The Graveyard - Rewards Blog
Top Dust off your parchment from Ulfric - we're heading straight to the heart of the mystery surrounding the lost Fremennik treasure! Earlier this year, we shared our plans for The Graveyard, a new Master-level quest continuing the story of Olaf's Quest. This epic sequel to our Fremennik series is set to launch in November, so not too long now. Don't worry, we're not here to spoil the quest. Instead, we're huddling around the campfire to talk about the new Agility training method, coming alongside this quest as its main reward. Once you complete the quest, you'll unlock a new Agility course, aimed at players between 65 and 80 Agility. It's a hybrid course, so you can expect it to have a mix of intensities, offering a relaxed or more intense option. Naturally, those of you who are willing to put in a little more effort can expect faster XP. We won't be revealing the exact layout of the course or specific mechanics, since we think it's best to keep this as a surprise. However, we will reveal that it's a dark underwater cavern, littered with the remains of ships unfortunate enough to have found their way there. Throughout the course, you'll dodge debris, leap across half-sunken wreckage and try to stay above water! Now, let's hand things over to Mod Husky, Senior Game Designer for this project, to take a closer look.
Hey everyone, Mod Husky here. Agility is in an interesting spot currently. Rooftops are our 'tried and true', mostly laid-back method at all levels.
- •Hallowed Sepulchre is great for players who value a more leaned in experience (from level 77 with a boost onwards).
- •We also offer Brimhaven Agility, Wyrm Agility or Werewolf agility as more unique or bespoke experiences.
With The Graveyard, we're offering a hybrid approach, specifically aimed at those of you who are between levels 65 and 80. You can expect some traditional rooftop Agility mechanics (around two thirds of the course), with the remaining third giving you a choice. You can pick a much more AFK and slow option (one click and come back ~20-30s later) or a more intense alternative for those who don't want to wait and want to proceed on to the next obstacle.
Here's an example of what that looks like in practice. Imagine you start the course and complete two traditional Agility obstacles, then for the third obstacle, you can either click a narrow ledge on one side or some stepping stones on the other.
- •Those of you who pick the narrow ledge would take longer to do it and get less XP for your efforts, but you can use the opportunity to either respond to a message from another player, stretch, or whatever else you fancy.
- •Those of you who pick the stepping stones (think Yama) can engage in one click every tick to get through the obstacle substantially faster, provided you have the mechanical skill to do so correctly.
We were blown away by the positive reception to Yama stepping stones, and the low level course we made for Leagues VI, so we're excited to integrate these mechanics at various points in this course. That said, expect there to be a step up in difficulty requiring you to identify the correct stones while also keeping up the one-tick rhythm. We're also taking inspiration from some of Mod Rice's work on the Vampyrium skilling sections. For example, imagine an obstacle where you need to double or triple click in one tick at a specific timing to traverse it optimally. As we're still in the process of development and testing, we can't confirm exactly what mechanics we're proceeding with until we've tested them out, and I don't want to set false expectations, so watch this space. For the more AFK parts of the course, we're hoping to achieve a level of consistency where the sections take about the same amount of time. This will allow you to get into a good rhythm, especially if you're doing this on mobile or as second monitor content. At this moment in development, the AFK time is looking to be somewhere in the region of 20-30s. We hope this description shines some light on what we're aiming to do and helps to shape any feedback you all might have. Either way, no matter which kind of player you are, everyone in our target level range (65-80) should have a reason to check out this course on their Agility journey! The course will be the main reward from Graveyard as it makes a solid progressional unlock for players between 65 - 80 Agility. Since it's a hybrid course, we're happy to cover a top-level overview of XP rates that you can expect to get at the lower and upper end of intensity.