thick skin!
11. Will (EoC) it be available for free players?
Mark: It certainly will. Just as the relationship between the free and the members game is, there will be some abilities, some features that will only be available to members and some features that are only available to the free players, but certainly they (F2P) will get the evolution of combat.
Chris L: They’ll be getting plenty of stuff with it as well. A new range of armour and gear that’s previously locked or not even existing in the live game at the moment just to make sure that everyone at the top of the free game is on par with each other.
Pi: We’ve even unlocked some members’ content for F2P because we found that there were holes. A lot of the holes in the lower levels were specifically to do with mage heavily, and in some places, range. We’ve given you new stuff.
Mark: So there’ll be a whole load of new equipment for the free game that they didn’t have before.
12. Do you really think the EoC will attract new players?
Mark: It definitely will and I’m very confident of that. We have been doing focus tests, feedback sessions, idea generation and discussions with new players for some time. Quite often, the feedback that we get from them is that the combat system just isn’t fun enough for them. It’s not engaging and like I said earlier, it’s just about clicking on the monster and waiting for it to die. With a modern day audience they want something which is much more visceral, a bit more adrenaline-pumping and a bit more exciting. We just want to make sure that we’re making a modern game for a modern day player.
13. Weapons are no longer unique due to loss of specials e.g. Korasi Special, Excalibur, Dragon Battleaxe, Spear Stuns and D Claws. What do you have to say about this?
Mark: One of the key objectives which I gave these guys (the developers) early on in the project was to make every character more unique. Whilst I would agree that those weapons have lost some of their uniqueness in that they don’t have their own special attacks tied to them, what we’ve done is made a system which allows players to build a character which is different from others. We’re allowing players to be unique with their characters. It’s strange that you consider those weapons to be unique but actually, because of the abilities that were associated with them (the special attacks) everyone was using them. You’d walk around, you’d be in combat situations, be in the wilderness, fighting monsters or anything. Just walking around in Varrock, you’d see people wearing the same gear. You’d see them wearing exactly the same equipment and for me that doesn’t make things unique at all. The new system really allows players to be unique and effectively, we do have those abilities in the game.
Pi: Yeah, we do. We have the special attacks. For instance, Korasi’s is an ability called Chain in mage. We’ve taken a mage attack off of a melee weapon to help the triangle. You’ve got Frenzy, which is just like the D-Claws special attack. You’ve got Rejuvenation which is your enchanted Excalibur special attack. Recently we added the D-Spear special attack to Kick, so you can kick people back now for a tactical challenge. But you know, these current in-game specs had heavy emphasis on what we were going to do with our abilities.
14. I heard some mention about evolving weapons? Could you elaborate?
Chris L: That was one of the things Mark first approached us about when we were looking to rework combat. He called it ‘Level up my X’ where X is the weapon. It wasn’t something the old combat system could do for a few reasons. That now should be possible and the idea is basically that you would start the game with a level one weapon and instead of trading it for an iron, steel, mithril, addy, rune and dragon weapon all the way up, it would be one of those things that would level with you. The design is on the table, but you could channel XP into it off kills etc, but there’s a load of things we could do but the idea would be that the weapon would grow with you. Maybe even do crazy things like decisions you make might make it an evil weapon and cause graphical changes like catching fire or whatever. We were banging our heads together when Mark came up with it. We were saying “this is not possible!” and now it should be and that’s quite an interesting idea we can explore.
Mark: That could be anything as well. It could be level up my sword, it could be level up my shield, level up my boots, level up my summoning creature, level up my mining axe...it could be all sorts of different things.
15. So if you could level up a weapon, would that go 1-99 again or...?
Mark: Possibly, yeah. You don’t have to think about it like levels with a player. It could be different tiers. There are lots of different things that we could do and as Chris says, the old system just didn’t allow us to do those things. While we can take those ideas and make them work with little bits of the old system, it’s wouldn’t be everything we wanted to do. Not only does the new combat system allow us to do these things but it gives us a good five to ten years of systems that we can actually use which unfortunately wasn’t the case with the old system.
