Quest Speedrunning Questions

Question #1:

This is an honest question without the intention of hating on the team, but how did the idea for Quests Speedrunning come about? I feel like this is a game mode which appeals to a very niche set of players and I’d love to see where the Game Jam projects are at. Could you explain more about why the decision was made to implement Quest Speedrunning above other projects which might have more appeal to main game players? Also can you compare how much effort it is to implement this game mode in comparison to a League?

Question #2:

I've always loved watching Speedruns of games I love and am super excited to see that play style officially added into OSRS, so a big thank you for that! From a development standpoint, what was the thought process on which quests to use for Speedrunning? Are there any quests that got vetoed upon discussion?

Mod Ed

We went back and forth on quite a few different ideas. There were quite a few lists of the initial set of quests proposed. In the end, we went with - as a starting point - the five iconic Free-to-Play quests because it felt like they made sense. One thing worth noting is that we hope this is just the beginning and we do add more quests to the Speedrunning worlds over time.

With that in mind, it made sense to start at the beginning with those first quests, the most memorable quests that people are playing through. That was the main reason, and one thing that people will have likely noticed when playing through the quests that we’ve enabled for Speedrunning, is that despite being an MMO, we haven’t always been brilliant at letting people engage with content at the same time. Some of the older quests, in particular, often require a lot of queuing, and we have had to make a few tweaks to try and reduce that as much as possible.

For example, if you’re doing the Vampyre Slayer Speedrun, you might notice that on Speedrunning worlds; you fight him in an instance, so it’s only you in there as opposed to the main game where you can get as many players as you want in there in one go.

That is also one of the reasons for going for these quests. They’re quite small and not as complicated, so it was a bit easier to make sure that there weren’t too many bottlenecks. On a similar note, when we look at the first few quests we’re planning to add post-launch, we’ve also chosen quite recent quests. These newer quests we’re adding these because, on the whole, they have done a much better job at reducing bottlenecks, etc.

That said, there isn’t any limit on this when it comes to adding quests for this in the future. I don’t think there are any red lines or quests that could never be added. There are a few that would be quite difficult; I’m not sure of the best way to tackle adding a quest like Shield of Arrav, for example, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t add any quest we wanted. Hopefully, over time, we can add quite a lot!

Mod Ayiza

Personally, I want to see a bigger quest come out, and I’d have to choose Dragon Slayer II. I’m a big fan of that quest! It was the first piece of content that I worked on when I joined Jagex, so it holds a special place in my heart. And it got me ever closer to the wonderful Mod Ed as well.

I think it’s such a brilliant quest, and I’d love to see how well that could be done in a Speedrun setting, given how much goes into it.

Mod Ed

Do I have some good news for you! Dragon Slayer II is one of the 10 quests we’ll add over the next few months.

Question #4:

Why did we decide to make the Graceful Outfit unobtainable on launch month? It can be obtained in the months following release, but the maximum points you can gain in the first month of launch is 1600 and the Tier 3 Outfit is 1800. What is the reasoning behind this decision?

Question #5:

Can you see Speedrunning Worlds encompass PvM activities such as Bossing in future? Other great ideas include Speedruns to Tutorial Island or Champion’s Guild - perhaps even a mode for Clue Scrolls?

Mod Kieren

I do think that’s all cool. These are some things that the Speedrunning community already does - I believe the Dragon Slayer Speedrun is one of the classics in getting to the Champion’s Guild. I’d love to support that.

This is quite experimental! It’s pretty unique for MMOs, full stop. We’re trying to be different here, and we’ll see how it goes. That’s when we can start to think about adding other slightly different variants of Speedruns because I’ve loved what I’ve seen so far!

It’s only been a day, and seeing some videos of people working out new strats for what seemed like incredibly simple quests. I’m sure it’s going to be mind-shattering to see what people come up with for longer quests like Dragon Slayer II, let alone other types of content. I can’t wait to see that.

I dream of seeing somebody Speedrun Old School at GDQ or at one of the GDQ events. I’m quite happy to see us doing stuff that helps support niche communities because MMOs are bigger than the sum of their parts! OId School thrives when each of its parts are thriving, rather than just one. If we only ever paid attention to the majority, we would just be releasing new bosses every week! Not much else.

Question #6:

Is there going to be a leaderboard for each quest? Is it possible to see time-based HiScores?

Mod Ed

I would love to see time-based HiScores. Not just for this but in general. The technology isn’t there at the moment, unfortunately, but hopefully, one day, we will get to see that. We’ve had conversations internally about if this is something we can do. In the meantime, there are unofficial player-run leaderboards in which people can get involved!

Question #7:

Why is Speedrun gear set with basic stats and items? Could we see the ability to pick anything we like so we can test the absolute fastest time that quests can be completed?

