Feb 2, 2022

Revenant Maledictus & Wilderness Changes | Weekly Game Update (February 2nd)

Old School RuneScape - Jagex Sarnie

This week, something new has risen from the depths of the Wilderness… meet the Revenant Maledictus!

Revenant Maledictus and Wilderness Changes

Revenant Maledictus

Something is lurking in the dark corners of the Revenant Caves – a new demi-boss known as the Revenant Maledictus!

Every Revenant you kill now has the cumulative chance, based on its Combat Level, to spawn the Revenant Maledictus. Here’s how that works:

If a player kills a Revenant Demon, the chance to spawn the Maledictus is 98/X
If another player then kills a Revenant Cyclops, the chance to spawn the Maledictus is (98+82)/X
If a third player then kills a Revenant Dragon, the chance of spawning the Maledictus is (98+82+135)/X

‘X’ will remain the same. The more Revenants killed in the caves, the greater the chance of the Maledictus spawning – but when it does spawn, the chance is reset.

There’s also a failsafe which guarantees Maledictus will spawn if it has not appeared for a decent length of time. Another system prevents a Maledictus from spawning if another recently appeared.

To avoid long waits for the Maledictus when servers update, the cumulative chance will be set to a random number – so it could appear at any time! After the first kill per world, the chance will reset to 0 and increase as Revenants are killed, as normal.

Now, let’s hear about the loot! Maledictus’ drops work just like those of Superior Slayer creatures, with a slight modification; Maledictus will run the Revenant Dragon’s loot table three times. One of these rolls is reserved for dropping a guaranteed lower-tier Ancient Artefact (the Ancient Emblem or Ancient Totem). The other two will roll the loot table as standard.

On top of these loot rolls, and dependent on how many players were attacking the Maledictus, a certain number of players who dealt the most damage will be granted a buff we’re calling 'Forinthry Surge.

For Iron players, the normal applications for loot apply however, Iron players can still receive the buff regardless.

Fortinthry Surge

To acquire this buff, you’ll need to be wearing the Amulet of Avarice.

Players with the buff are marked with a unique skull above their heads and will receive a 15% Damage and Accuracy boost for all combat styles while fighting Revenants – including the Revenant Maledictus itself. The buff lasts for 30 minutes.

Removing the Amulet of Avarice during this time will also remove the buff. World-hopping will reduce the duration of the buff by one minute per hop.

If you don’t manage to grab the buff from the Revenant Maledictus, you can always snipe it from another player by killing them in PvP. For example:

Player A acquires Forinthry Surge from fighting Maledictus.
The same player then continues killing Revenants in the same world for five minutes.
Player B, with an Amulet of Avarice equipped, kills Player A.
Player B acquires Forinthry Surge with a 25 minute timer.

Wilderness Slayer

Some new task-only creatures have been added to the Wilderness Slayer Cave:

Abyssal Demons (task amount = 75-125)
Dust Devils (task amount = 75-125)
Jellies (task amount = 100-150)
Nechryaels (task amount = 75-125)

Enemies in the Wilderness Slayer Cave now also have a chance to drop items from a new loot table containing consumable blighted items and items from Justine's LMS Rewards Shop.

We've also made some changes to Wilderness Slayer:

The number of Fire Giant kills required per task has been reduced from 100-150 to 75-125.
The number of Hill Giant kills required per task has been reduced from 100-150 to 75-125.
The number of Bloodveld kills required per task has been reduced from 90-140 to 70-110.
Additional Bloodveld spawns have been added to the Wilderness God Wars Dungeon. These additional spawns will replace some of the werewolves that roam the area.
Additional Bear spawns will be added north of the Ferox Enclave. Watch out, Derse Venator!