Chris L: Just touching upon that, what we’re going to do is release the base version so when we’re all happy with it, that’s stage one and there’s lots of stages to come afterwards.
16. Will computers be able to handle the EOC?
Mark: If you can play RuneScape now, you can definitely play with the new combat system, 100%. We haven’t needed to raise any of the minimum specs for the computers and we’ve built it with our current user base in mind.
17. Dungeoneering won’t last after EOC due to binds, damage output vs. Damage taken. Players now have to complete a dungeon exhausting resources to survive. This creates a disparity between the many accounts with high level dungeoneering who got there in half the time it would take in the EOC.
Chris L: Well, the short answer is that we agree with you. That was definitely the first state dungeoneering was in. We’ve since made a load of changes to it which I’ll list. We’ve got magic changes where staves are super-effective now. Being a mage is much easier and more accessible which was a big problem we had before. The combat triangle is quite harsh so being a solo guy if you didn’t have a bow you couldn’t kill a ranger. We made it so doing the wrong thing combat triangle-wise is not as punishing now in dungeoneering. The bind system is something that I’ve never really been happy with anyway. It’s something me and Mark have talked about and we’re going to look into changing that entirely because people aren’t happy with it and neither are we. This is another good reason to take a second look at that system. As far as XP and time goes it depends on how effective you are. Personally I’ve done some dungeons faster than I have done in the live game, and XP is going to get a second look at as well.
Mark: Yeah, we’re looking at an update next year specifically looking at the rate of XP you get as a solo player. These boys are very keen on that. We’re looking at changing the way that binds work. For example, at the moment you only have a limited amount of binds. What we’d quite like to do, because we’re encouraging people to use multiple combat styles in dungeoneering as well, you might be able to allow them to bind certain pieces of melee equipment and ranging equipment and mage equipment rather than asking them to share slots as they do at the moment. All sorts of things that we’d like to do for next year.
18. How extensive is the tutorial going to be for players to learn how to use the new combat system? Will they learn the Combat and Skilling side of the hot bar? Also for players like me who go on the beta often can we opt out of the tutorial since we already know the mechanics?
Pi: Firstly, there’s actually going to be two tutorials. The tutorial that I’m making is actually the one for you guys. There’s going to be a separate tutorial for the Burthorpe area. The one that I’m making for you guys, you’ll be happy to know that I won’t be forcing you to do it. I hate tutorials which force me to play and what I’m actually going to do is when it goes into the live game, I’m going to give you XP for doing it. It’s going to teach you something and you’re going to do a fun challenge for it. Depending on how well you do on the challenge, you’ll get more XP. With regards to what actually is going to be in there, I’m not going to go through the nitty gritty. What I’m going to do is I’m going to give you the tools for you to learn. Quite often, you’ll read the tool tips and you’ll go “oh, what does that mean?” I’m going to teach you that. I’m going to teach you what it means and I’m going to help you build yourself. Also, for the first time, helping us in the Beta will give you XP on your live account. We really want to get this down for you guys so when it goes into the beta, you’re also going to get a chunk of XP on your live account if you take part and go through the tutorial. You don’t even have to give us feedback; you just have to use it. We would prefer if you would give us feedback, though! The final point I’m going to make is that we’ve got a limited amount of time to do feedback. What would be absolutely amazing and help me right now is if you could go into the beta. Even if you haven’t gone into the beta yet, try it and tell me what is confusing so that I can help you and address those things which are confusing. Just litter the forums with “I don’t understand this, this is too confusing” and I’ll address it.
19. Will XP rates be comparable to XP rates in the live game at the moment, or will they be different?
Mark: We’re aiming for the new combat system to be at least as effective as the old combat system. In some situations you’ll be getting more XP than you were before. The minimum benchmark is what we had before. As Pi has said, we’re really looking to reward people for coming back into the beta. That won’t be something we’ll be able to put in for tomorrow but certainly we want to encourage more people to come into the beta before we go live. We need to make sure the community is satisfied with what we’ve done before we push it out to the live game. A lot of the questions we’ve had through are questions that are from people who clearly haven’t tried out the beta or tried out the beta once in the really early stages and haven’t looked at it again since. We’ve done huge amounts of feedback and it’s honestly well worth the effort to go in there, look at the changes that we’ve made and give us more feedback.
