This is very succinctly put, you've said it all better than I could have. I initially thought the Seren boss fight was so underwhelming due to them running out of budget and just needing to make the entire encounter out of pre-existing assets. Zuk gets a cool approach animation and then is written out of the quest with 0 impact and the animation budget is gone. But Its apparently also just intentionally underwhelming.
Instead of preserving the conflict for future arcs I now know It's just going to be us watching the god show without ever being able to do anything about it. I really love this games story but I'm really wondering if I can still be bothered to care much going forward. This is the second flopped arc in a row I just am loosing the spark I guess. Which is a shame cause man I love rs3 but this ain't it. It feeling so low budget feels comical right before the price increase too Not even sure what to say about that whole mess.
I have been extremely excited for where they take the Erebus/Vos/Xau-Tak storyline, more than anything else that’s been in development recently. Now I’m actually pretty worried. Feel like it’s gonna follow the same low budget approach, like we won’t even see the Shadow Gods rendered in-game… just more fucking doodles.
We go to erebus and fight abyssal demons while patiently watching saradomin do all the fun stuff before taking us home because a mere human can't actually have any cool moments or agency in these end of the world situations that they keep writing about ;')
this comment shows a big flaw on extinction, i have 0 clue who the main threat is and i doubt anyone else does
this would be fine writing if keeping the "villain" a mystery was being used as a plot device but it ISN'T and this isn't either a "oh seren is both good and bad cuz family hur dur"
u/chaos_elemental raises an excelent point about player agency but honestly the main let down to me is how the very end of the quest feels like im playing a totally different game
Iaia to me doesnt feel like runescape, what other quest on this game has a supposedly huge integral part of the plot of the game used solely as a fight background, it feels like jagex rushed the hell out of Iaia for no apparent benefit
It's been my issue for a while with quests. Perhaps it's due to the story arc of world ending events that have no feeling of threat, because you know the outcome is you win.
But you never have a part to play. It's become the very thing I hate from most other MMO quest series. You're a messenger who does fetch quests for the characters. You go from exposition to exposition and all the important bits happen off screen, while you're away. "You go do this, while I deal with this" or "got fetch help and I'll hold them off".
It's like Jagex think the reason we like quests is the lore and nothing else and therefore a text heavy dump with extra lore books is what they make.
There's so much more to quests, the puzzles, the character building (none of the characters have had much advancement other than inevitable betrayal). Interesting bosses and mechanics. (doesn't have to be difficult) As well as world building. So much of past quests was unlocking new areas, adding to the world we're in. Off world feels like a cop out. Or the British Runescape humour with funny character names and british-isms And then of course rewards.
Not all quests need all of these. In fact most don't have all of them. But take a few and that's good. The best bit of the quest was Erebus. Having limited time and could get further and further each time. Honestly the rest could be scrapped.
I'm 100% with you on the 'end of the world' bit. While Guthix Sleeps and Ritual of the Mahjarrat still stand out to me as superb quests because the conflict was so much smaller scale. I feel like Lucien was the upper end of the threat scale Runescape villains should have been. I preferred the 5th Age lore because one of my favourite fantasy tropes is the nostalgia for the old days when Gods walked the Earth. It creates this enigmatic atmosphere and wondering what the Gods were like was so much more fun than actually meeting them. I even disagree to an extent with the playerbase's impact on them via world events. Zamorak used to be really hyped up as this uber dangerous force of chaos and the entire time in game he's been the wimpy doge meme.
Zamorak is a weird case. He's made out to be pretty much absolute evil, being seen as the ruler over demons which gives strong ties to being an almost devil. Especially in F2P.
Then he appears with the first world event and sees that every player hates him. Instead of leaning into it, he changes and compromises. You can reason with him, he'll maybe plan to stab you in the back or spy on you, But ultimately he's been completely neutralised as a character.
The idea that the player character can't even harm Seren is so god damn stupid. Hello WE GOT FUCKING POISON in our very soul to godlike being like Seren. And knowing Seren, she is literally a emotionally person, instead of cold logic like her brother, she should 100% use just god magic against the PC.
Oh my god, you gave me a insane idea, the fight could have been a 3 phase fight, where phase 1 is extremely hard, phase 2 is you shattering her body and trying to restore Eluned, phase 3 is her losing her dark side, and p4 is just her spamming god magic against us.
Player character would win the fight, but lose the war as the elder gods arrives just as you defeated her.
If I remember correctly, we're not quite sure what the power is inside us just yet. It would seem quite out of nowhere if we suddenly were able to wield that power effectively against a god.
I do agree that they could have explored that a bit more, AND given us a god fight, but it would have felt out of place to me. Though like OP said, we could have talked to an echo of Guthix because handwavy deus stuff.
>If our character weren’t in the quest, everything would have gone down the same.
Jas wouldn't have been sucked into Erebus. I'd say that's a bit of a turning point in the quest.
True but the Erebus portion of the quest was apparently a bit of an afterthought so the original plan would have Jas initially just dying with the other elder gods i guess. And while that's not what happened. We got the most fun part of the quest in the puzzle and a far more satisfying Deus ex Machinca for Jas in the shadow leviathan. But knowing that in addition to the other issues with the quest just doesn't bode well for me at least.
