Dragonwilds:Community Campfire/Episode 4 Transcript

The following is a transcript from a Q&A on 8 October 2025 on YouTube. The transcript is created using third-party software through YouTube and Riverside FM.

Question 1 (at 00:32)

Syl: Is it Maya and Substance painter? 3DS Max? Blender? 3D Coat? What does your pipeline look like? If I were to try to make assets that are true to the style, are there any things you'd point at and say "This one thing does a lot of the work" if there is anything like that?

Mod Aaart: That's a good question, so I'm going to guess you may be an artist in the background, which is great. So just to give you an idea, art, we use all kinds of software because art covers so many different types. We make 3D environment assets, we build characters, creatures, we do animation, we do lighting, we do VFX. There's a whole myriad, a spectrum of art that we create. I can share a really boring slide with you you like. So just to give you an idea, in other words, characters, let's start with characters because they're really interesting. So we use Maya. So Maya is probably the question you're asking, which 3D software do we use? Maya. Maya is the one that sort of grounds both animation, environment art, character art. It's where we create our 3D assets. We've got some internal tools, internal software, but ZBrush, for those of you who know what that is, that's where we put all the detail in, right? We bring it in, we come out a high resolution sculpt. And all that means is that's where all the facial detail, the clothing detail, really, really high fidelity stuff, we tend to use it in ZBrush. You can't just put that straight into a game. So we take that and goes back into Maya. We use Marmoset. Again, what does baking mean? We bake that high resolution detail into our game meshes. It means that when you see our game resolution mesh, it actually has all of that lovely detail, with a lot less polygons, call them, which is the kind of mesh that makes up these characters. We use Substance Painter, Substance Designer again for materials and textures. We call them smart materials as well a lot of the time. In others, we can create things like metal or leather or cotton or whatever it is. And we can sort of use that as the basis as we start to sort of apply all these different textures and materials to our characters.

Mod Aaart: Photoshop is a standard, again, I would say, for creating textures. But also we use it for everywhere. We use it across our user interface. A lot of our concept work is done in there. Unreal Engine is our engine of choice. And Perforce we use. Now, Perforce is very boring, but very important. It's basically a safe repository for all of the data, all the files that's coming in from our team. And it allows us to what we call version control, which allows us to save multiple iterations as we move through it. But just quickly scroll on, again, just the different file formats that we use relate to exactly what I've just described, but basically this is our process. This is what Arc does. We start out with a placeholder shape, we block out approximately what we're doing, we do that in Maya. That high poly one I mentioned goes into ZBrush. Game resolution mesh back to Maya again, texturing Photoshop or Substance Painter. And you see that little tech artist again where our readers will step in and start doing proxy rigs and things, again they use Maya. And there's a really long list of software we use for our environments. Lots of new things that the additional things that we use in here, for instance, SpeedTree, all those trees you see in Dragonwilds were all created with SpeedTree. I'm seeing, let me see, we use Maya, yeah, I'm trying to see where it might be different. I most of the other things there you've seen, there's a similarity.

Mod Aaart: One other thing I could show you if you want is how we do animation. How do we do animation software-wise? We tend to do this, number one, we start with really good references, whether it's our game designers or our animators. Basically, what we're trying to do is piece together the kind of feeling and flow of what we want. Once we understand that, we sort of block that mire, right? So again, J Animators are using the same software as all the other artists. We jump in and we block this stuff out; the fun bit. We jump in and we use motion capture. All right, so motion capture means we cast an actor based on the kind of performance that we want. We need somebody with that skill set, the ability to do what we want to capture, and they will ground it and hopefully they were going to bring a skill set. They're going to do this much better than ourselves, that the animators could do when I train fighters, these guys are. So you start with that, then you bring it into Maya again, back into Maya. We apply it to our character, and we call it raw data. So this is the performance of that actor directly on our character. The animators work their magic. So again, we start to polish this all up. We're chopping bits up, we're speeding bits up, and it's all about the feels. How does this feel? Is it reading clearly? Am I giving enough anticipation of what's about to happen? Was that too quick? Was that too slow? Anything that might frustrate the players with the animators are jumping in, and they piece all of this together.

Mod Doom: It's something that I saw behind the scenes. I think it was actually one of my first days when I worked on the project. I was managing, I was in the studio and just in passing Mod Dutch was like, "By the way, there's going to be people downstairs like Mod Shark who are overseeing some motion capture today." And I went down, and there they were. There was our man in the motion capture suit. And they had some references that our lead animator had done in his garden. This is the rough idea of what we want. And then there was also a laptop with a bunch of references to Old School and RuneScape animations, saying, "Okay, obviously the ability in question was the fire magic, the dragon breath attack, that sort of flamethrower move." And so obviously there was a reference to the RuneScape 3 dragon breath, magic ability, and then there was some footage of someone in their gut, and they were like, "We're trying to go for this." And then working with that actor to get it to be more physical and get a bit more motion and more natural movements into it. And then obviously that then went away, got tinkered with, refined, polished, implemented, and now that's what you see in games. So I know that there's been loads of players who have asked about lots of the different animations, saying, "Was that motion captured?"; "That hand animated?" It was a little bit both, right?