Leagues III: Shattered Relics Changes & Fixes

Here's some of the following small changes and fixes made over the last week:

The Myths’ Guild Bank will now allow you to swap your Fragments.
Extra items gained from Smithing Double now correctly count towards 'Smith X item/s' tasks.
The Barbarian Assault tasks ‘Read Level 5 in any Role' and ‘Reach Level 5 in All Roles' now correctly complete when the Level Up interface appears at the end of the wave.
Auto-completing the Troll III quest bundle now correctly sets up the fire pit at Weiss.
Message in a Bottle is now more balanced and shouldn't give as many Beginner Clues.
Players now correctly unlock the Ardougne Teleport when purchasing any of the Elf quest bundles.
Green Dragons in the Wilderness Slayer Dungeon will now count towards League Tasks.
Arclight now works correctly with Twin Strikes.
Certified Farmer now works correctly in the Vinery at Hosidius.
Catch of the Day now works correctly with Personal Banker.
Dying from Poison after exiting the Wilderness will no longer result in a PvP death.
You can now teleport to My Arm's boat with Last Recall.
Auto-completing Sir Amik's section of Recipe For Disaster now correctly unlocks the Evil Chicken’s Lair.
Thorgel now appears when auto-completing the Elf III quest bundle.

Other Changes

Fixed an issue where Galvek’s waves were killing safe players as he changed phases.
To remedy an issue where Group Ironman leaders could not leave their group if their teammates were inactive, leaders no longer need to wait until they have abdicated to leave the group. They will, however, have to wait the usual seven days for their leave request to be processed.
Additionally, players can no longer be made the leader of a group if they have a leave request pending.
Dagon’hai garments are now recognised as Zamorakian items. This affects monster aggression in the God Wars Dungeon, the Zamorakian Sight Fragment in League III: Shattered Relics, and various other things in the game.
Implemented more rigorous tracking to detect alternate accounts aiding Iron players by luring the Kalphite Queen. Additionally, if combat against her halts for more than five minutes, she’ll reset her health completely so that her next opponent has a fresh boss to fight.

PvP World Rota

The PvP rota has moved to Period A:

539 - (US) - PvP World
548 - (Germany) - High-Risk PvP World
577 - (US) - Free-to-Play PvP World
559 - (UK) - LMS Competitive

World 390 (AUS) for LMS Competitive has been activated with this rota.

Discuss this update on our official forums, on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the#gameupdatechannel. For reference on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.

Mods Arcane, Archie, Argo, Ash, Ayiza, Banjo, Boko, Brow, Bruno, Con, Curse, Daizong, Deagle, Dibber, Ditto, Dylan, Ed, Elena, Errol, Fed, Gecko, Grub, Halo, Havik, Hornet, Husky, Jalo, John C, Kandosii, Katies, Kamon, Kieren, Kirby, KT, Kurotou, Lenny, Light, Lottie, Mack, Matheus, Maylea, Markos, Meat, Morty, Nasty, Nin, Nylu, Oasis, Peppers, Regent, Redfield, Roq, Ry, Sarnie, Sigma, Skylark, Sova, Squid, Steve W, Tide, Torrance, Veda, Vegard, West, Wolfy & Zuko

The Old School Team.

Feb 2, 2022

Developer Briefing #163 - Patch 17 PTE This Week

Hell Let Loose - -Gothic-

Hey Everyone!

PTE For Patch 17 This Thursday!

With progress coming along nicely we’re excited to announce the beginning of PTE testing for Patch 17, with the first session kicking off on Thursday the 3rd of February 11am GMT.

As always we greatly appreciate all who participate, whether it’s to provide valuable feedback and bug reports, or simply help out with the numbers to test server loads and other items. We’ll also be jumping into battle amongst the ranks on the day so if you have the time or are just curious, we would love to hear from you!

If this is your first time wanting to participate in a PTE you’ll need to head over to the Discord where you can find information on how to join and get notifications on when a testing period is live. A full changelog can be viewed in the HLL official discord in the #pte-Info channel on the day.

Maps for this PTE testing environment include FOY (offensive GER), SMDM (warfare) and Carentan (warfare).

A quick reminder of what’s included:
Adjusted US M4A1 Sherman Tank handling
Speculative fix for MDC (mass player disconnect bug)
Speculative fix for players sometimes spawning in with the level 1 loadout of the role regardless of their selected loadout
Various QOL items
Removed weapon sway when using binoculars
Smoother Tactical Map zooming
And a host of other gameplay improvements and fixes

Because this Patch contains a number of speculative fixes for a few long-standing bugs we would love to see as many of you as possible jumping in and helping us test these fixes in a high-capacity environment. The greater the numbers we have the better the data we can gather on some of the improvements we are aiming to implement.

Community Content

We continue to see some great content from the Hell Let Loose community members showcased in the official HLL discord. Separate from the dedicated team of ‘War Correspondents’ the HLL general community comprises every person who is involved with HLL. (That means you also!)

