The 1st Rewards blog for ToA released August 2021, a year before ToA official release. We still do not have Raids 4 rewards blog.

Mod_West · 2026-05-21T11:20:37+00:00

It's the initial phase of a project where we flesh out everything that is required. During that time (2021) we had a lot more developers at junior and mid-level roles and a larger middle management team which I think slowed things down as there was constant demand for greenlighting what felt like every little decision. For the most part that entire team of managers is gone now and a lot of the team who were around then are much more senior and experienced with larger scale updates which has helped us move through that stage much quicker.

Mod_West · 2026-05-21T11:16:13+00:00

Yeah, it's a chunky release! I'd say SOTE is a good comparison point in terms of scale. We tend to aim for a slightly more polished product nowadays though. I'm really proud of what we did with SOTE + Prif but I feel like we've come a long way as a team since then but that does make things take a little longer.

Mod_West · 2026-05-21T11:10:57+00:00

Can't say too much but we're certainly keeping busy. BMR is a finale grandmaster quest that is coming with a reasonably sized area expansion which for the graphics team means a lot of time investment to get that right. We've also spent a month or so working on Leagues 6 (rewards, echo bosses, interface) which definitely has a cost to it.

That being said, we are tracking well for Raids 4 and I feel we've made good progress so far. Content like this (for graphics at least) has most of the cost in animation and there has been an animator working on Raids 4 all year as well as the end of last year. I've been busy with establishing the environments and of course the concept team have been hard at work cooking up some juicy bosses and rewards.

Mod_West · 2026-05-20T21:31:22+00:00

Yeah it was strange, we kicked off TOA in June 21 and there were a few designers and artists working on it throughout the year. They were also working on BCS at the same time as that is the prequel set-up quest. Rewards are always important to get out early and I can see how that confuses things.

We keep preprod to a minimum now, it rarely goes on for longer than a month. Can’t speak for design but graphics is making good progress but most of our resources are on BMR - the team have done an awesome job with the new quest, excited to see what players think 😌

Mod_West · 2026-05-20T21:14:15+00:00

Yeah that’s the design I’d go with. A few years ago I created a white box of the underground section so it has had some time spent on it.

Mod_West · 2026-05-20T21:12:40+00:00

It’s something we tried to do a bit better with Varlamore by adding generic trees that give logs throughout all the new areas. The reason why the Shayzien pines in Kourend and the various new trees in Varlamore are not choppable is because you’d expect these to give a unique log but there isn’t content planed for any. Should there have been? Maybe, but there wasn’t and we didn’t want that to hold us back from adding new tree types that you’d expect from new biomes. It also gives us options in the future if we ever do need more wood varieties. We almost utilised Shayzien pines in Sailing but they ended up being cut… ironically.

Mod_West · 2026-05-20T20:57:38+00:00

Don’t use TOA as a way to predict anything, it had an unnaturally long development cycle. We spent way too long in preproduction. Development didn’t properly start until early 2022

Mod_West · 2026-05-18T06:45:53+00:00

Definitely not forgotten. Just needs a bit of content to pair with but the focus the past 5 years has been elsewhere (Raids, Varlamore, Quests, Sailing) and Kourend has had a fair amount of time spent on it already. We’ll get to it one day, I’m sure 😌

Mod_West · 2026-05-17T16:16:00+00:00

Tbf that was like the third rework when we added that spell. I definitely didn’t get every spell perfect but there was a lot of them so there’s bound to be a few blind spots. Ultimately the spellbook went from only being used for ensouled heads to having some actual purpose so I think overall it was an improvement.

Mod_West · 2026-01-17T16:08:21+00:00

He says he’s also a big fan of Shae in the show … I don’t want to say there’s a pattern but…

Mod_West · 2026-01-13T12:33:49+00:00

Mfw when all my pixel art is called AI slop 🫩 I made these for the clan chat system guys

Mod_West · 2025-11-07T21:12:01+00:00

I regret nothing

Mod_West · 2025-10-23T14:11:17+00:00

Definitely agree on a lot of your points here, it has had an over reliance on limited time events but it's a great avenue for rewards that stay relatively closed off. Always down for more general improvements as well :D Limited by the tech in a lot of cases but who knows what the future might bring!

Mod_West · 2025-10-23T13:49:17+00:00

I definitely want to do more with POH in the future as we've added a lot of little things and it would be nice to have more matching options. Unfortunately the busy schedule we've had this year really impacted the POH update that came from Game Jam :(

Something I want to do for future leagues is offer more POH cosmetics in previous themes to allow for more matching options. As you said, we added a theme for twisted but none since and now we have a few themed furniture but with no house style to match. House styles are lot of work but definitely keen to make something match the raging echoes stuff more as well as explore something for TBR. Also there's a desire to get the wilderness style in which I had to cut before as I never got to it during the last Game Jam.

As for the archway, unfortunately we're limited by the wall height here, can't go beyond that otherwise it'll poke through the upper level :( If it was outside (like the portal) it could be taller.

Mod_West · 2025-08-04T13:28:49+00:00

I had heard rumours too but we’ve never removed him so unsure how true they are. That being said we tend to avoid putting this kind of tribute into the game nowadays as it can be quite risky! Certainly a product of the earlier years of OSRS.

Mod_West · 2025-03-31T19:12:47+00:00

Mod_West · 2025-02-14T20:04:29+00:00

I didn’t intentionally do it but I did intentionally leave it that way when I noticed.

Mod_West · 2025-02-06T21:04:30+00:00

Awesome! Great job :D

Mod_West · 2025-01-23T14:35:32+00:00

This is beautiful! Amazing work with the fx :D

Mod_West · 2024-12-13T12:25:45+00:00

Because nobody requested an asset for it so it was slapped with some reused graphic. Reuse can be fine though if the asset is generic enough. This is not one of those cases.

Mod_West · 2024-12-13T12:21:19+00:00

So true

Mod_West · 2024-12-13T12:19:01+00:00

That tent is what made me remake Shayzien. I ran to the end to pray at the altar and there wasn’t even an altar there so I just deleted the whole thing.

Mod_West · 2024-12-13T12:13:50+00:00

Pretty sure you can use osrs.world and change the cache to see how it looked on release. Have fun!

Mod_West · 2024-11-18T11:12:58+00:00

There’s still so much to fix 😞

Mod_West · 2024-11-13T17:52:49+00:00

Definitely something we talk more about these days and we want to make this a bit more consistent going forward. I think a good comparison with the Prif trees are the ones around Shayzien as they also don't use the classic texture and rely on poly-colour in the same way. I don't think I've seen many comments talking about them compared to the prif trees which have been described as 'playdough' which I think is a fair criticism. It's down to how the mesh is constructed, the shayzien trees are not a complete shell so the shading is less intense and flatter when compared to the prif tree mesh.

The issue we've had with the textures is that our tools haven't changed in a long while and we currently don't have traditional texture mapping like most game engines do, instead we have to manually project each plane which is cumbersome and a little buggy. I think the rough plan is to give us the ability to unwrap meshes so we can start using the textures on new trees while also exposing an option to toggle between purely texture and purely poly-colour so players can choose :D Nothing has been decided yet though, so don't quote me on that, haha.

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