20. How different is the beta now to when you first launched it?
Mark: Completely different.
Chris L: You’ve got an old-school mode as well if they don’t like the new system and never will. Well, I could show you how to use the old system in three clicks. If you minimise the action bar so chat is back to typing without having to press enter. Auto-attack is still there. We’ve got all the cool stuff like dual-wielding and stuff. If you think your damage rate isn’t as high we’ve got a new ability, all from player feedback called momentum. This ups your damage and makes it more comparable to the live rate. So, it’s about three clicks. We dropped a lot of people on day one and there was no formal tutorial. We admit it was a big change to the game because it is. When you drop someone in the deep end like we did, it was really overwhelming. Hopefully the super-awesome tutorial will break you in easy and then you can take it where you want it to go.
21. Why were most prayers nerfed? For example, why were protection prayers nerfed to only 40% protection?
Mark: Some of the things from the old system we would regard as designers as overpowered. One of the problems with the old prayer system was once you’d reached level 43 prayer you’d get your protection from melee and you didn’t really need to bother about levelling your defence skill because most of the bosses you would fight would be melee-orientated. So you’d go into an area, switch your prayers on and you wouldn’t have to worry about food or potions or anything. I’m not convinced that that’s great design. Players are going to do that because that’s what the system encourages them to do but it would also lead to other problems. The old combat system calculator would use quite a lot of defence in a heavy way to calculate your combat level, but defence didn’t actually contribute to your ability to fight in-game in the same way, so you’d find a lot of players, everyone knows the players as pures. They minimise their defence levels to gain advantage in the wilderness. I’m not saying that that’s bad game play at all. I’ve never been against pures because at the end of the day they are using the system to the best of their ability. What we’re trying to do now is to encourage you to level your defence skill. We’re not going to penalise you for having too high stats, which ultimately the old system kind of did. We’re now going to encourage you to level your lower stats so that they’re high. The defence skill now significantly contributes to your ability to be a good fighter in RuneScape. The old prayer skill for me was unbalanced and overpowered and encouraged people not to access content. There’s nothing worse from a design perspective than someone saying “I really like the sound of your new content but I’m not going to access it because it might give me defence XP”. Giving people a reason not to play content is not good design. That’s really why we’ve changed it.
Pi: For the high level prayers they made making bosses really hard. Prayer is supposed to be a buff and not part of your main combat. When you have to start designing bosses around always having a buff, that’s when you know it’s overpowered and that it needs to be changed.
Chris L: We’re already at that stage. For most of the new bosses we have to make, I get people coming over to me asking what the hell to do with prayer and it generally results in a lot of the new bosses maybe in the last one to two years we’ve had to have them hit through prayer or having the prayer on reduces the damage by half, funnily enough, that’s what we’ve done in the combat system now. It’s just part of the thing that makes it a hairy thing to design around. Creatively speaking though, it actually allows us to do really cool things in the future because it’s 50% protection at the moment but on stuff like Jad we still have it as 100% protection. That number is variable and we can change that. Even better, we can let you change that so in the future, I’m thinking an ability or maybe a potion that gives you 100% prayer protection for a certain amount of time so that in a boss fight you’ll have to think about that tactically. If that massive attack is coming up you need to defend it, drink that potion, take the hit or not take the hit and as a result it gives us much more flexibility and it makes it much more tactical and puts the power in your hands rather than us saying “sorry, we have to hit you now even though you’re praying”.
Mark: If you think about the amount of monsters which exist in the game right now which have got special exceptions so that your prayers won’t work or they’ll switch your prayers off or muck around with you in some way or they’ll drain your prayer rates...We’ve been designing around it for a very long time.
Chris L: It’s a bit cheap as well. I think I saw one boss where when you attack it your prayer’s gone. This is making prayer useful, keeping it on and reducing the damage but we’re not being harsh to you about it.
