The Runescape Combat Update has finally gone live, and we’re all eager to know what players think about it.
It has been a loooong project, the idea for it actually started almost two years ago, when I was hired together with lots of other people to improve the graphical quality of the game.
The Runescape Combat Update involved pretty much every department of the Runescape team, it required hundreds of hours of testing, gathering feedback from the players who subscribed to the beta and, on our side, redesigning the throng of old weapons to fit with the new system.

There will be issues, things to fix here and there and other feedback to take into account, but all in all I think the new Combat System brings a huge improvement to the former, primitive “click once and look at the energy bars going down” approach.

Anyway, the most recent thing I did for the update is the trainer at the Combat Academy in Lumbridge.
She’s the one who explains players how things work, so if you’re not sure what’s happening just pop there before you dive into the thick of things.
As you can see she’s loaded with weapons. She’s obviously supposed to be an expert of melee, ranged and magic combat, so she usually carries along her entire gear because, you know, she’s that though.

Now, I don’t always go into this level of polish.
This time though, I indulged into things we don’t normally care about when designing characters for Runescape: rivets, chain mail, scratches on the armour, freckles (ha! Freckles in Runescape) are not the sort of things you’ll see in a browser game.
Thing is, I had just spent a couple of months or so designing props and environments at an insane pace, and this was a welcome diversion.
So, since at the moment I wasn’t particularly under pressure (the main bunch of concepts for the Runescape Combat Update had been finished months before) I took my time with this and made her a bit more refined than usual.
Quite happy with her. She has freckles.

by Paolo Puggioni