Player Avatar Refresh
Today marks the launch of a long-awaited refresh to the Player Avatar! Discover a brand-new iconic face for the character you’ve always known and loved.
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Before we continue, let's clear up what is a "Player Avatar"? In short, the Player Avatar is you or, more accurately, your character in Gielinor. It's the character beneath the armour that you created when you first started your account.
Those foundational customization choices such as gender, hairstyle, top, legs, shoes, and facial hair, along with the colour options available for each, are what make up your Avatar. These core appearance options are the focus of today's update.
Handsome fellow, right? So, when we talk about the Player Avatar, we're talking about your character's baseline appearance, the foundation that everything else is built upon. Your adventures, achievements, and personal story all sit on top of this representation. But beneath it all is your new Avatar!
Over the years, RuneScape has featured a variety of player avatars, from 2D sprites to fully 3D characters. Each was a product of the technology and game engine available at the time. In 2021, we began work on the Player Avatar Refresh project, with the goal of taking the next step forward. After weeks of community consultation, livestreams, and collaboration with players to develop a remastered visual style that felt true to RuneScape, we encountered a significant obstacle: technical limitations.
The underlying systems simply weren't ready to support the changes we wanted to make. As a result, the project was put on the infamous shelf. While it may have seemed dormant from the outside, behind the scenes our technical teams continued laying the groundwork, building the tools and systems needed to make a future Avatar refresh possible.
Now, we're ready to get this modern, grounded avatar into your hands today!
Today's Release:
The Player Avatar is a gargantuan project that touches a wide variety of systems. It isn’t just your character, it also affects NPCs throughout the world as well as armour sets, outfits and cosmetics, the wardrobe system, chat systems, and much more. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an area of the game that isn’t impacted in some way.
Today's update lay's the foundations with a new base avatar, updated hairstyles and facial hair options. When you login today you should slip into your new shape with minimal friction as most outfits and armour have been updated to work with the new avatar! If you do encounter anything unexpected, please check out the known issues section below.
New Base Avatar
The star of the show, the base avatar has been updated to a new modernized standard whilst maintaining elements of the RuneScape style. So, new torso, arms, hands, legs, feet and of course face!
With the face being updated we have also updated the chathead (which is actually a separate model) so your conversations will now be in higher definition!
Additionally, several pieces of the base outfit kit you choose from during character creation or at Thessalia's shop have been updated, while others have been tweaked to fit this new body - your preferred style should still be available to you!
Updated Hairstyles
With a fresh face we definitely needed some fresh cuts and so we have updated 46 Female hairstyles & 37 Male hairstyles to fit this new head, including tons of your favourite styles!
And that's not all the styles!
Legacy Hairstyles
You'll notice that some hairstyles are part of a new "Legacy hairstyles" category. Originally we had planned to remove some older and less used styles as part of this update, but after further investigation and insights from the beta we decided that keeping all available styles of hair is the better outcome. This did mean that we had to make a decision on which ones to focus on first.
The 31 Female & 26 Male "Legacy" hairstyles have been tweaked to fit the new player head, but they will get updated over time to the same standard as the updated hairstyles, so fret not - your favourite hairstyle is still available to you!
And that's not all for hair!
Beards
Can't forget the face warmer: 22 Beards will be available to choose from with 4 of them being Legacy Beards. These Legacy beards will be updated in the future in the same way as the previously mentioned hairstyles.
List of Known Issues
Our diligent artists and developers have been hard at work setting every hair in place and cleaning up clipping issues for weeks now but there are bound to be some issues with an update that covers such a wide swath of the game as this.
To that end we have compiled a general list below of several issues we are already in the process of resolving during the weeks following this launch.
While we have endeavoured to update every single piece of clothing in the game, as we mentioned in our initial introduction to the Player Avatar Refresh, ungrafting the skin from every item has been a complicated and lengthy process and there are still a small handful of remaining items that require updating.
Our approach has been to prioritize the most commonly worn and used items first, so the outstanding items are generally only worn by a handful of players each. These outstanding items constitute a very small percentage of worn outfits from the past month. While you may encounter such an item and it may not feel like it's working as intended with the new avatar, please rest assured that they will be iteratively updated over the next few weeks.
Beyond those items, there are a few outstanding bits noted below that you may encounter today, but we are already aware of them and are looking to address them as soon as possible:
- Some heads, torsos, legs, hands and feet items will still be displaying the old avatar skin and may look out of place (explained above).
- Certain items may encounter clipping issues, especially with Tiaras or ‘legacy’ customisations (old style customisation but new avatar).
- Clipping is a visual bug that occurs when two textures pass through each other in a way that is not realistically possible. An example of clipping would be a hair texture poking through the solid top of a hat.
- The flip-side of clipping is when you can see gaps between joins so that items feel unconnected or floaty. You may encounter this on a certain number of items.
- Heads in interfaces and speech may have bugs (chat heads).
- Some clothes or limbs may appear stretched or at awkward angles.
- Some NPCs may be missing parts of their heads.
- The photobooth, which is used to reflect your in-game avatar's face onto our website, has been temporarily disabled, while we proceed with work to integrate the new avatar code into the website.
We will be monitoring this update for any and all reports of issues but if you encounter any egregious issues that are not mentioned above, the most helpful way to support us is to use the in-game report bug functionality.
In-game reports take a snapshot of your account at the time of the report (both on a code but also on a visual level), giving our team tons of very useful information to help with assessing your report right away. This report feature should be your first port of call when you encounter an issue you want to report. It is also incredibly simple to do.
1. Open your options menu by pressing Esc. Then select the "Report Issue" button in the bottom left.
2. Choose "Report a Bug" in the menu that appears
3. Choose the category that best suits your report (Likely to be "Graphical" in this instance)
4. Write up your issue!
Done and dusted, this will send your report and associated information to our triaging team, which will massively assist them with zeroing in on your issue and getting it resolved sooner!
Should you not wish to use the in game functionality, you can also use the bug report form on the official RuneScape Discord #bug-report-form. This won't be as in depth as the in game version but will still be of assistance to us. Alternatively, you can also use this form to report Avatar related bugs.
What's next?
This year is flying in, we are already into June and making great progress on the Road to Restoration with even more great updates to come. The Player Avatar Refresh has been a long-running project and today it delivers a bright new face as we look forward to seeing all of your in game in your brand new look!