22. Are you going to be changing the stats of every piece of armour and Weapons in game? If so how is this going to affect PVP, bossing, dungeoneering?
Mark: Get on the beta and have a look! We have already changed all the stats for the weapons and the equipment twice in the new system. Everything’s changed, as has the relative stats of the boss monsters that you’re going to fight. Lots of things have changed for the better.
23. Will there be finishing moves introduced in PvP combat? Specifically in the duel arena?
Pi: We already have them. They’re called ultimates and they’re designed around basically what special attacks used to be, you’ve just got to work for them now.
Chris L: It’s not the end of it. What we’ve released is not all you’re going to see of the abilities. You’ll see things like execution where you can only use it if your opponent has less than 25% of health and it’s graphically cool. A lot of games do this and it’s pretty cool-looking.
24. Is there any plan on changing the effect that defence plays on the combat level?
Mark: I kind of touched on that earlier (Q21). As I said earlier, it’s really disappointing that we’ve designed a system that encourages some players not to level up their defence. That was one of the early challenges on the combat system, which was to make a system that would encourage people to level up all their stats and not have a game that encouraged people to keep their stats low. Defence will play a much bigger contribution to your effectiveness in combat.
25. Will there be better thrown and arrow ammunition?
Mark: The short answer is yes. We’re aware that there is a lack of decent thrown and projectile weapons particularly towards the top end of the game. Those are things that we’re looking at addressing. We’ve got slightly bigger projects in mind for what we do with ammunition in general, including runes. At the moment we’re just building a system that was right for all of the equipment that we had in game. We’re also introducing more monsters which have got specific weaknesses to range as well.
Chris L: And those ones won’t be weak to thrown at the high end because we know there’s not that ranged equipment there.
26. How will we be able to obtain the offhanded weapons? Specialty Shops? Monster Drops? Smithing? Will these be available to sell on the GE and how do you imagine this will affect the economy?
Mark: This is one of the exciting things from me about the system. I felt for a while that smiths and crafters haven’t really had much to add. Back from classic days the main ways to achieve rune equipment and things like that was to actually buy it from player smiths. That has kind of changed over the years. We’ve added those things to drop tables but we haven’t added things for those smiths to actually make. When the system goes live, crafters and smiths will find that they’ll have a whole shed load of things that they can do now. We would expect the majority of offhand equipment to come into the game via crafters and player smiths. Some of the really high-level stuff will come in specifically from boss monster drops as well. We’re doing that to refresh the drop tables of monsters, particularly with monsters that people feel they can’t be bothered to go and fight because they just don’t get enough return from them. For me it’s really exciting because we’re giving more things for player smiths and player crafters to do and we’re refreshing some of the drop tables of some of the older boss monsters.
In case anyone doesn’t know, offhand weapons are specifically for dual-wielders because the new combat system will give the ability to wield a weapon in your offhand. The current system would only allow you to hold a shield or a defender, something like that, in that hand, or there are a few sort of jokey things that you can put there. The new system, if you don’t want to go two-handed mode then you can do really cool things with your offhand. You can go in with dual scimitars or one of my own personal favourites is a long sword and a crossbow. There are all sorts of cool stuff you can do with the new system. So the answer to the question is that they’ll mostly come in from player crafters and player smiths with some top end stuff coming from boss monsters, really refreshing the old game.
27. Pertaining to old Quests and activities in general that contain combat in them, will the development team at Jagex eventually be re-working such fights within Quests and combat moments within certain activities?
Chris L: Yeah. Most of the stuff should be live in the beta so check it out. It’s a bit of a curse at the moment because most of the people like myself, when I import my save, I’ve already done all the quests so I can’t fight it and I can’t test it. So if you haven’t done the quest and you’ve got beta access, please get in there and check out some of those quests because whilst we’re happy with them internally, we need you to tell us if it’s too easy or too hard, impossible or bugged. We need that feedback. The short answer is yes, we’ve updated everything in the quests, minigames. Even the temple trekking rework I did a year or two ago I’ve updated again so that the followers now animate and use the new combat moves already.
26-Sep-2012 15:01:21