On Monday 25th July 2016, Jagex released the Arc.

The Arc is collection of islands located somewhere in the Far East. Players had already loosely encountered the region and some of its lore in the Player-owned Ports (PoP) minigame. This update introduced the three westernmost islands of the Arc. After completing a short miniquest, players can charter a boat from Port Sarim to Waiko, the central island, which has a village and a large marketplace.

The Arc represents the promise of a potentially massive amount of new content.

One of the first things that surprised me about this update is how generous it feels in size. Each of the three islands is moderately large. The amount of interactive content is minimal on Whale’s Maw and Aminishi, but there is a large amount of detail on all three islands.

Now, the Arc is bigger than just these three islands. And the Arc is just one region out of the eight regions encountered in PoP.

The sheer extent of all of the potential content that could be added is staggering. While there is still plenty of space for new additions on the current RuneScape continent, the prospect of a new, radically different continent has been tickling players’ fancy for a while now, and the Wushanko islands give one idea of how that might look.

Obviously, Jagex will only decide to pursue this if players are on board. There was an immediate and considerable backlash to some aspects of the Arc, which we shall discuss at a later point. But many of the questionable design choices so far seem more exciting and inspiring if viewed as the first simple building block of a potentially much larger economy and system. With the right prompting, Jagex may well be able to expand this into a gamechanging new chapter of engaging RuneScape gameplay.

On the flip side, the practice of releasing content in a minimally playable state with the promise that it will mature with future updates is becoming disturbingly familiar (invention), and we must be careful to hold Jagex to their promises.

The Arc is artistically well-executed.

While MTX cosmetics and Treasure Hunter specials have ultimately undermined any consistency in the presentation of player characters, the scenery and environments around RuneScape have largely upheld a certain number of consistent themes. The desert is sandy, Morytania is murky, and the elven regions and Priffdinas are sparkly and crystally. The Arc strikes a fairly radical departure from all other familiar themes, shooting for a bright and breezy tropical feel with an intriguing oriental twist, and absolutely pulling it off. I’m sure that most people don’t play with the sound on, but with the ambient rolling waves, chirping insects and birds, and the voice-acted music the Arc manages to build a legitimately relaxing atmosphere.

One recurring comment in the more recent graphical overhauls is that players find a lack of examinable objects disturbing. Jagex has meekly protested that examines are costly due to localisation, but nonetheless seems to have taken this feedback on board – the Arc features a reasonable level of examines. This really does help. It’s hard to explain why, but anything without an examine feels insubstantial, as if it’s not really there.

The Arc introduces some new lore, with a couple of interesting characters and backstory. I’m not much of a lorehound personally, so I won’t bore you with a superficial analysis, but it’s definitely refreshingly different from anything else currently in the game.

On each of these points – visuals, audio, detail, thematic consistency, lore – it’s hard to see the Arc as anything but a success. But…

The innovative gameplay of the Arc was criminally undermined by its balancing on release.

The decision was made for the Arc that the economy should be separate and independent from the main RuneScape economy. This means that the developers had the occasion to redesign and rebalance economically productive activities completely from scratch.

Extremely briefly, the economy of the Arc consists of a few different skilling activities (woodcutting, fishing, hunter) to gather raw resources, which can then be processed and sold to merchants.

The Arc also introduced a new type of innovative gameplay – randomly generated islands. For the price of a certain amount of chimes (the Arc currency), you can explore islands of various sizes and gather the resources present on these islands.

Exploring islands is designed to be engaging and fun.The randomness makes it exciting, and it encourages you to vary your skilling activities instead of grinding out one single skill.

But on release, the cost/reward of islanding was such that exploring islands was a net loss per hour, before even considering the opportunity cost against the baseline of afk resource gathering on one of the main islands, which players can do for free. Players wishing to progress in the Arc are therefore actively discouraged from engaging in its signature activity. This makes no sense.

Note that there appears to have been technical issues with random resource generation on islands. Valuable resources were not spawning as often as they should. But this does not fully explain and certainly does not excuse the extent of the imbalance.

Design Principle: Interesting and complex content should be more rewarding than boring and simple content.

I fully and wholeheartedly believe that adhering to this design principle would greatly, greatly improve much RuneScape content. Allow me to justify this position.

There is a slightly perplexing attitude that has been going around for a while which can be summarised in the statement: Players shouldn’t need incentive to play content, they should just play it for fun. This absolutely makes sense at first glance. RuneScape is a game, and we all play for fun. Right?

Human psychology is complex, and so is the spectrum of player motivations. RuneScape is an MMORPG, and I believe that the concept of progression is far closer to the source of why players play, rather than fun in the sense of immediate joy. We play RuneScape to progress. Perhaps you could reformulate this to state that it is planning and progression that players find fun, but carefully note that this remains in contradiction with the italicised opinion above. Without incentive, there is no progression, so there can be no fun for players motivated by the accumulation of progress.

It is most certainly true that different people enjoy different things, so different people will find different activities fun. This complicates but does not contradict the above principles. It’s where the artistry of game design comes into the equation. By making different activities rewarding in different ways, you can incentivise a broad spectrum of content for different players.

This does not preclude playing content for fun occasionally or intermittently. But it strongly demonstrates that, from the perspective of balancing and game design, if you wish players to play content, you cannot rely on them being willing to do it just for the sake of it. And that’s OK. There’s no point moralising about whether this is good or bad – it’s just how it is, an objective aspect of the RuneScape demographic.

Therefore, it is extremely counterproductive to make boring content more rewarding than exciting content. Progress comes first, and this will cause players to neglect the fun content. Instead, rewards should be aligned with content quality, so that players are actively encouraged to engage in more exciting activities.

And this is the fundamental problem with the Arc in its current state. Islanding is exciting and innovative, but is currently a casualty of tragic balancing. There will be various buffs tomorrow (Monday), but it is not currently clear they will suffice to make islanding the most rewarding activity on the Arc.

It categorically needs to be if the Arc is ever to be seen as more than a grind.

Premature and arbitrary completionist requirements force players to complete content in an unfinished state.

In a similar spirit to the above argument about the rewardingness of content, completionist requirements should not exist just for the sake of it. Completionist requirements should provide an additional incentive to complete content that is already interesting and engaging in its own right, or attain milestones that have some other prior significance.

If the chimes economy on the Arc is expanded to include a much wider breath of activities, spending large amounts of time participating in this economy is meaningful. Currently, the reward unlocks exist in a completionist vacuum, and are not meaningfully balanced.

There’s really not much more to say. The completionist requirements are a massive failure of judgement. At best, they should be postponed until a later point when players have more options to complete them.

In summary.

Artistically? Great.

Game design? The bare bones of great potential, ruined by astonishingly poor balance.

Completionist requirements? A travesty of awful judgement.

Looking to the future.

Tomorrow, Jagex is planning to “fix” the Arc. The importance of getting this fix right cannot be overstated. The Arc is a major new axis of content, and it might never get further than its current state if its major faults are not corrected before player bitterness festers too deeply. It would be a massive shame, because the Arc has an enormous amount of potential. We will see.