It's not been long since we first shared with you our plans for Bounty Hunter's return in an absolute behemoth of a blog.
If you're not up to speed yet, make sure to check out the blog above before diving into this one, because this time around we're talking about rewards. We shared some of our suggestions for Bounty Hunter's rewards in the previous blog and included some questions about them in the attached survey.
Fortunately for us, it looks a lot like we're on the right path for many of you - so we'll use this blog to expand on some of the things we mentioned for some more focused feedback, before expanding our offerings and using a more detailed survey to give us the go-ahead to start preparing some fancy new items for an upcoming beta!
In an ideal scenario we'd use a greenlight poll for these. However, with the volume of projects we're juggling at the moment (Desert Treasure II - The Fallen Empire with its rewards and the Ruinous Powers, Forestry, and in the very near future some polls dedicated to a new skill) the polling system is in constant use and we don't have a good window to poll these and deliver Bounty Hunter with a full complement of rewards on-time.
That being said, the survey we included in our initial Bounty Hunter blog alongside the feedback we received gave us a very clear indication that we're heading in the right direction here, and we're confident that these rewards being tailored towards PvP, to be obtained from and used in a PvP minigame, with a handful of cosmetics for items heavily associated with PvP will resonate with many of you.
Of course, all of these rewards would be placed into a beta and locked in at a later date - so none of these rewards will be entering Old School before you've had a chance to vote on them and experiment with them.
With all that said, let's dust off a set of old favourites to figure out exactly how we should handle them.
Four Zarosian Warriors, whose names alone are enough to strike fear into anybody who's heard whispers of their deeds. They're long-gone, but their legacy lives on in the powerful gear they left behind.
From left-to-right: Morrigan, Zuriel, Vesta and Statius.
Those of you who've played since 2008's release of PvP worlds, or played during certain Deadman Mode seasons, or partake in Last Man Standing these days will likely have some kind of familiarity with these infamous offerings. For those out-of-the-loop, Ancient Warriors' equipment are tier-78 armours and weapons aiming to pack a mean punch in PvP. If you'd like to see the stats that these items currently possess, check out this OSRS Wiki page!
On their initial 2008 release, these armours and weapons were the absolute peak of PvP power, the uncontested best-in-slot (and it wasn't even close). While the weapons (Statius's warhammer, Vesta's longsword, Vesta's spear, Morrigan's javelins, Morrigan's thrownaxes and Zuriel's staff) are still able to absolutely decimate anybody on their receiving end, some of the armours look a little bit less exciting when stacked against some more recent Old School offerings. For example, Statius' set has a Crush bonus far below Inquisitor and only +1 Melee Strength, or Morrigan's set having less Ranged bonus than unfortified Masori alongside zero Ranged strength.
What we'd like to hear from you is whether we should spend some time looking over the stats and tweaking Ancient Warrior's equipment to be best-in-slot gear for use only in PvP, or whether their identity is better-suited to being almost best-in-slot but significantly cheaper to use than things like Torva, Masori (f), Inquisitor or Ancestral, making them a little more accessible and giving more of you the chance to experience the raw power of this ages-old armoury.
Throughout the years and across iterations, Ancient Warrior's equipment have seen a handful of approaches to things like tradeability, degradation, and death behaviour. On our survey, we asked you how you'd feel about charging these offerings with large quantities of GP, with the GP lost to whoever killed you - similar to how Vesta's blighted longsword works on Target Worlds.
You responded overwhelmingly positively to this suggestion, so we'd like to propose that these offerings would be untradeable, permanent unlocks that require a big chunk of coins to be useable in PvP combat. To get another temperature-check on how you feel about this approach, we've included a question on this in the survey.
Next up, let's talk about corruption. Each piece of the Ancient Warrior's equipment has a corrupt, tier-20 variant, packing a punch far beyond anything else at the same bracket. These corrupt alternatives also proved popular among our survey's respondents, many of whom were excited at the prospect of firing up purpose-built 20 Defence accounts to get stuck in to Bounty Hunter. We'd love to offer these up for all of you - variety is the spice of life after all, and we'd love to see some expanded build diversity within the Bounty Hunter crater.
We envision the tier-20 corrupt weapons hitting significantly harder than the mighty Mithril weaponry you might expect to see, but if given a 'GP to recharge' system would result in you risking much more of your wealth to capitalise on their power. For the tier-20 armours, we'd like to see them sit on-par defensively with more typical offerings at this level, but have additional offensive capabilities to lean in to some of the high-roller, glass cannon fantasy.
That's enough about these dusty, old antiques for now. Let's spend some time talking about the most popular of our previous suggestions...
Our initial pitch for these was simple enough: imbues for iconic weaponry, useable only within Bounty Hunter, to help them keep up with their modern counterparts, with the aim of seeing a wider spread of weaponry in-use so that on days where you just feel like using a Dragon Longsword - you can!
We likely wouldn't be looking to displace staples like the Dragon Dagger, but instead offer you a little more choice when gearing up and picking your weapon of choice down in the crater. This could be in the form of tweaking accuracy, strength bonuses, or even multipliers on Special attacks, on any number of weapons.
We'd absolutely love to explore these to throw some variety into the mix, and having some imbues exclusive to Bounty Hunter means we all get to have a whole lot of fun without worrying about adversely impacting the wider game. Perhaps if some of these imbues prove particularly popular then we'd be able to poll adding them to the wider game, but that would be a question for the future.
Here's a friendly-looking Lesser demon showing some of the weapons we're targeting for imbues at the moment, just in case you'd forgotten what they looks like!