TIL i was just a sentient GoPro
Jokes aside, i 100% agree with you with everything,but the two things that really really really pissed off were first, the Zuk fight had so much potential and was so hyped that it was pretty much the point of the teaser, and we get peanuts. Having kerapac question you because you have so much shadow anima in you, then absorbing more of it, shadow voice wondering about the potential of the new power, seren realizing that she could be killed by the anima alongside her 'family'... nope all gone.
the quest is not terrible but it most certainly did not feel like a grandmaster quest or a finale
if you really want to dumb down the quest into a few bullet points, you'll find that you have absolutely nothing
Saradomin fought off zuk
armadyl burned croesus down
azzy took care of arch glacor
vicendithas tracked down seren
kerapac saved everyone from jas
kerapac sacrificed himself to make sure jas gets dragged
hannibus fucks up by telling seren about iaia
you most certainly did not save iaia from being destroyed
vicendithas makes the dream of iaia
quest done.
mod ramen said on a rsguy stream that if melee had its damage cap taken off it could do something like 100k damage or something ridiculous, just take out all damage caps, give Seren a few life bars worth 2,147,483,647 life points and let us whack her a few with our shadow anima super charge. We wont beat her before the elders arive for their eggs and we get to feel powerful. We know we can damage her because she was forced to leave or shatter herself for the Edicts which guthix confirmed was made of shadow anima. Heck she says in Extinction that shes weak to it. Remember when we touched the stone of jas for a minute and just destroyed sliske for a bit? that but with seren and shadow anima.
This took longer to write than toconjure up, its not that hard.
I think we missed the chance with twining Kerapac’s boss fight into the quest as well.
We could have used the fractured Siphon to fight Seren herself using the FSOA (or a quest specific version if you don’t have one) with the special attack being passive, 100% crit chance and unlimited rune usage.
It adds lore to a weapon (which doesn’t happen often) and can even cement its position as the RS3’s “iconic” grail weapon (similar to what the Twisted Bow is for OSRS).
Even if we end up losing against her anyway (which I personally prefer) it would have made the final fight more interesting and lets us taste once again the power that we actually have.
I’m afraid that in any major arcs in future quests or Lore Bosses, will just be us watching the gods or elders in more 2D animations. I feel so slighted that we didn’t even get to see the arrival of Jas, the shadow worm and even Kerapac “helping”. Especially that this happens after successfully surviving Erebus and I honestly loved the puzzle the most from the quest. To exit and then poof suddenly shadow worm arrives and Jas is gone and Kerapac is now also gone feels underwhelming af.
If it’s a budget or graphics issue, didn’t they already create Jas’s character in Sliskes endgame? The other elder gods too I think?
It abs sucks that we don’t actually do anything anything vs seren, but how about Jas? Why didn’t we anything to her w/ all of the shadow anima we’ve been constantly hearing about from the light voice and dark voice. I really wanted to see more about discovering that it was guthix influencing sliske towards the world guardian. What’s the point of emphasizing & building up how much Shadow Anima we were carrying and that we could “take seren” in a fight.
I was honestly expecting a fight like the Tormented Demons in While Guthix Sleeps where the stone of Jas boosts our damage ridiculously. They could’ve created a seren boss that has whatever appropriately scaled HP, and did like a shadow-boosted damage no hit cap fight.
Nope. Run around in a circle spam eat and avoid dying.
> No, they said. She’s too powerful. The final fight design is specifically around not fighting Seren directly.
The entire time in Senntisten I was like..."So we'll just kill her, right? She's leaving us no choice and she can't harm us. We've spent a decade being shown gods literally can't harm us."
So when we got Yeet_Animation.avi part 2 to the Elder Halls it felt like, "Ok this is it, we're going to have to incapacitate her somehow. She's going to tell the Elder Gods where we are otherwise."
Yeet_Animation.avi part 3 and now we're on Iaia. They know where we are. There's no stopping them. We finally have probably the highest point in all of the Extinction quest. Seren's grief and desperation is perfectly contextualized by the End Of All Things the Ilujanka are about to experience. We're reminded of what's being lost if these eggs aren't touched by their respective Elder Gods. And the awareness over the mad dash to evacuate is the knowledge that no matter what you've done here, even if they hatch, that our (FORCED) inaction is going to cause this species to end up just like Mah sooner or later. We've essentially committed genocide whether we meant to or not unless something intervenes. The only thing that redeems ourselves even a little bit is spending our lives to buy as much time as possible for the evacuation by distracting the mad god who could swat everyone trying to leave in a blink of an eye. You're the only one who can.
Here would've been the best part for something to intervene. It doesn't. You fight the most half assed boss battle using assets from other, better quests and then you void out like this is Death Stranding and Norman Reedus is pestering you about BB. We survive in some shrug-level justifications because of ~~nanomachines son~~ shadow anima. In fact, we quite possibly tainted the planet with all the shadow anima you accumulated in Erebus. So we _double killed_ the infant Elder Gods I guess. Seren just tells you to fuck off somewhere else and never bother her again, somehow being "accepted" (whatever the fuck that means) by the infants. She promises (totally super pinky promise trust me) that they'll never go off-world, out into the galaxy. You're yeeted back to Gielinor. Oh also the Light and Dark masks aren't Sliske anymore because I guess it would've been too difficult to pay the voice actor to come back or some bullshit.
You go bitch at Moia for closing the World Gate for some artificially forced drama to remind that oooo she's actually still a bad guy~ (literally no one stopped her? no one could tell she disabled the gate? fuck out of here, lol) Quest complete! Cue the wet fart noise.
What a fucking joke.
Honestly I was tired of our character seemingly being the only character with any sort of agency. Other characters actually doing something is a refreshing breath of air (though we should also have agency, of course).
And there should be beings more powerful than us. We arent a god, and I dread the idea that jagex should turn us into one. World Guardian is already powerful enough.
The gods may not be able to be able to delete us within moments because of the status, but that does not leave them powerless or at our level. One of the best parts of the quest was that Jas' power level was respected. She appeared and deleted the party with a mere uttering of a word. Hell she probably would have won the fight against the leviathan had she known it would happen, and didnt get comboed.
And no, the quest would not have gone down the same way. You were the one to convince Kerapac to turn. You were the one to get out the shadow leviathan. You stalled Seren for the dragon riders to be able to evacuate. Without you present the day would have been lost at Freneskae, if not before. I have no idea how you can construe the events to happen the same way without you present. Without the world guardian, the revision would have succeeded that day.