Question #8:

Is there a reason why NPC locations aren’t static? A single person might keep them in the wrong spot which could mean the difference between one or two seconds on my personal best.

Mod Ed

One of the good things about the way we’ve put Speedrunning together, both in usability and maintenance, is that we have built it into the existing quest system. What that means is that while they are on separate worlds, it’s not a separate game. Speedrunning is all still built into the actual core of the game itself.

I can say that that’s good in some ways; great for usability, it’s immediately easy to understand, and it’s very, very easy for us to maintain. Adding a new quest for speedrunning takes five minutes to actually do! The only really hard part is balancing the times.

There is a downside. Because it is still technically part of the same game, we wouldn't be able to do some things, like making NPCs static without impacting the base game. That’s the unfortunate side of that. It would have been nice to do, but it’s just one of those things that weren’t possible.

That said, we have made sure that things like an NPC being a tile out of place shouldn’t be the difference when it comes to trophies. Getting a Platinum Trophy should never rely on the perfect positioning of NPCs. There should always be plenty of room to manoeuvre. That sort of thing does only impact people going for the Global Best.

Mod Kieren

RNG is an expected part of world record Speedrun attempts in every Speedrun game. Everyone must have seen the drama with Minecraft and a certain famous creator, the cheating scandal, accusations, and all that.

That was all centred around RNG and potential cheats that changed the droprates of items that make it easier to get good attempts. RNG is standard as part of Speedruns. If you’re going for world records, there’s no way we’d be able to minimise it entirely. How far do you go? Do you make flour a 100% drop rate from Imps? I don’t think we should be messing with stuff like that. It just opens up a humongous can of worms. As long as we balance the trophy times correctly for a more casual use of speedrunning, I think we’re fine.

Question #9:

The Dark Wizard aggression in the Delrith fight is causing frustration for some players as the area is single way combat so it prevents players attacking Delrith himself. What’s your thought process around changing legacy quests in Quest Speedrunning? Generally, would you look to change this or keep it the same?

Mod Kieren

This quest is so stupid for doing this in the first place. You finally got the three keys, you've got the sword, it's so epic! You walk to the summoning location. It's so epic! Delrith spawned. Oh my God, I'm terrified! You can't attack it. Because the Wizard attacks you instead.

Let's be honest; it's ridiculous. The boss spawns, and you can't even attack it. Because it's single combat, and the wizard, which is far more dangerous, is attacking you.

Mod Ed

This is one of those ones where you're absolutely right. This is stupid. Why is it this way? This isn't a speedrunning-specific issue. It's just an issue in general. For any new player, it’s just horrible.

Ironically, on Speedrunning worlds, that terrible bit of gameplay actually becomes part of a strategy in some ways of finding interesting ways of getting around it. As I mentioned, there are some things you can do to avoid this or at least minimise it. So yeah, it weirdly becomes part of the strategy.

Question #10:

If a plugin comes out that shows an ideal path for Speedrunning the quests would it be banned or allowed? Assume it would highlight in blue all menu options and what items to buy out of shops then a line on the ground of where to go to get to the next step of the quest fastest.

Mod Kieren

I don't know off the top of my head. I think it's worth a discussion about whether this would undermine Quest Speedrunning by removing those thoughts. It's not a huge difference between looking at a video of somebody doing the plan and the trophy and copying it. But it makes it a little bit easier when it's highlighting or in-game.

Mod Ed

I'm not too worried about if something like this did exist in terms of having an impact on leaderboards and world records, etc. To be honest, realistically, anyone going for the best time they have memorised every little step anyway. Speedrunning Helper doesn’t exist yet, but if it did, then it would be worth having a conversation.

Mod Kieren

Imagine you're at GDQ. You're about to do your Dragon Slayer Speedrun section, and you boot up the client, and it's just blue highlights everywhere showing you how to do the Speedrun, then I think that's a bit rubbish.

Mod Ayiza

Maybe for practice. If you’re doing it for practice, then it’s fair.

Mod Kieren

Now we're not going to dictate the rules of the Speedrun community, because the Speedrun community in most games are sort of community-run, right? Speedrun.com exists for that reason. Players make custom rules for their speedruns, and you must upload video evidence. I expect that to be quite similar for Old School in terms of the world records seen anywhere.

Question #11:

Will there be a Practice Mode that will allow me to practice some of the more difficult quests without starting a timer? Or will the Speedrun mode itself be its own practice tool?

Mod Ed

That's the beauty of it. There is no punishment on Speedrunning Worlds for abandoning or restarting a Speedrun. You can do it repeatedly, as many attempts as you want. I’m not quite sure if this question is asking about a Practice Mode specifically for Speedrunning or for quests in general.

