Necromaner_101

Raven, Stu, and Jack have been the lore dudes so far. Stu and Raven have been doing great, but Jack's said numerous times on Discord that he doesn't want to branch out with writing or world-build too much, because he thinks stuff will just get retconned.

I'm glad they're actually hiring writers, because that's a crap excuse.

Edit: Plus it would be nice to have someone who actually works full time in storytelling and writing. Passion is great, but professional experience and passion is even better.

All of us here who champion quests and lore have both professional experience and passion. What Osborne was suggesting was a full-time writer, I believe, rather than what we currently have, which is developers and designers who also write.

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Have you considered a job in tabloid journalism?

The first quote is a response to someone saying that it would be "difficult" to retcon Bandos being alive, to which I replied that it would be very easy to make the retcon, but very hard to make it convincing in the context of the story.

The second quote is me talking about SCP. Do you think SCP has good world building?

EDIT: Removed a heinous insult.

MinorikoRS

I mean....

https://i.imgur.com/12LHpe2.png

from when they memed comp (this was from June)

Several of us were suggesting they rename it to "Dahmaroc's Cape" - I added the idea of changing the Comp title to "Dahmaroc's Protégé". The reason we suggested the rename is, and he also agreed with us that, "Comp isn't comp" so ..... yeah.

As I explained multiple times at the time, the issue isn't what the name could be changed to for whatever reason - it's that changing the name away from "comp cape" wasn't an option at all. You can't make lore arguments that override a basic UX issue like that.

MinorikoRS

As I explained multiple times at the time, the issue isn't what the name could be changed to for whatever reason - it's that changing the name away from "comp cape" wasn't an option at all. You can't make lore arguments that override a basic UX issue like that.

IIRC we weren't ever actually told it wasn't an option. But it's been a while and I can't remember much more than the channel being spammed with memes.

Regardless - we all know that the cape's namesake isn't fitting for it. Besides that, someone decided years ago that Dahmaroc was the cape's owner.

I'm not sure how UX comes into play when it's literally a misnamed item that had it's best chance to be appropriately named wasted.

I'm not going to argue more over it since it doesn't matter anymore - but it's just extremely disappointing for this super-special item to have no significance to the game NPCs at all. Especially when several of them probably would have visited the museum and seen the cape on exhibit at some point, or have possibly heard about it from somewhere else.

I have no objection to an NPC commenting on or recognising your cape, I think that's a cool suggestion. In our workflow though that's the sort of thing a dev slips in while they're working on something else nearby, which is why you tend to see that sort of detail in quests (where you're working on a lot of NPCs and dialogue already) and not so much in systems projects like comp (where no NPCs or dialogue are involved).

I could open a project, book a meeting to agree it, get dev and testing time scheduled for it, and implement a line of dialogue to this end, but honestly while I think it's a fine idea I don't think it's such an important idea that it's worth taking up a good two dev-days of time on.

MinorikoRS

I have no objection to an NPC commenting on or recognising your cape, I think that's a cool suggestion. In our workflow though that's the sort of thing a dev slips in while they're working on something else nearby, which is why you tend to see that sort of detail in quests (where you're working on a lot of NPCs and dialogue already) and not so much in systems projects like comp (where no NPCs or dialogue are involved).

Understandable, but you were already working on an update to the cape - so I figured that would be in the "related-to" kind of thing.

I could open a project, book a meeting to agree it, get dev and testing time scheduled for it, and implement a line of dialogue to this end, but honestly while I think it's a fine idea I don't think it's such an important idea that it's worth taking up a good two dev-days of time on.

Well what we got took months, and barely did anything.

Just feels like a largely missed opportunity, for having been that long of an update-design process.

It didn't fix the incorrect naming. (Completionist is now even less Completionist than it originally was.)

It didn't fix the fact that the lore, that totally is there, is loose-ended.

It didn't really fix that "only a true completionist should earn this cape" either.

Anyway, it's whatever I guess.

I sympathise with being frustrated with where comp ended up.

5-x

I miss Mod John A. I believe after quitting Jagex he's now pursuing his career as a writer.

His website: https://www.johnayliff.com/

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This does happen sometimes. I was brought in on Gower Quest, Evil Dave and The Mighty Fall to write/rewrite the dialogue when the quest itself was largely structurally complete.

5-x

With all respect to other developers, you can really tell the Zanik storyline (up to The Chosen Commander) was written by the absolute master of his craft. Some of the dialogues are the best of what RuneScape has to offer. The quest feels almost like a novel adapted into the game. Proper storytelling.

Only the Vampyre storyline comes close to that, at times (obligatory RIP Mod Tytn).

I actually think Blood Pact is weirdly underrated given that it's just a glorified combat tutorial. John has an amazing talent for introducing you to a couple of characters and then making you care about them with only a handful of lines of dialogue.