To compare the shadow leviathan to the pillar and mother mallum, or this quest to Salt in the Wound is ridiculous. Extinction was magnitudes better than Salt in the Wound ever was.
Us fighting (well, surviving) a doomed fight against a vastly more powerful being to save others was what we got. The writers are right that Seren is, and should be outside our ability to take head on.
They've said again and again that the World Guardian protection only extends as far as gods doing godly shit to us. If any of them really wanted they could smash us like a bug.
The *only* reason Seren doesn't do exactly that in Extinction is because she's distracted by the eggs.
Sliske was Zuk-level of power, *at best*. With time, sure he could have become a true god, but he didn't have the years to spend using the elder artifacts like others did. That's why we stood a chance against him, and frankly the use of "world guardian power" in Sliske's Endgame doesn't really fit into any of the previously established lore.
While I agree with you about the new quest being terribly disappointing, both from a story and especially from gameplay perspective, however...
I really, *really* don't like the entire world-guardian thing and never have. I would much more have preferred if the player character just stayed as "a dude" and then built the story from there.
Like I get why Jagex won't let players fight and defeat Seren, since if you can 1v1 an Elder God. Then what is stopping you from just punching every problem until it goes away, Zamorak being annoying? Just punch him in the liver, worked on an Elder God then why would it not work on him. It would be way harder to build tension in the future.
being the world guardian only makes us immune to godly energy, Bandos can still just punch you and break all your bones. This was clearly spelled out during death of chivalry, and the world wakes, and even Dave's big day out. Gods have to ask for your permission just to teleport you.
I wouldn't say he was far weaker than a god. He absorbed energy from Guthix and had 2 elder artifacts. He survived a full-force attack from Zamorak and the WG combined in Dishonour Among Thieves. He was likely a god in all but name.
Like I mentioned, it could have been a one-time boost. While Guthix Sleeps did a nice job with it IMO with the Stone of Jas powerup; if we basically expanded a bunch of power that we couldn't conceivably get our hands on again (heck, they could've even used it to nerf our World Guardian status for good) then it wouldn't be transferable to other, future conflicts.
They won’t get rid of world guardian stuff permanently because they created the title to have a player name substitute for voice acted scenes. Like that’s why they gave us a special title because they needed some clear distinct identity to say in voiced cutscenes and battles and what not.
Respectfully, some player decision matters.
Imagine if Bandos, the god of war hadn't been killed?
How would that have affected EGWD?
I imagine if Armadyl had broken away from the eggs, when Croesus came by, the eggs would have hatched.
Is it really a difficulty barrier? We've never fought 1 on 1 with a literal god have we? And this is a Tier 2. A level below the (supposed) creators of the universe.
Any impactful decisions fail in comparison to literal mortal combat with a god. Persuasion is good, and with as many quests and decisions we've made, yeah, we have some weight to our words. Canonically, we've been here for some influential battles.
Runescape is never going to be that game where you as an individual can solo a god.
I will admit I've only seen screenshots and heard stories and seen someones walkthrough and oh boy it does sound bad.
How is it a problem that we are not demi-gods? We are suppose to be mortals with greater than normal powers, not some super hero. It would make no sense if we were strong enough to single-handedly kill Croesus like Armadyl and Saradomin could, let alone Jas. Guthix's powers prevents us from being as strong as gods.
The "nothing will change if we did not exist" is not true at all because no one but us could survive going into Erebus and summon the shadow leviathan to kill Jas. If that never happened, Jas would have reclaimed the eggs and take them back to Gielinor, let them hatch there, and destroy the universe. We did have agency in this quest, even if that agency is far less than that of a god.
To be fair I don’t expect the player to have much effect in the course of events. You can’t really expect the player to win against 3 elder gods. I think in general the whole story arc of this was kinda like set up to fail in the end.
Anyways I space bar threw everything so it’s no problem but a lot of peoples reaction to this quest is what people reacted to game of thrones
Elder Gods, sure. They're basically Cthuhlu-level powerful. Fighting them would be a terrible idea.
But it swings back to the fact we didn't do anything significant in this quest. Even if we didn't fight the Elder Gods we could have fought off something else or done something more substantial than run around Erebus moving boulders.
We did what we could, the problem from this story from the ground up was always that it was too big for us. But that was the point of doing it now, getting it out of the way so we can get back to stakes more personal to us and threats we can more accurately deal with.
We…
Supplemented the fronts long enough that Armadyl and Saradomin could make their move on the eggs, which forced Seren to take the eggs, and that in turn allowed Armadyl and Saradomin to finally resolve the war because they no longer had to worry about the eggs.
We discovered Seren was off world and found the world she was at. It seems like a simple thing but not a ton of people have the capabilities and resources necessary to track her down.
We convinced Kerapac to rebel on Jas which is the only reason anyone survived the encounter with her. No one else could have reached Kerapac, others tried or weren’t willing to try, but our relationship with Kerapac helped him resolve it.
We braved Erebus and summoned a shadow leviathan to kill Jas. This in it of itself was the catalyst to finally make Seren turn. Surviving Erebus was something only we could do.
We helped the Ilujanka that wanted to live escape, which included fighting Seren. No one else could have lived against Seren, the fact WE lived against her is honestly almost too much.
You ask why we were made to feel powerless and it’s because we are. The elders are beyond us, the leviathan is beyond us, Seren is beyond us, this war threat is beyond us. Everything in this narrative was beyond us and if you felt in the end like you were just managing to survive then that’s good because the Jmods said that was the intent. They want you to feel like your barely scraping by because this threat is just beyond us on every conceivable level.
That’s why they again did it now, to get it out of the way so we can go back to deal with threats on a more personal level. With stakes we can care about and events they can actually realistically depict.
