Over Desert Treasure

[Ex-gebruiker 1440]

Een ex-RS dev deed een interessant verhaal uit de doeken over enkele RS quests:

It's old enough and trivial enough that I can probably skirt NDAs as an anecdote.

The company had an internship-style placement scheme with various universisties it had used to some success in customer support, so someone high up decided they could do the same for content developers too.

We got three placements in for a summer position, and they basically had free choice on what they wanted to work on (within certain degrees of scope agreed on before they started work) and had basically the whole art department backing them so as to provide a good impression.
One of those placement projects was Monkey Madness, which players love (see this thread) and internally the content devs absolutely hated, because it was a huge mess of spaghetti code that linked into multiple systems, and over the years has thrown up so many bugs as a result its not even funny.
One of those placements did Throne of Miscellania, which I don't think was ever that popular externally, but internally we all absolutely loved the concept of (running your own kingdom and getting resources from your subjects). I think it was over-balanced to the point of being useless in the end. Dude who made thats at Frontier now I think.

The final placement wanted to do a multi-part quest, and was pretty much left to it.
When QA came to look at it, and realised he had done things like:
- make the quest giver the boss NPC you had to kill at the end of one part of the quest (so good luck starting that quest if anyone was at the end)
- do a login check so that anyone who hadn't started the quest was immediately teleported next to the quest giver (anyone being the entire playerbase, not just members, not just people who had the requisite skill levels. Anyone)
- questionable dialogue choices (like Monks of Zamorak shouting "allah allah akbar zamorak" when they attacked) and generally poor quality written english they went to senior management and raised their concerns.
His placement was abruptly terminated, but they had basically got a huge stack of unused art assets that nobody was going to be particularly happy with throwing away, so I was basically asked to cook something up from existing ingredients.

I'd just finished Horror From The Deep and was in planning stages for "A Viking quest" (which became Fremnnik Trials), and at the time Mages were in a pretty bad spot in the combat triangle, so I merged an in-between combat project I wanted to do (multi-target spells and spells with on hit effects) as the quest reward for Desert Treasure.

So because this was a hodge-podge of recycling premade mapsquares and assets explains all sorts of weirdness about it;
- the fact that a quest called Desert Treasure pretty much happens everywhere in the world except the desert
- the fact there are loads of "one and done" NPC appearances (like some dude living in a sewer under draynor, or a ghost near the waterfall)
- the fact a mahjarrat suddenly looks like anubis (when the previously existing ones in game clearly aren't)
- the whole "collect 4 diamonds each with their own boss" thing as a non-linear get them in any order aspect.

I also took the time to do a little lore tidying up about zaros, but a bulk of that wasn't ready in time so we snuck it in as a secret patch update with invisible ghosts later on.

source: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... =runescape

[Joa]

allah allah akbar zamorak

Een student die probeert om zijn diploma te halen gaat zoiets toch nooit doen? Lijkt me een grote kans dat dit bs is.

- the whole "collect 4 diamonds each with their own boss" thing as a non-linear get them in any order aspect.

Leukere quest dan sommige brol die we nu krijgen.

[Dexter]

Die persoon heeft in de thread nog meer zaken gepost over andere quests en dergelijke, echt interessante zaken. ^^

[Roy Boy106]

the fact that a quest called Desert Treasure pretty much happens everywhere in the world except the desert

[Bearserk]

Damn waren er nu nog maar meer van dat soort jmods, hij klinkt echt geweldig

[Ru ben ik]

the fact that a quest called Desert Treasure pretty much happens everywhere in the world except the desert

Het lijkt me dat de quest zo heet omdat de 'schat' (Ancient magicks?) nu eenmaal in de desert ligt..
Naar mijn mening maakt het daarbij niks uit dat de rest van de quest zich niet in de desert afspeelt

[Superheat]

Thx for sharing, interessant inderdaad!

[Joost]

- questionable dialogue choices (like Monks of Zamorak shouting "allah allah akbar zamorak" when they attacked)

Maarja, inderdaad wel interessant.

[Kev]

- questionable dialogue choices (like Monks of Zamorak shouting "allah allah akbar zamorak" when they attacked)

[Rasmus]

Gelukkig betekent Allah Allah akbar Zamorack niets anders dan; god god is groot Zammy.

[Joa]

En toen boem Saradomin dood door een bom spell

[Panzkajr]

En toen boem Saradomin dood door een bom spell

Heel heftig