Hi Scapers,
It's time we check in on our content plans for May and June - and some updates we've made based on your response to our Spring Content Roadmap.
Our Plans And Changes
We've heard for many years now that you want bigger and better Seasonal Events - something that embodies the spirit of the season, brings everyone together, has a great Seasonal Quest and is packed with gameplay-earnable rewards.
With Christmas and Easter, we put our efforts into making that a reality, while also ensuring we build a strong foundation that we can efficiently build upon for future event appearances. We hope you've really felt that with the Christmas Village and Blooming Burrow.
However, from your feedback, there's a balance to strike in achieving this. It's clear you want to see more of our development invested in persistent content - especially in the near term - rather than content with a limited seasonal availability.
In response, we have stopped the development of our Summer Event and refocused those resources onto new persistent content releases.
How We're Making This Happen
With this shift in the focus of our development time, we've picked two great Game Jam projects - each selected based on their positive reception from our Game Jam recap posts, as well as their potential to be strong experiences in the time we have.
Speaking of time, one of the challenges we face is the impact of a change made at this point in development of the Summer Event. The Summer Event was taking as many resources to deliver as a persistent Content release, as we set out to build another strong foundation we could iterate on over the years ahead (as with Christmas and Easter). With this change coming around five weeks into the development of the Summer Event, we have less development time than we typically would to work on these newly planned content releases.
To offset the impact of this, we've cut down on the pre-production phase by a focused effort on beefing up and completing these two exciting Game Jam projects. It's worth noting that Game Jam projects are usually more akin to a prototype - a great idea in a somewhat playable format - that still require plenty of additional resources across multiple development teams to be release ready. By building from these concepts with our re-allocated development resources, we're confident we can release some great new content updates within the same schedule.
New Content For May & June
Both of the projects below are now in active development, and have replaced the now cut Summer Skilling Event.
May: New Boss - Rex Matriarch
A fourth Necromantic Rex Matriarch has emerged - Osseous! Explore mysterious ruins, uncover the lair of the Undead Rex Matriarch and prepare yourself for combat.
June: New Archeology Dig Site - Daemonheim
Descend into Daemonheim to uncover mysteries buried deep...
- Connect with mysteries you uncover to explore the long-forgotten secrets of Daemonheim
- Excavate and discover new items and explore the stories they tell.
We'll share a deeper look at both of these projects as their development progresses and we close in on their final release.
Updated Overview For May & June Releases
May
- The Fourth Rex Matriarch: Take on the undead Rex Matriarch
- Rellekka Graphical Update: An upgraded look for a beloved area
- Accessibility: High Contrast Mode
- Our next Double XP, arriving May 17th.
June
- New Archeology Dig Site - Daemonheim: Descend into Daemonheim to uncover mysteries buried deep...
- The Beach: The Beach makes its regular return in place of the cancelled Summer Skilling event
- Pride: Our Pride Event will also return, with new additions!
We appreciate all your feedback on this, and we hope this content feels much more in tune with the content you want to see from RuneScape in the near term. We're looking forward to showing you more about them in the coming weeks.
Just before we close out, we'd feel remiss if we didn't address the other part of this story - your clear asks to know what's coming for RuneScape beyond June. While that's not something we have ready to share today, we just wanted to let you know we hear you and we're working on it. We'll bring you a clear look at the content ahead as soon as we possibly can.
See you in Gielinor.