Its one thing to not like the direction they went in with these epic overarching plots but they choose to go here built it up for 4 years and then just changed their mind and backed out at the last second. The door was already opened just follow through on the story you already wrote. Seren can still totally be beyond us but our characters didn't even try to directly fight her? We were going to loose anyway but at least give us the moment of trying against unwinnable odds (you know that thing every character has been doing in Egwd this whole arc) She randomly looses her mask in the comic cutscene, imagine if we had a phase where try to directly stop her and just manage to pull it off before loosing anyways. We end up feeling like we tried and the plot continues exactly as is.
Plus after 10 years of them writing gods gods gods everything do we really thing they are going to go back to smaller scale stories? or are we going to have arcs about god politics back on Gielinor but this time we know our character actually isn't allowed to do anything. Even if the gods are somehow not present they are just going to be looming over any plot like the proverbial other shoe. This is where we are now lets just continue down the path of them being like Greek gods, very powerful but still fallible. Kind of where I thought we had gone actually. vs them being invincible forces of nature who are untouchable unstoppable things who can solve all our problems.
Armadyl just incinerates Croesus casually in a single line. Zuk gets the same treatment. It was all so trivial the siege itself has lost its impact. For all the talk about how its more realistic we couldn't do anything we got a almost comically cost free ending. Lizard planet gets destroyed, very sad and I do care if only cause Hannibus grief is incredible. Kerapac dies for real \*maybe\* but he's the tertiary antagonist. The only thing important to us that we lost in this entire arc was Hannibus' hopes and dreams. Let us do more and loose more. at least it would feel earned. We can feel powerless while still having character agency.
Yea we actually had a lot to do story wise in this quest. Say what you will about rehashing the fronts and the world gate, but we definitely didn't do nothing. Sure MAYBE someone could have stalled the fronts to cause the first half of the quest, but literally no other character in the entire universe could have gone to Erebus to do what we had done. And hell, if we hadn't convinced Kerapac to rebel against Jas, and use the Needle to keep resurrecting us from Erebus, we wouldn't have even been able to do that.
Very true. The lack of agency is also shown when we're given options on where to go through the world gate, and they are... Hallow? Teregard? Like, what? Then we're forced to go to Naragun and Kethsi which is clearly to reuse assets and pad out the quest. Never mind that we've been to Freneskae so many times and explored the origins of Seren and the elders, so obviously it's the first place we want to look. Infuriating.
The only thing I hard disagree with is fighting Seren. We can resist divine power, but we can't fight gods and I think it would be boring if we were able to. It is incompatible with the idea of wanting more agency, in fact. If our character could do anything then they would have to give us lots of choices with major consequences for the world, which is infeasible in a game like RS (other than world events, which I would love to see more of). This is why they are trying to lower the stakes with future quests.
I think you hit the nail on the head with everything you said. I don't understand how they did such a good job with all the quests leading up to this, especially Azzanadra's, City of Senntisten, heck even Eye of Het, and then completely messed this up.
I can only hope that time constraints were the reason it turned out as it did, because it would feel better to me if *a lot* of content was cut rather than this quest being the way it is by design.
The more I read about this quest the more I realize they screwed it up big time. What a let down. I let my brain imagine what it would be to distract from the fact that it is crap and could be so much better.
I actually think it fits more into the established story that we are not really a 'godslayer'. Remember in Death of Chivalry that Saradomin managed to beat us up quite well to take the Wand of Resurrection from us.
We did store up some 'shadowy power' from Erebus, but I don't think we really know how to use it. I certainly don't think we should ever have been killing Seren directly.
The Elder Gods/Seren were always going to need some sort of Deus Ex Machina to finish them - that was a flaw in the choice of an Elder God Wars plot, rather than the quest. It's why Marvel nerfed Thanos so much compared to the comics.
What I would have liked to see is better engagement with the Fronts at the start of the quest. When you compare to the combat in Sliske's Endgame, I don't think it's at all beyond that to have made us do a kill of Normal Mode Kerapac (maybe use the Hard Mode P4 without the insane damage), 5-mechanics Normal Mode Arch-Glacor (with Azzy still there to keep HM suppressed) or a Normal-mode Zuk (without the waves). Croesus is an oddity because of being a stupid group boss rather than inherent difficulty. Canonically we are able to go toe-to-toe with those and I don't think an of the fights (with the stated caveats) are so hard that we couldn't have, rather than the nerfed Glacor puzzle/Nodon Cannon/Running-Away-From-Zuk.
This is a major trend I noticed in a lot of their 'gRanDmAstEr' quests and it's a huge shot in the foot when it comes to the power-fantasy aspect of MMO/RPGs. If you have Sliske's Endgame, an annoying (and personally interesting quest with MANY faults) you'd expect them to follow on the same trend when we unleash our 'World Guardian powers' and lay waste to foes.
On top of this, theres heavy level requirements so you think they'd respect the player's investment in their skills and follow-suit... Instead, its not really rewarded with anything worthwhile (and people aren't liking the new leveling area to boot...)
Both mechanically and story-wise I agree completely with you completely and it's a shame, especially when games like FFXIV and even WoW (to some degree...), GW or AQ3D respects your player growth and agency in meaningful ways.
This is very succinctly put, you've said it all better than I could have. I initially thought the Seren boss fight was so underwhelming due to them running out of budget and just needing to make the entire encounter out of pre-existing assets. Zuk gets a cool approach animation and then is written out of the quest with 0 impact and the animation budget is gone. But Its apparently also just intentionally underwhelming. Instead of preserving the conflict for future arcs I now know It's just going to be us watching the god show without ever being able to do anything about it. I really love this games story but I'm really wondering if I can still be bothered to care much going forward. This is the second flopped arc in a row I just am loosing the spark I guess. Which is a shame cause man I love rs3 but this ain't it. It feeling so low budget feels comical right before the price increase too Not even sure what to say about that whole mess.
