Dragon Slayer II Dev Update, Design Competition

11/15/2017

Dragon Slayer II Progress & Competition

Time flies when you’re gaining XP. It’s already been over a month since we announced and polled Dragon Slayer II! With a phenomenal 96% of you voting yes, it’s one of the highest voted pieces of content we’ve ever worked on.

Dragon Slayer II is set to be one of the most challenging quest introduced to Old School RuneScape, and with the release date of 4th January now less than two months away, we wanted to give you an update on how things are progressing. Don’t worry, we’ll keep things spoiler free! And for those that want spoilers, you'll just have to wait until the quest releases!

So how much of Dragon Slayer II have we got done so far? Quite a decent amount actually. Like with all our big projects, Dragon Slayer II has been broken down into lots of smaller jobs. As you can see the doughnut graph below, we’ve already begun work on over half of the jobs and we’ve finished a third of them. All in all, we’re well on track for the 4th January release.

This doughnut graph shows the status of each job making up the project.
Apart a few assets, we already have a complete act 1 for the quest. In fact, we’ve had that for a couple of weeks now. Having a big section of the quest playable at this point is really helpful as it means we can start holding internal feedback playtests nice and early. Feedback is a very important part of the development process. After all, we want to make this quest as good as possible. We regularly hold internal playtests people the Old School team and beyond will sit down and play through a piece of content. The feedback our first playtest has already resulted in various improvements being made to the content.

Internal playtests are a good opportunity for us to get feedback on the project.

We don’t just look for feedback internally of course. We also try to get the player base involved ver possible. We’ve already held three design streams for Dragon Slayer II. These streams are more than just a chance for us to show off what we’re doing, they’re also a chance for us to get feedback on what we are showing.

So, we know that progress is going well on the quest, but the quest isn’t all that’s coming with this project. We also have some nice rewards for you as well. Development has already finished on Vorkath, the new solo boss, and the Adamant & Rune Dragons are not far completion either. High level monsters like these often require plenty of fine tuning to get them perfect and we’ve given ourselves plenty of time to do just that. We won’t be doing it alone though, we’re looking to bring in some of our top content creators to have a go at these monsters and see what they think!

Visits like this are valuable to us as it gives us an opportunity to gather real-time feedback players interacting with the content.

Art and development don’t necessarily work on the same content at the same time. In the case of Vorkath, placeholder assets have been used until art provides the final models.

With the first act of the quest done, and some of the biggest pieces of post-quest content out of the way, what’s left to do? The next two acts of the quest are probably a good start. Work is already nearly finished on act 3, with it set for completion within the next week. We chose to focus on act 3 first as it is considered to be a larger priority than act 2. Of course, we fully intend to deliver a complete act 2 as well, we’re just working on it later in development.

As well as the quest, we also have a few more rewards to finish off and let’s not forget the brand new F2P area we polled alongside Dragon Slayer II. We’ve already got a lot of the art in place for the new area and we’re hoping to release it a bit before the main Dragon Slayer II launch.

We’ll continue to share our progress on Dragon Slayer II as we get closer to the release date. For now though, we’ll get back to work.

It's Competition Time!
One of the rewards that will be coming alongside Dragon Slayer II is the Mythical cape, a new cape that offers a way to teleport into the Myth's guild.

If you missed out on the detail behind the cape you find it in the initial Dragon Slayer II Dev Blog.

If you've been keeping up with the design streams and developer updates, you'll have likely noticed we haven't showcased any designs for these capes yet... Whilst our artists love designing new things, we also love to see your own creations so we're opening up the design of the Mythical cape to the players! The winner of the competition will have their cape featured in-game and win an exclusive Dragon Slayer II goodie bag!

You have to be in it to win it, so make sure you email your design to [email protected] with the subject line "Mythical Cape Competition". Be sure to include your RuneScape username some too!

We're proposing placing the cape some between the Cape of Legends and Fire cape, with the addition of some Crush Attack bonus. We want you to let your imagination run wild with the designs but keep in mind the cape cannot have any textures and any symbols/markings should be simple in form. Also, the cape will be darker than you might think when worn on a player character in-game, so keep that in mind when choosing a colour palette.

We will stop accepting submissions on November 24th and will three designs to be put to a poll. The community will then vote to decide the winner of the competition, which will be whoever has the most votes at the end of said poll.

Before submitting your design, make sure that you have read the competition terms and conditions.

Your Feedback & Changes

During development and testing of Dragon Slayer II, we've noticed two main areas we'd like to bring to your attention and gather feedback on. The first is regarding Dragon Bolts. When we first polled the Dragon Bolts, we stated that you could add any bolt tip to them to gain the effect of the tips without increasing the base ranged strength.

Amethyst bolt tips can be attached to Broad bolts, increasing their ranged strength by +15. They have no special effect, so adding them to the Dragon bolts would have zero benefit. We'd like to hear your thoughts on if these should be added to the Dragon bolts. We won't be adding them as a cosmetic, so they would also increase the ranged strength of the bolts even further. This would need to be polled.

The second point we'd like to raise is regarding Superior Dragon Bones dropping Adamant and Rune dragons. In the Poll Dev Blog we proposed that both dragons would have a guaranteed drop of 1 bone per kill.

Now that we've made great progress on the development of both dragons, we've realised that having a guaranteed drop rate of Superior Dragon Bones for them was far too rewarding given their difficulty to kill. If we were to leave this and make no changes, killing the Adamant and Rune dragons may well be more profitable than the actual boss, Vorkath. This obviously is something we want to avoid, so as part of a game balance change we will be lowering the drop rate.

Both dragons will now drop standard Dragon Bones.
Adamant dragons will have a 1/5 chance to upgrade the Dragon Bones drop to Superior Dragon Bones.
Rune dragons will have a 1/3 chance to upgrade the Dragon Bones drop to Superior Dragon Bones.

We hope you understand the reasoning for this change. We want to ensure that the reward the dragons matches their difficulty, and without making this change we cannot balance their s fairly.