Livestream Roundup II

04/26/2020

Did you miss the livestream on April 14th? You can catch up on everything you missed right here, or alternatively head to the bottom of the post to watch the entire thing!

In this week’s livestream, the elusive Ninja Team stepped out of the shadows to tell us all about how they’ve shaken up the Shattered Worlds minigame, while the developers behind Archaeology dug into the changes they are making to this brand new skill.

Shattered Worlds

The latest Ninja Team Strike sees a number of changes made to the Shattered Worlds minigame. Originally launched in May 2017, the content proved popular, though players have been asking for a greater variety of objectives, as well as more rewards for taking part.

Objectives

When Shattered Worlds launched, there was only one objective to this minigame: to kill 75% of enemies in a world. Not only has that original goal been changed – now varying between 65% and 80% – but there are new objectives, too.

Players will sometimes be asked to do a certain amount of damage on a single world, while another asks that they to repair the portal by finding three Portal Repair Kits. The final objective is to summon and kill a boss.

  • There are still three challenge levels; gold, silver and bronze. Players reached higher worlds than we were expecting, so these have been rebalanced. Gold challenges were originally set around worlds 40-to-50, but now appear in worlds 80-to-100 and up. Silver challenges are now between worlds 40 and 50, rather than around world 20 as before. Bronze is still worlds 1-to-10.
  • Challenges can’t be re-done after they have been completed except if players use a Reset Token.
  • Bosses appear every five worlds. These are encounters from God Wars Dungeon 1, minus Nex, the Barrows Brothers (with the exception of Akrisae) the Dagannoth Kings and Chaos Elemental. These bosses scale in difficulty to the world you are on.
  • The minimised HUD has been overhauled. Where before there were drop-downs for positive and negative mutators, as well as the time and what the player’s most recently-used mutator was, now the UI simply shows five mutator slots.

    • "The minimap now has icons for the start and end portals. It's a bit easier to know where your objective is. You can plan a little bit in advance and head towards the end portal and kill those last enemies on the way. You'll also be able to see side objectives on the minimap."

    ~ Mod Erator

    Rewards

    As well as adding in new objectives to Shattered Worlds, the Ninja Team has introduced more rewards. There were already a number of goodies that could be obtained for playing Shattered Worlds, such as cosmetics, pets and abilities like the Bladed Dive, but there are now several new additions:

  • For the first time, players can buy the Spirit of Battle in-game. This allows you to reset kill counts on Slayer Masks so that you can still receive buffs after the kill count hits the maximum number.
  • There are three new titles can be bought from the Shattered Worlds Reward store, each costing 150m anima: Abyssal Knight, Animaniac and Abyss Diver.
  • Players can now also buy Teleport Scrolls. These cost 250,000 anima and transport you directly to the Shattered Worlds.
  • Anima is now automatically picked up on the Chest World.

    • “Shattered Worlds had a lot of potential when it first went live, but it just didn't hit the mark in a couple of different areas. We wanted to take a look at that and address bits and pieces in there. Players wanted more variation in objectives and more rewards. There was only one objective when we launched, which was to kill 75 per cent of the enemies on the world. With rewards, we wanted to give players more reason to go there in the first place, beyond combat XP."

    ~ Mod Erator

    Archaeology

    Changes

    The Archaeology skill is a recent addition to RuneScape and work has continued on it since its launch on March 30th:

  • The team has made a number of quality of life updates, such as adding keyboard shortcuts to the site map at the Archaeology Guild. You now can find these by clicking on the site you want to teleport to.
  • The developers have changed the name of the Restoration Station inside the Make-X interface to Archaeologist’s Workbench.
  • The Inquisitor’s Staff has been fixed as damage boost wasn’t being applied to some attacks.

    • "We also changed some of the things we mentioned on the last live stream. Relic powers are now the priority if the effect is the same as that of other items you have. We made the Dharox Armour prioritise its set effect over the Bezerker's Fury Relic Power as that armour's effect is slightly different."

    ~ Mod Ryan

    Upcoming Changes

    In addition to these released tweaks, the Archaeology team has a number of areas that it wants to look into and change in the future. These include alterations to some of the new skill’s mechanics, as well as items:

  • The team hopes to add activate and deactivate options on the Autoscreener.
  • There are also plans to make material storage viewable from journal, so you’ll be able to open up the interface at a dig site and see what materials you need.
  • An upcoming change will allow you to inspect Tetracompass pieces so that you can see what is needed to restore it.
  • The team wants to make some tweaks to the Ripper Demon, which is one of the ancient familiars that can be called via Ancient Summoning.

    • "We’ll ensure that the changes we make are the right changes. We're looking at the various abilities the Ripper Demon has, like auto and special attack and passive abilities, and figuring out where we want it to sit."

    ~ Mod Ryan

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