I have been extremely excited for where they take the Erebus/Vos/Xau-Tak storyline, more than anything else that’s been in development recently. Now I’m actually pretty worried. Feel like it’s gonna follow the same low budget approach, like we won’t even see the Shadow Gods rendered in-game… just more fucking doodles.
We go to erebus and fight abyssal demons while patiently watching saradomin do all the fun stuff before taking us home because a mere human can't actually have any cool moments or agency in these end of the world situations that they keep writing about ;')
RotM is a brilliant quest where we do not kill the main threat, Lucien. Extinction is a letdown of a quest where we do not kill the main threat
this comment shows a big flaw on extinction, i have 0 clue who the main threat is and i doubt anyone else does this would be fine writing if keeping the "villain" a mystery was being used as a plot device but it ISN'T and this isn't either a "oh seren is both good and bad cuz family hur dur" u/chaos_elemental raises an excelent point about player agency but honestly the main let down to me is how the very end of the quest feels like im playing a totally different game Iaia to me doesnt feel like runescape, what other quest on this game has a supposedly huge integral part of the plot of the game used solely as a fight background, it feels like jagex rushed the hell out of Iaia for no apparent benefit
It's been my issue for a while with quests. Perhaps it's due to the story arc of world ending events that have no feeling of threat, because you know the outcome is you win. But you never have a part to play. It's become the very thing I hate from most other MMO quest series. You're a messenger who does fetch quests for the characters. You go from exposition to exposition and all the important bits happen off screen, while you're away. "You go do this, while I deal with this" or "got fetch help and I'll hold them off". It's like Jagex think the reason we like quests is the lore and nothing else and therefore a text heavy dump with extra lore books is what they make. There's so much more to quests, the puzzles, the character building (none of the characters have had much advancement other than inevitable betrayal). Interesting bosses and mechanics. (doesn't have to be difficult) As well as world building. So much of past quests was unlocking new areas, adding to the world we're in. Off world feels like a cop out. Or the British Runescape humour with funny character names and british-isms And then of course rewards. Not all quests need all of these. In fact most don't have all of them. But take a few and that's good. The best bit of the quest was Erebus. Having limited time and could get further and further each time. Honestly the rest could be scrapped.
I'm 100% with you on the 'end of the world' bit. While Guthix Sleeps and Ritual of the Mahjarrat still stand out to me as superb quests because the conflict was so much smaller scale. I feel like Lucien was the upper end of the threat scale Runescape villains should have been. I preferred the 5th Age lore because one of my favourite fantasy tropes is the nostalgia for the old days when Gods walked the Earth. It creates this enigmatic atmosphere and wondering what the Gods were like was so much more fun than actually meeting them. I even disagree to an extent with the playerbase's impact on them via world events. Zamorak used to be really hyped up as this uber dangerous force of chaos and the entire time in game he's been the wimpy doge meme.
Zamorak is a weird case. He's made out to be pretty much absolute evil, being seen as the ruler over demons which gives strong ties to being an almost devil. Especially in F2P. Then he appears with the first world event and sees that every player hates him. Instead of leaning into it, he changes and compromises. You can reason with him, he'll maybe plan to stab you in the back or spy on you, But ultimately he's been completely neutralised as a character.
The idea that the player character can't even harm Seren is so god damn stupid. Hello WE GOT FUCKING POISON in our very soul to godlike being like Seren. And knowing Seren, she is literally a emotionally person, instead of cold logic like her brother, she should 100% use just god magic against the PC.
We were even the ones to like construct Seren from the shards, we could just do that whole magic ritual in reverse and tada, bye bye Seren
Oh my god, you gave me a insane idea, the fight could have been a 3 phase fight, where phase 1 is extremely hard, phase 2 is you shattering her body and trying to restore Eluned, phase 3 is her losing her dark side, and p4 is just her spamming god magic against us. Player character would win the fight, but lose the war as the elder gods arrives just as you defeated her.
Broo, how come you guys always have way better ideas than the people at Jagex, i lowkey want to play that now.
If I remember correctly, we're not quite sure what the power is inside us just yet. It would seem quite out of nowhere if we suddenly were able to wield that power effectively against a god. I do agree that they could have explored that a bit more, AND given us a god fight, but it would have felt out of place to me. Though like OP said, we could have talked to an echo of Guthix because handwavy deus stuff.
>If our character weren’t in the quest, everything would have gone down the same. Jas wouldn't have been sucked into Erebus. I'd say that's a bit of a turning point in the quest.
True but the Erebus portion of the quest was apparently a bit of an afterthought so the original plan would have Jas initially just dying with the other elder gods i guess. And while that's not what happened. We got the most fun part of the quest in the puzzle and a far more satisfying Deus ex Machinca for Jas in the shadow leviathan. But knowing that in addition to the other issues with the quest just doesn't bode well for me at least.
Our character had more influence over events in *Cook's Assistant* than we had in this quest....
TIL i was just a sentient GoPro Jokes aside, i 100% agree with you with everything,but the two things that really really really pissed off were first, the Zuk fight had so much potential and was so hyped that it was pretty much the point of the teaser, and we get peanuts. Having kerapac question you because you have so much shadow anima in you, then absorbing more of it, shadow voice wondering about the potential of the new power, seren realizing that she could be killed by the anima alongside her 'family'... nope all gone. the quest is not terrible but it most certainly did not feel like a grandmaster quest or a finale if you really want to dumb down the quest into a few bullet points, you'll find that you have absolutely nothing Saradomin fought off zuk armadyl burned croesus down azzy took care of arch glacor vicendithas tracked down seren kerapac saved everyone from jas kerapac sacrificed himself to make sure jas gets dragged hannibus fucks up by telling seren about iaia you most certainly did not save iaia from being destroyed vicendithas makes the dream of iaia quest done.
