A new skill is a pretty big deal in RuneScape circles. For one thing, it opens up a whole new avenue of advancement to explore in a game where character classes do not exist, and for another, their addition is an increasingly rare occurrence. Through the first decade of RuneScape’s existence, new skills would often take a handful of month or half a year to develop, but as low hanging fruits like thieving and fishing were plucked, the wait between skills has grown longer and longer. Over four years since the last skill was added in January 2016, Jagex have finally unearthed another: Archaeology.

“You can’t get much bigger than a skill,” Dave Osbone, Lead Designer on RuneScape said. “Skills are so important because that’s how a player sees their progress in the game, and because we’re classless, this is effectively a new profession from players to work through, to become a master archaeologist.”

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Archaeology will see players literally digging into the history of RuneScape, uncovering secrets of the Elder Gods that created this world and the God Wars that wreaked havoc across the world. With a gradually building crisis threatening to consume the Runsecape world, it’s another example of how players will be looking at the game’s history to try and discover solutions for the present and upcoming calamities. It’s this drive that saw players travelling to Anachronia in last year’s Land Out of Time expansion, and it will now see players flocking to five dig sites across the world.

The core loop will be roughly what you might expect of an archaeological dig site. You spend time in the trenches, pulling anything and everything out of the ground that you can find and then try to figure out what on Gielinor it means.

Ryan Philpott, Senior Content Designer explained “You’re excavating, finding materials and artefacts, and as a player you can then restore these artefacts using the materials you’ve found. It’s up to you then what you want to do with them. Some of these artefacts can have uses at the dig site, so it may be a key to a door, or at the same time there are NPCs in the game who are really interested in them. A Bandos lover would be really interested in all the Bandosian artefacts and will reward you for giving them to him.

“As you progress through doing this, you’ll be uncovering more of the dig site and ultimately learning more of the story of that site and getting to the satisfactory bit right at the end of ‘Oh, that’s what all this is!'”

With mysteries and puzzles thrown into the mix, it’s much more involved than sitting down for a rerun of Time Team – “We knew that archaeology has a certain image” Dave said – and the team have worked to include the unexpected or offer fresh twists on how things are revealed.

The could just be from the location, where one dig site is up in a floating citadel, another in an area alive with demons. Tim Fletcher, Senior Game Designer told us, “A similar subversion would be our two sort of main gods, Saradomin, who’s sort of a good god, and Zamorak who’s sort of an evil god. They’ve had their dig sites swapped, so within the human occupied, Saradominist area in the present, you’ll find the Zamarakian area, which allows us to tell a story of how Zamorakianism could exist within the human areas. […] It allows us to tell stories of how those areas changed over time.”

That’s helping to peel back a fresh layer of the RuneScape lore, both in a grander sense, and in the way that each dig site’s story will focus on the tales of one character or a couple of characters, learning what it was like to live there. Who those characters are can provide another fresh twist on things.

“Because of what RuneScape is, there’s goblins and orcs,” Ryan said, “and some of these stories come from their perspective, so what is it like to be a goblin child praising Bandos, this great lord? You get to see the stories with this fantasy element of non-human characters, which is super interesting to see how that evolved over time.”

And again, there’s just those basic expectations of archaeology being about dusting off little fragments of pottery and shutting down building sites because they’ve found some Roman coins. It’s a little bit like more relaxed and careful mining in that regard, which brought a chuckle from the trio when I mentioned it.

“Archaeology really is embracing the Lara Croft end of archaeology,” Dave said. “You are adventurous within the skill, and I feel that’s probably where a lot of the differentiation [with mining] comes, is that there’s just as many puzzles and mysteries to be solves as there are things to be hit.

“There’s something in the game called Headbutt Mining, which is an override that you can get. I’m now just imagining archaeology and what potential that could bring!”

You shouldn’t expect to see Headbutt Archaeology any time soon, but Ryan added, “I’m now thinking of cool ideas for future archaeology updates that could tie the two skills together.”

One thing that is most definitely on the roadmap is a tie-in with the island of Anachronia from last year’s Land Out of Time update, with a dig site planned there for later this year.

“I’ve spent a lot of the last year explaining that palaeontology is not archaeology!” Tim joked before revealing that “Archaeology was already in development before Land Out of Time began development, and part of the reason for that was that, as the scope of Archaeology increased, we had to decide if we were going to cut it back – the plans that were being pitched were very ambitious.[…]

“This is absolutely the most feature-full skill we’ve ever made, plus it’s got all these dig sites and areas to explore, and so we really had to decide in early 2019 if we were going to cut back the scope of this. Land Out of Time was created as an update to allow Archaeology the time to reach the scope.”

There are those thematic, narrative parallels though. “There’s this overarching story where wanted to mine the past to resolve the present. Both Land Out of Time and Archaeology are doing that, and that problem is the upcoming problem of the Elder God Wars Dungeon. We very much had that kind of theme of these problems being cyclical, these problems have been solved in the past, so can we unearth them to solve our problems now?”

As RuneScape hurtles toward that Elder God Wars Dungeon and the resolution of the latest global crisis, I guess we won’t have long to find out.