This week we have a few nice ‘period looking’ black and white action shots depicting some tense ingame moments for players.

Fritz - Dashing through an Alley

Fritz - Running from the Fields

EduNotFound - Artillery Barrage

War Correspondent, Content Creator and Community HLL Videos
Time for some more community highlights from the below creators.We highly recommend giving them a watch.
If you see a Video you like make sure to post in the Discord #hll-videos channel.

Best of Hell Let Loose [January 2022] - The Fresh Baked Goods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXvvg3gQhFg

Letting Hell Loose - Spawning In - Terrydactyl Gaming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKxPinnfMoI

WHY YOU!, SHOULD PLAY: Hell Let Loose On PC or Console - No BS - BRUTAL and GRUESOME GamePlay-Movie - Burningwiki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnwSaYdmN3E

Don’t forget that if you haven’t checked out the other Hell Let Loose socials you should do so. Like our discord you will find them great places for information and community interaction.

Join the Discord here https://discord.gg/hellletloose

Our other social platforms can be found here:

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HellLetLoose/
Twitter https://twitter.com/hell_let_loose
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/HellLetLoose
Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/HellLetLoose/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hellletlooseofficial/
Steam http://steamcommunity.com/groups/HellLetLoose

Well, it's time to wrap up today's Dev Brief. See you all on the PTE frontline!

Feb 2, 2022

Legendary Deck Design Deep-Dive

Talisman: Digital Classic Edition - Tom Young

Howdy Talisman fans!

Soon we’ll be launching some exciting new Legendary Decks for Talisman: Digital Edition, but before we do we wanted to sit down and talk through the process of creating both the four original Legendary Decks, and the four new ones we’ll be launching soon. You can find out more about these new ones in our original announcement post!

If you’ve never encountered any of our Talisman: Digital Edition Legendary Decks, they’re rebalanced and remixed versions of the adventure decks that come with each Talisman expansion - especially designed to offer more challenge for the seasoned player.

We had a lot to consider when making these new decks, such as:

How can we improve the Talisman: Digital Edition experience for more hardcore players?
How can we best accomplish that by rebalancing each expansion?
What would players expect to see in a Legendary Deck?
And how do we do all of this in a way that keeps the core Talisman experience intact?

We’re going to go through each of these to explain how we crafted these Legendary Decks that you’ll soon be able to play with! We’ll also use some specific examples from cards to show how we changed the way they function, and better demonstrate our design choices.

Improving the game for hardcore players

Back before we made the Legendary Decks, we were brainstorming the different kinds of content we could possibly make for Talisman: Digital Edition. In order to narrow down what we could create, we decided to look at the different kinds of players who enjoy Talisman and what they get out of the game as they play it. It’s much easier to design something once you know who you’re designing it for!

One of the demographics we encountered was a group of players who specifically enjoy the challenge that comes from playing Talisman - the more difficult their adventure, the more they felt they’d accomplished by overcoming those obstacles that appeared during the game. We wanted to offer something that would give that group of players more flexibility to customise the challenge they faced as they play. We already knew that more experienced players tend to find the later parts of a Talisman game can become tedious once you’ve outclasses all the enemies and nothing can pose a threat to you.

The most obvious way to increase the challenge was to up the strength and craft of a number of enemies, in order to keep that danger around for longer! This helps mitigate the issue of longer games becoming boring, and also makes the earlier rounds much more deadly - a thrill we knew hardcore players would appreciate. Below are two examples of how we did this:

As another example, for a number of cards we removed the fact that they were discarded at the end of turn. This might seem like a small change but it drastically changes how players make decisions as they play. For example, these three fine fellows no longer go off to the discard pile after you encounter them for the first time:

Having the threat of landing on these cards adds a different feel to the game, and generally makes surviving in Talisman a harder job than it already was!

Rebalancing each expansion

When we came to creating the Legendary Decks for each expansion, it wasn’t simply a case of ‘make the numbers bigger and then it’ll be harder’. We wanted to update each expansion while still maintaining some form of balance to the game.

On the surface, due to the random nature of Talisman, it can be argued that it’s already an unbalanced game to begin with. However, once you dig deeper into the way each deck is balanced and the different possibilities for cards you can draw, there is an underlying balance to how the game is built. Even if someone gets lucky, the other players also should have an equal chance of being just as lucky (if not luckier!)