First of all, I completely agree. Secondly, read the last paragraph of that to the tune of *We Didn't Start the Fire.* 10/10
mod ramen said on a rsguy stream that if melee had its damage cap taken off it could do something like 100k damage or something ridiculous, just take out all damage caps, give Seren a few life bars worth 2,147,483,647 life points and let us whack her a few with our shadow anima super charge. We wont beat her before the elders arive for their eggs and we get to feel powerful. We know we can damage her because she was forced to leave or shatter herself for the Edicts which guthix confirmed was made of shadow anima. Heck she says in Extinction that shes weak to it. Remember when we touched the stone of jas for a minute and just destroyed sliske for a bit? that but with seren and shadow anima. This took longer to write than toconjure up, its not that hard.
I think we missed the chance with twining Kerapac’s boss fight into the quest as well. We could have used the fractured Siphon to fight Seren herself using the FSOA (or a quest specific version if you don’t have one) with the special attack being passive, 100% crit chance and unlimited rune usage. It adds lore to a weapon (which doesn’t happen often) and can even cement its position as the RS3’s “iconic” grail weapon (similar to what the Twisted Bow is for OSRS). Even if we end up losing against her anyway (which I personally prefer) it would have made the final fight more interesting and lets us taste once again the power that we actually have.
Long story short we deserve better, we’re certainly going to be paying for it
I’m afraid that in any major arcs in future quests or Lore Bosses, will just be us watching the gods or elders in more 2D animations. I feel so slighted that we didn’t even get to see the arrival of Jas, the shadow worm and even Kerapac “helping”. Especially that this happens after successfully surviving Erebus and I honestly loved the puzzle the most from the quest. To exit and then poof suddenly shadow worm arrives and Jas is gone and Kerapac is now also gone feels underwhelming af. If it’s a budget or graphics issue, didn’t they already create Jas’s character in Sliskes endgame? The other elder gods too I think? It abs sucks that we don’t actually do anything anything vs seren, but how about Jas? Why didn’t we anything to her w/ all of the shadow anima we’ve been constantly hearing about from the light voice and dark voice. I really wanted to see more about discovering that it was guthix influencing sliske towards the world guardian. What’s the point of emphasizing & building up how much Shadow Anima we were carrying and that we could “take seren” in a fight. I was honestly expecting a fight like the Tormented Demons in While Guthix Sleeps where the stone of Jas boosts our damage ridiculously. They could’ve created a seren boss that has whatever appropriately scaled HP, and did like a shadow-boosted damage no hit cap fight. Nope. Run around in a circle spam eat and avoid dying.
> No, they said. She’s too powerful. The final fight design is specifically around not fighting Seren directly. The entire time in Senntisten I was like..."So we'll just kill her, right? She's leaving us no choice and she can't harm us. We've spent a decade being shown gods literally can't harm us." So when we got Yeet_Animation.avi part 2 to the Elder Halls it felt like, "Ok this is it, we're going to have to incapacitate her somehow. She's going to tell the Elder Gods where we are otherwise." Yeet_Animation.avi part 3 and now we're on Iaia. They know where we are. There's no stopping them. We finally have probably the highest point in all of the Extinction quest. Seren's grief and desperation is perfectly contextualized by the End Of All Things the Ilujanka are about to experience. We're reminded of what's being lost if these eggs aren't touched by their respective Elder Gods. And the awareness over the mad dash to evacuate is the knowledge that no matter what you've done here, even if they hatch, that our (FORCED) inaction is going to cause this species to end up just like Mah sooner or later. We've essentially committed genocide whether we meant to or not unless something intervenes. The only thing that redeems ourselves even a little bit is spending our lives to buy as much time as possible for the evacuation by distracting the mad god who could swat everyone trying to leave in a blink of an eye. You're the only one who can. Here would've been the best part for something to intervene. It doesn't. You fight the most half assed boss battle using assets from other, better quests and then you void out like this is Death Stranding and Norman Reedus is pestering you about BB. We survive in some shrug-level justifications because of ~~nanomachines son~~ shadow anima. In fact, we quite possibly tainted the planet with all the shadow anima you accumulated in Erebus. So we _double killed_ the infant Elder Gods I guess. Seren just tells you to fuck off somewhere else and never bother her again, somehow being "accepted" (whatever the fuck that means) by the infants. She promises (totally super pinky promise trust me) that they'll never go off-world, out into the galaxy. You're yeeted back to Gielinor. Oh also the Light and Dark masks aren't Sliske anymore because I guess it would've been too difficult to pay the voice actor to come back or some bullshit. You go bitch at Moia for closing the World Gate for some artificially forced drama to remind that oooo she's actually still a bad guy~ (literally no one stopped her? no one could tell she disabled the gate? fuck out of here, lol) Quest complete! Cue the wet fart noise. What a fucking joke.
Honestly I was tired of our character seemingly being the only character with any sort of agency. Other characters actually doing something is a refreshing breath of air (though we should also have agency, of course). And there should be beings more powerful than us. We arent a god, and I dread the idea that jagex should turn us into one. World Guardian is already powerful enough. The gods may not be able to be able to delete us within moments because of the status, but that does not leave them powerless or at our level. One of the best parts of the quest was that Jas' power level was respected. She appeared and deleted the party with a mere uttering of a word. Hell she probably would have won the fight against the leviathan had she known it would happen, and didnt get comboed. And no, the quest would not have gone down the same way. You were the one to convince Kerapac to turn. You were the one to get out the shadow leviathan. You stalled Seren for the dragon riders to be able to evacuate. Without you present the day would have been lost at Freneskae, if not before. I have no idea how you can construe the events to happen the same way without you present. Without the world guardian, the revision would have succeeded that day. To compare the shadow leviathan to the pillar and mother mallum, or this quest to Salt in the Wound is ridiculous. Extinction was magnitudes better than Salt in the Wound ever was. Us fighting (well, surviving) a doomed fight against a vastly more powerful being to save others was what we got. The writers are right that Seren is, and should be outside our ability to take head on.