Alongside some of the items we're already looking at, we'd love to hear from all of you about weapons you think would be perfect candidates for adjustments like this, as well as how you'd like to see them adjusted. Perhaps you'd like a more accurate Dragon Dagger special attack, a harder hitting Dragon Mace, a higher Dark Bow damage cap, a louder Armadyl crossbow Special attack - let us know, the sky's the limit!
While there's always room for more and we remain open to suggestions, we've got our sights on a few beta candidates at the moment: the Dark bow, the Dragon mace, the Dragon Longsword, the Heavy ballista and the mighty Barrelchest anchor. Adjustments we can make range from tweaks to accuracy to improve consistency, strength bonuses for some spicier KOs, Special attack costs for more combo variety or even Special attack mechanics like adjusting how damage is rolled or how quickly you could attack after using one.
If you'd like us to develop some of these for use in an upcoming beta, we'll be able to lock in specific weapons in a future poll before they make their way to Bounty Hunter proper.
There's not really much more to say on these, get in touch with your suggestions and hopefully we'll have the chance to work on some of them and relive the nostalgia of whacking our opponent with a huge Dragon Longsword Special attack (or maybe an even louder Armadyl Crossbow...)
Similar to the above, this one's a pretty easy one to wrap our heads around. Get assigned a target, hunt your bounty, get points, spend them on Combat XP.
Something we forgot to mention in the last blog but spoke about during the Winter Summit was that we'd like to block Combat XP within the crater so that you don't risk instantly ruining or slowly invalidating your chosen build. To compensate, we'd like for you to be able to stock up points to spend on levelling up, similar to Soul Wars or Pest Control.
For those looking to get started in Bounty Hunter, it's possible to spin up a basic build pretty quickly (check out this video from Pip to watch him speedrun a BH-ready account). What this would allow you to do is get started with a basic build and stock up XP so that whenever you feel like taking the next step (for example, jumping from 50 to 75 Attack) you'd be able to do so at the click of a button, assuming you'd been diligent in your Bounty Hunting.
Ultimately this would mean that getting stuck in to some PvP action would still allow you to progress to some future goals, rather than feeling like you're putting your account on hold while fighting it out in the crater.
Minus XP lamps
In the previous blog, we wrote:
'We're pushing to try and make the necessary changes where we could offer this kind of a reward feature, though we can't confirm yet that it would be possible. We also need to discuss with you how such a feature would work in-game, what kind of restrictions it should have, how much XP a Minus XP Lamp should remove, etc.'
At this stage, we're confident that it is possible for us to offer this as a reward, but need to kick off the conversation with all of you.
Something we'd like to clear up pretty immediately is that there would absolutely be some kind of limitation on the number of XP you could shave off using these. We saw some concerns about people progressing their accounts making use of high stats and then using Minus XP lamps to remove tens of thousands of experience. This absolutely wouldn't be the case. Most often when we see players asking about these, it's to revisit accounts they've abandoned following a costly misclick - these are exactly the players we'd love to be able to get excited about the game again, giving them the opportunity to wind back the clock by a small amount of XP and get stuck back in to PvP.
We've included a survey question to get a sense check on where you stand on this one, but we're mostly interested to hear some of your thoughts on the balancing/limitations of a Minus XP system like this - so make sure to get in touch!
Hunting your fellow players for rewards in a violent bloodsport is fun and all, but is it even worth doing if you're not doing it in style.
Last time around, we suggested 'bloody' kits to add a splash of colour to some PvP staples. Some players felt like it might be a little hard to distinguish these from their 'clean' counterparts, and there are potentially issues in some countries with displaying cosmetics like this.
Fortunately, we have something else in mind. We dug through some of our old art and found some old concepts and models for 'corrupt' Dragon cosmetics.
Some really early concept art we dug up for a corrupt Dragon aesthetic
Here's how those concepts turned out looking when modelled in-game!
Above are some old concepts and some in-game models to show off a slightly darker approach to Dragon armour and weaponry. While for many of you this will draw memories of the F2P Corrupt Dragon equipment from over a decade ago, that's not what we're planning to do with these.
Instead we'd like this colour scheme and concept to form the basis of a set of cosmetics you're able to earn yourself by participating in Bounty Hunter. Meaning this style of cosmetic wouldn't be limited to just Dragon equipment, and could be extended to other staples like the Fighter Torso, Berserker helmet, dragonhide chaps - the world (and dev time...) is our oyster!
On top of this more 'general' theme, we'd like to resurface some of the untradeable ornament kits we proposed as rewards from the Emir's Arena. Specifically focusing on the kits intended for items whose primary use is in PvP.
So we'd like to gauge your thoughts on us adding ornament kits for the following items:
- Dragon Claws
- Elder Chaos Robes
- Heavy Ballista
- Elder Maul
We've dug up the old kits for some pictures in case you need a refresher, take a look!
We'll ask about all of these individually in the survey while keeping an eye on your feedback, if it looks like there's particularly strong opposition then we're sure we can find something else to excite the fashionistas among you!
There's not exactly much new here since the last time, but we're hoping this kicks off discussions focused primarily on the rewards rather than Bounty Hunter's mechanics.
We'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to fill in the survey (linked on the big button below, you literally cannot miss it) and to get in touch with us on all the usual channels with feedback, suggestions for cosmetic offerings, and any thoughts, queries or concerns you might have about anything else mentioned in this blog!
Thanks as always for taking the time to read this far! We appreciate all of you looking to keep up-to-date and can't wait to share more with all of you about the return of Bounty Hunter!
You can also discuss this update on our official forums, on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.
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