Mod Ayiza

Well, there are two things. It could be that the pressure of a timer is just too much, making you crumble. So you want to practise without it, and then you can go with the timer on? Maybe they missed out on a part of the question and wonder if there are particular steps you could do and practise those individual steps over and over to refine what happens through the entire quest.

Mod Kieren

I understand this is probably more like, ‘’I want to practice the Dragon Slayer II boss’’ or something like that. On the main account, or hardcore.

Mod Ed

So an answer to that: You don't have to have completed quests on your main account to Speedrun it. So from outside, yes, you could do the quests on Speedrunning Worlds first as practice. But you can't practise individual sections of a quest; you would have to play for the whole thing. And every time you abandon or restart it, you start from the beginning.

Something else that we should probably also note is that while we've already said we want to keep adding quests to this and build it up, there is no plan to ever launch quests simultaneously in the main game and on Speedrunning Worlds. So we'd never be enabling a quest for Speedrunning on its launch day. There would always be a gap before any new quest, so you wouldn't be able to use it to practise that way.

Question #12:

Can you explain more about why replaying quests on our main account is technically not practical to do?

Mod Ed

The easiest way to answer this is to explain what we do on the Speedrunning World. On Speedrunning Worlds, whenever you hit that ‘’Start Speedrun’’ button, we wipe the entirety of the save game of the account. We save a few things like setting, so you don’t have to redo your keybindings, but on the whole, everything gets wiped; all your inventories, the variables, the skills. All that we're tracking returns to zero, and then we set up the quest for you.

You could probably guess why we wouldn't want to do that on people's main accounts. To be able to replay a quest so much needs resetting, not just for the quest itself, but for everything afterwards.

Let’s say I decide I want to replay the Darkness of Hallowvale for some unknown reason and go through Meiyerditch again. If I've already done A Taste of Hope and Sins of the Father, do you reset those as well? I've done Sins of the Father, unlocked Darkmeyer, gone to the Hallowed Sepulchre and got the pet there. Do you take the Hallowed Sepulchre pet away? How much do you reset to do it properly?

That is why we do it on separate worlds and why it's just not possible to do it on main accounts. There's just too much risk of doing one of these things: accidentally messing up your ‘’save game’’ permanently or not doing enough and putting you in a weird state where you have a half-completed quest. So doing it in separate worlds makes it nice and safe.

Question #13:

Will Melzars Maze be instanced?

Mod Ed

It comes back to what we were on about earlier. Despite being an MMO, it’s not always very friendly when it comes to people doing the same thing at once. So we instanced the bosses for Speedrunning but not Melzar’s Maze.

It would be a nice thing to do at some point, but it’s not something I can commit to. The weird thing about stuff like this is that it’d be good to instance a lot of these on normal worlds. That’s how we do newer quests. You avoid bottlenecks entirely by ensuring that anything like that is instanced so as many people can do it as they want.

The problem is; while that’s great on paper, the game has been like this for so long that whenever you have conversations like this, you soon find yourself running into risks of “oh, but there’s now a strategy on the main game where limited accounts can complete this quest by taking on an alt and having the alt do this”, and when you start instancing, it isn’t possible anymore.

You’re changing metas that have been established for a long time. While it would be a nice thing to do in general, if we did do it, it probably would just be for Speedrunning worlds.

Question #14:

Can we add trophies to the quest list so we know which quests we have already achieved Platinum on?

Mod Ed

It would be nice to show this. The only issue is that the Quest List already shows a lot of information. You can already filter it by so many different categories. I do worry about how many more we can add on top of that before it starts to have performance issues.

We can look into it. Again, it’s not something I’m committing to immediately, but it’s something that we could look at in the future.

Mod Kieren

We can just use the colours. You’re not going to have green or yellow quests in the same way because you’re not completing quests permanently.

Mod Ed

That’s what I was thinking. We use yellow to show the quest you’re currently Speedrunning, but there might be a way we can do it nicely where it’s red if you’ve got no trophies, yellow when you’ve got some, and green when you’ve got them all. The one you’re currently Speedrunning could maybe be blue.

Question #15:

Has there been any discussion about adjusting the fang droprate, or are we happy with its current state?

Mod Kieren

This is a discussion we need to have if we plan to change anything. I’m not aware of any decision that’s concretely been decided thus far. I’m not sure we have a good answer to give you on whether we’re happy or not.

Mod Ayiza

Where it currently sits is that we’re aware that the community has been raising it as a potential issue. It’s something that we’re looking into; we’re not just going to make a knee-jerk reaction based on perception.

We’ll do what we typically do: have a look at the data, figure out if there needs to be a change, and if so, then we’ll let you know about it, but we are still yet to have that discussion. At least, if nothing else, this is confirming the fact that we have seen the comments that have been made about it. It’s inevitable that we will at least investigate it further and see if anything needs to be done.

Read full article on RuneScape.com OSRS News Articles

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