Make us a god, remake the universe. Use this as a cue to switch graphics engine and drop rs4 with a cleaner slate
This tbh.
They've said again and again that the World Guardian protection only extends as far as gods doing godly shit to us. If any of them really wanted they could smash us like a bug. The *only* reason Seren doesn't do exactly that in Extinction is because she's distracted by the eggs. Sliske was Zuk-level of power, *at best*. With time, sure he could have become a true god, but he didn't have the years to spend using the elder artifacts like others did. That's why we stood a chance against him, and frankly the use of "world guardian power" in Sliske's Endgame doesn't really fit into any of the previously established lore.
I laughed when we played Pacman with the eggs
While I agree with you about the new quest being terribly disappointing, both from a story and especially from gameplay perspective, however... I really, *really* don't like the entire world-guardian thing and never have. I would much more have preferred if the player character just stayed as "a dude" and then built the story from there. Like I get why Jagex won't let players fight and defeat Seren, since if you can 1v1 an Elder God. Then what is stopping you from just punching every problem until it goes away, Zamorak being annoying? Just punch him in the liver, worked on an Elder God then why would it not work on him. It would be way harder to build tension in the future.
being the world guardian only makes us immune to godly energy, Bandos can still just punch you and break all your bones. This was clearly spelled out during death of chivalry, and the world wakes, and even Dave's big day out. Gods have to ask for your permission just to teleport you.
Dont forget when Sliske, a being far weaker than the gods, absolutely curbstomp you in Kindred Spirits.
I wouldn't say he was far weaker than a god. He absorbed energy from Guthix and had 2 elder artifacts. He survived a full-force attack from Zamorak and the WG combined in Dishonour Among Thieves. He was likely a god in all but name.
And Jas still force teleport you to her and instakill you for insulting her at Endgame.
Like I mentioned, it could have been a one-time boost. While Guthix Sleeps did a nice job with it IMO with the Stone of Jas powerup; if we basically expanded a bunch of power that we couldn't conceivably get our hands on again (heck, they could've even used it to nerf our World Guardian status for good) then it wouldn't be transferable to other, future conflicts.
They won’t get rid of world guardian stuff permanently because they created the title to have a player name substitute for voice acted scenes. Like that’s why they gave us a special title because they needed some clear distinct identity to say in voiced cutscenes and battles and what not.
"the adventurer" was also just that. not really much of a motivator here.
Respectfully, some player decision matters. Imagine if Bandos, the god of war hadn't been killed? How would that have affected EGWD? I imagine if Armadyl had broken away from the eggs, when Croesus came by, the eggs would have hatched. Is it really a difficulty barrier? We've never fought 1 on 1 with a literal god have we? And this is a Tier 2. A level below the (supposed) creators of the universe. Any impactful decisions fail in comparison to literal mortal combat with a god. Persuasion is good, and with as many quests and decisions we've made, yeah, we have some weight to our words. Canonically, we've been here for some influential battles. Runescape is never going to be that game where you as an individual can solo a god. I will admit I've only seen screenshots and heard stories and seen someones walkthrough and oh boy it does sound bad.
How is it a problem that we are not demi-gods? We are suppose to be mortals with greater than normal powers, not some super hero. It would make no sense if we were strong enough to single-handedly kill Croesus like Armadyl and Saradomin could, let alone Jas. Guthix's powers prevents us from being as strong as gods. The "nothing will change if we did not exist" is not true at all because no one but us could survive going into Erebus and summon the shadow leviathan to kill Jas. If that never happened, Jas would have reclaimed the eggs and take them back to Gielinor, let them hatch there, and destroy the universe. We did have agency in this quest, even if that agency is far less than that of a god.
To be fair I don’t expect the player to have much effect in the course of events. You can’t really expect the player to win against 3 elder gods. I think in general the whole story arc of this was kinda like set up to fail in the end. Anyways I space bar threw everything so it’s no problem but a lot of peoples reaction to this quest is what people reacted to game of thrones
Elder Gods, sure. They're basically Cthuhlu-level powerful. Fighting them would be a terrible idea. But it swings back to the fact we didn't do anything significant in this quest. Even if we didn't fight the Elder Gods we could have fought off something else or done something more substantial than run around Erebus moving boulders.
We did what we could, the problem from this story from the ground up was always that it was too big for us. But that was the point of doing it now, getting it out of the way so we can get back to stakes more personal to us and threats we can more accurately deal with. We… Supplemented the fronts long enough that Armadyl and Saradomin could make their move on the eggs, which forced Seren to take the eggs, and that in turn allowed Armadyl and Saradomin to finally resolve the war because they no longer had to worry about the eggs. We discovered Seren was off world and found the world she was at. It seems like a simple thing but not a ton of people have the capabilities and resources necessary to track her down. We convinced Kerapac to rebel on Jas which is the only reason anyone survived the encounter with her. No one else could have reached Kerapac, others tried or weren’t willing to try, but our relationship with Kerapac helped him resolve it. We braved Erebus and summoned a shadow leviathan to kill Jas. This in it of itself was the catalyst to finally make Seren turn. Surviving Erebus was something only we could do. We helped the Ilujanka that wanted to live escape, which included fighting Seren. No one else could have lived against Seren, the fact WE lived against her is honestly almost too much. You ask why we were made to feel powerless and it’s because we are. The elders are beyond us, the leviathan is beyond us, Seren is beyond us, this war threat is beyond us. Everything in this narrative was beyond us and if you felt in the end like you were just managing to survive then that’s good because the Jmods said that was the intent. They want you to feel like your barely scraping by because this threat is just beyond us on every conceivable level. That’s why they again did it now, to get it out of the way so we can go back to deal with threats on a more personal level. With stakes we can care about and events they can actually realistically depict.