Recognising this balance is something that more seasoned players would be able to notice - as that was our primary target audience for this content, we knew we needed to make sure we didn’t cause any balance issues. As they would most definitely get noticed!

So while we wanted to make each expansion more challenging and increase the risk each player would face when drawing a card, we didn’t want to remove that feeling of each player having equal chances to be as lucky (or unlucky) as each other. We also had a chance to make the game scale a bit better compared to the original expansions - with stronger creatures, you don’t have to hunt down multiple creatures to trade in for upgrading your abilities.

Another one of the ways we rebalanced cards for the Legendary Decks is by changing the way they work in the game. Making sure that everyone is on a level playing field is important to ensure that the enhanced challenge stays roughly the same for everyone. If we take the Arnkell card as an example:

Spot the difference? The original specifically says moving normally while the new Legendary version says rolling the die for movement. While on the surface this might not seem like a big change, it’s actually quite the nerf! ‘Moving normally’ covers standard movement and covers movement behaviour within the inner region (where you move 1 space at a time instead of rolling the dice to move). This adjustment makes it unusable in the inner region because you don't roll the die to move there - and stops players skipping to the crown!

So while it’s still very useful during the game, players can’t skip straight to the end of the game while avoiding any challenge.

Managing player expectations

When we say “We’re making Talisman harder for you”, what do you expect that to actually mean? This is something that we asked ourselves before, during and after the design process. Firstly, we looked at the different expansions that people already consider ‘challenging’ such as The Dragon or The Firelands to see what people actually enjoyed or found challenging about them.

After talking to players and researching feedback, our main takeaway was that certain expansions don’t necessarily increase the ‘challenge’ overall, but instead make different stages of the game more difficult. For example, players often find that The Dragon expansion makes surviving in the early game more of a challenge than normal. Expansions like The Fireland increase difficulty from start to finish, and The Cataclysm increases the challenge by forcing you to be more aware of where you’re planning on moving in the future.

We also found a common consensus with our own experience of playing lots of Talisman - that even if an expansion is difficult, the more expansions you add the less of an effect is has on the game. By adding more cards into the pool of possibilities, you reduce the chances that players will encounter them. (So playing with just the base game and The Firelands expansion will be much more challenging that playing with The Firelands and 8 other expansions, for example!)

So in order to make sure we matched player expectations, we made sure that each Legendary Deck features a range of difficult enemies at all stages of the game. If we’d simply loaded up each deck with super challenging monsters, it’d make the early game too difficult. We also put a unique ‘foil’ finish on each Legendary Deck card, to help better visualise to players when they were battling a tougher enemy. We found that a small visual que like this helps players feel more accomplished for surviving an encounter, and also know where to avoid on the map at a glace.

Keeping the core Talisman experience there

We’ve already touched on this a bit, but keeping the core Talisman experience intact was something that we didn’t want to lose sight of while creating these new decks. As seasoned board gamers ourselves, we’ve played enough games to know that each one has an ‘experience’ it’s trying to create. From something as simple as Snakes and Ladders giving you the experience of scrabbling to the top of the board to more complex experiences like Hostage Negotiator, which recreates the feeling of a very tense stand-off with a kidnapper, even though you're just rolling dice and playing cards.

In The City expansion, we know that a lot of players use the Assassin to kill other players, as they can pay up to 3 gold and take a life from someone. Being able to take 3 lives from someone is mighty strong, so you can quite often just straight up kill people with it.

In the Legendary version of The City, we adjusted it so that the ability was more expensive and reduced the maximum life you could take. Have a look!

We didn’t want to remove the Assassin entirely, as we know a lot of players do enjoy using them as a way to eliminate other players - we just wanted to adjust how players were able to use them. We also made it so that the card is no longer discarded, so players can plan their next moves with more knowledge of where the Assassin will be. As we knew these decks would be played by more experienced Talisman players, we didn’t have to worry as much about filling up the board with cards that need to be kept track of.

Final Thoughts

This is the first time we’ve done this kind of design dive into something we’ve made, so we’re keen to hear your thoughts on it! Would you like more of this kind of thing? We won’t know unless you tell us, so pester us on Twitter all you like.

We’re super excited to see what the Talisman community thinks of these new Legendary Decks when they launch - don’t forget to give us your feedback over on the Steam forums or our Discord!