New Dwarf Quest: Implementation Begins

Good news, everyone! The design brief for the new dwarf quest is complete. This is the core design document of the project that defines all the important details of the new quest. The initial concept document said things like "there's a puzzle here involving such-and-such a thing"; the design brief defines exactly how the puzzles will work.

Creating the design brief involved a lot of back and forth between me, Mod Mark (RuneScape's lead designer) and our balancing expert. We agreed on the bulk of the document pretty quickly, but a few of the details took a bit of haggling to get worked out. This took a while, but it's important to get things right at the design brief stage, rather than trying to balance the project at the last minute.

With the design done, the project now moves into the implementation phase. This means I'll be writing the actual dialogue and code that'll make up the final quest. I'll also be working with the Graphics and Audio teams to begin work on the look and sound of the new quest.

The only major thing to still be decided is the quest's title, because I'm terrible at coming up with titles for things. Hopefully, something will come to me while I'm writing the quest dialogue. I'll keep on calling it 'new dwarf quest' for now.

Among the things decided at this stage of the project are the exact level requirements of the quest. In the last diary I said that they would probably be in the same range as those of Forgettable Tale..., but Mod Mark has decided that they should be higher than that. I can now exclusively reveal the new quest's level requirements:

• Level 41 Hunter.
• Level 54 Firemaking.
• Level 54 Strength.
• Ability to defeat a level 100 enemy.

What could you have to do in a dwarf quest that involves Hunter, Firemaking and Strength? You may begin your wild speculations now.

We're planning three new dwarf quests in total (this one plus two more), and their level requirements will get progressively harder so that the last one will be Grandmaster level, with requirements of around 70-75. I can't say anything specific about when we will release any of the quests, but we're not planning to leave as long a gap between installments as there was before this one.

Please note that these level requirements are the ones we're planning now, but it's just possible that we'll need to change them for some reason while the quest is being developed. If we do change them, I'll let you know. Basically, everything I write here should be taken as a prediction rather than a promise.

Some people on the forums have asked whether dwarves are going to get a graphical rework. We've discussed this and decided that we will be updating the dwarf NPCs with new graphics. However, this graphical update will be a separate project from the quest; I don't yet know whether it will be released along with the quest or at another time.

To the right is our first piece of concept art - a new look for Commander Veldaban - by Mod GG. Please bear in mind that this is only the initial concept and might change as we all discuss exactly how we want the dwarves to look.