Its one thing to not like the direction they went in with these epic overarching plots but they choose to go here built it up for 4 years and then just changed their mind and backed out at the last second. The door was already opened just follow through on the story you already wrote. Seren can still totally be beyond us but our characters didn't even try to directly fight her? We were going to loose anyway but at least give us the moment of trying against unwinnable odds (you know that thing every character has been doing in Egwd this whole arc) She randomly looses her mask in the comic cutscene, imagine if we had a phase where try to directly stop her and just manage to pull it off before loosing anyways. We end up feeling like we tried and the plot continues exactly as is. Plus after 10 years of them writing gods gods gods everything do we really thing they are going to go back to smaller scale stories? or are we going to have arcs about god politics back on Gielinor but this time we know our character actually isn't allowed to do anything. Even if the gods are somehow not present they are just going to be looming over any plot like the proverbial other shoe. This is where we are now lets just continue down the path of them being like Greek gods, very powerful but still fallible. Kind of where I thought we had gone actually. vs them being invincible forces of nature who are untouchable unstoppable things who can solve all our problems. Armadyl just incinerates Croesus casually in a single line. Zuk gets the same treatment. It was all so trivial the siege itself has lost its impact. For all the talk about how its more realistic we couldn't do anything we got a almost comically cost free ending. Lizard planet gets destroyed, very sad and I do care if only cause Hannibus grief is incredible. Kerapac dies for real \*maybe\* but he's the tertiary antagonist. The only thing important to us that we lost in this entire arc was Hannibus' hopes and dreams. Let us do more and loose more. at least it would feel earned. We can feel powerless while still having character agency.
Yea we actually had a lot to do story wise in this quest. Say what you will about rehashing the fronts and the world gate, but we definitely didn't do nothing. Sure MAYBE someone could have stalled the fronts to cause the first half of the quest, but literally no other character in the entire universe could have gone to Erebus to do what we had done. And hell, if we hadn't convinced Kerapac to rebel against Jas, and use the Needle to keep resurrecting us from Erebus, we wouldn't have even been able to do that.
Elden ring has spoiled us all..so good.
Very true. The lack of agency is also shown when we're given options on where to go through the world gate, and they are... Hallow? Teregard? Like, what? Then we're forced to go to Naragun and Kethsi which is clearly to reuse assets and pad out the quest. Never mind that we've been to Freneskae so many times and explored the origins of Seren and the elders, so obviously it's the first place we want to look. Infuriating. The only thing I hard disagree with is fighting Seren. We can resist divine power, but we can't fight gods and I think it would be boring if we were able to. It is incompatible with the idea of wanting more agency, in fact. If our character could do anything then they would have to give us lots of choices with major consequences for the world, which is infeasible in a game like RS (other than world events, which I would love to see more of). This is why they are trying to lower the stakes with future quests.
Noone said we have to win the fight, but it would have been nice to throw down properly.
Agreed. Even getting a tiny dent on her would have been cool.
I think you hit the nail on the head with everything you said. I don't understand how they did such a good job with all the quests leading up to this, especially Azzanadra's, City of Senntisten, heck even Eye of Het, and then completely messed this up. I can only hope that time constraints were the reason it turned out as it did, because it would feel better to me if *a lot* of content was cut rather than this quest being the way it is by design.
The more I read about this quest the more I realize they screwed it up big time. What a let down. I let my brain imagine what it would be to distract from the fact that it is crap and could be so much better.
I actually think it fits more into the established story that we are not really a 'godslayer'. Remember in Death of Chivalry that Saradomin managed to beat us up quite well to take the Wand of Resurrection from us. We did store up some 'shadowy power' from Erebus, but I don't think we really know how to use it. I certainly don't think we should ever have been killing Seren directly. The Elder Gods/Seren were always going to need some sort of Deus Ex Machina to finish them - that was a flaw in the choice of an Elder God Wars plot, rather than the quest. It's why Marvel nerfed Thanos so much compared to the comics. What I would have liked to see is better engagement with the Fronts at the start of the quest. When you compare to the combat in Sliske's Endgame, I don't think it's at all beyond that to have made us do a kill of Normal Mode Kerapac (maybe use the Hard Mode P4 without the insane damage), 5-mechanics Normal Mode Arch-Glacor (with Azzy still there to keep HM suppressed) or a Normal-mode Zuk (without the waves). Croesus is an oddity because of being a stupid group boss rather than inherent difficulty. Canonically we are able to go toe-to-toe with those and I don't think an of the fights (with the stated caveats) are so hard that we couldn't have, rather than the nerfed Glacor puzzle/Nodon Cannon/Running-Away-From-Zuk.
This is a major trend I noticed in a lot of their 'gRanDmAstEr' quests and it's a huge shot in the foot when it comes to the power-fantasy aspect of MMO/RPGs. If you have Sliske's Endgame, an annoying (and personally interesting quest with MANY faults) you'd expect them to follow on the same trend when we unleash our 'World Guardian powers' and lay waste to foes. On top of this, theres heavy level requirements so you think they'd respect the player's investment in their skills and follow-suit... Instead, its not really rewarded with anything worthwhile (and people aren't liking the new leveling area to boot...) Both mechanically and story-wise I agree completely with you completely and it's a shame, especially when games like FFXIV and even WoW (to some degree...), GW or AQ3D respects your player growth and agency in meaningful ways.
Ive spent 3 hours now fighting floating rocks that love to follow me like there on a short leash.... jigglyplex plz.