Mod Aaart: I mean, that's a good question as well. We use kind of both, right? So you've seen dragons in the game. We can motion capture a dragon. We've tried. It's very difficult. Lots of good people lost. So we need hand-key animators. So animators are trained to deliver motion like good, you know, realistic, or it can be stylized. There's lots of different styles of animation that animators are called on to do. In our game, we made a decision earlier on. We wanted to ground combat. We wanted it to feel sort of visceral and sort of of the time medieval and others. Super jumping, not, we push things with magic, now magic's another matter, but we wanted combat to feel grounded, so we found amazing actors that worked with us, plus our animators are very good performers as well, and we can capture ourselves in, we use different motion capture suits, but basically what you're trying to do is capture a performance, a realistic performance, that delivers what design wants, which is a really good feeling set of combat, know, combos, know, kind of, you know, responsiveness, all of that wonderful stuff, we'll sell a good combat game. That's really important to us. So we use motion capture for a lot of things. We also use hand keys. Sometimes we will just hand key animation. It means we just, we generated, you know, using reference and we, the animators directly do it. But for our creature stuff, we're not motion capturing any creature stuff. So our AI, any bipedal AI you see, we usually have a performance. We cast a very specific actor who brings that sort of energy and the believability to those performances. But for things like quadrupeds, flying creatures, all of the other wonderful stuff, it's all and that's all down to the talent and animators that we have on the team.

Mod Doom: There we go. That's a very, very comprehensive deep dive into everything. Obviously, my first introduction to Marmoset was when I said, I went to yourself and the team and I said, right, I would like four images of assets, items in game up close to really show that texture, to really show those high quality, high poly models. And immediately I was told, right, we're just gonna get a Marmoset. We're going to go to Marmoset and bake these and I was like baking Marmosets? And then the outcome obviously. Not usually advisable for baking an anvil or something like that. It doesn't usually go that way, but hey, it worked out.

Question 2 (at 08:59)

Crepecheck on Reddit: Looking ahead with the weapons, armour and clothing the team is planning to add to the game - what have you been most excited to see recreated/reimagined? The Abyssal whip felt like such a great choice to tease us with, so I can't wait to see what else you have in store. Thanks!

Mod Aaart: It's a great question. So if I talk just a little bit just about the abyssal demon, just give me a moment. I'm going to pull up an image actually. Why not? The abyssal demon, the interesting one is that we're talking about that one because that was one of the first ones we did. So just, I won't elaborate too much on it, but this is one of the first creatures we did. And it was actually, it was one of the most challenging. You can see in the top left of the image, that was the kind of the RuneScape equivalent that we were using. And what we're trying to do is realize that in an Unreal Engine on a high-fidelity mesh with high-fidelity animations and so on, and try and figure this stuff out. I a lot of fun with this. But as soon as we did it, almost immediately, if I go into full screen mode, can you still see Abyssal Demon? Right, so just really quickly, the Abyssal Whip, immediately the designer says, you can't have one without the other. Players are gonna expect this. So it was unexpected because WIPs aren't easy, right? From an animation point of view, to put that into a game, it's tricky. And actually what we were really doing was creating a creature, but we realized, no, we have to do this too. So we immediately, this is our process, kind of, you know, I have to make some kind of sense of it. You're basically pulling the spine out of this creature, the bones, the, you know, and some sort of spinal column. You can see some of the exploration that we were doing. But, it's interesting. So even when I went back to the Abyssal Demon itself, we actually then had to put their spine bones protruding out the back to try and visually link him with this drop. So that was what went into the game. But to give you an idea, this one for sure was one of the more interesting ones that we did. I'm trying to think, yeah, but get back to your question. I'm buying time. Getting back to your question, what am I really interested to see that's coming down, that was the real question. I can show you something really interesting. Now, this is a bit of an exclusive. I haven't really shown this to anybody yet. So this will be our next Ranger outfit. Now, what on earth is this? So this, to me, I'm going to give you the technical term, it is Tier 5 Ranger. But actually what it really is, it is green dragonhide armuor that will be used for our Rangers. Now, why am I excited to see this, and why am I excited about doing this? We've been on a journey on art. We have been on a journey where we started with very basic armor, very, very, very basic. Now, we moved away from RuneScape in a sense at the beginning of our game. We are a survival game. I think in RuneScape, you start with bronze armour. We had to insert a few little things like leather and bone and stuff. And we started to think about this because we wanted that first experience of our players to sort of be of, I have to kill something, I have to dress, I don't know what I'm building, and so on. So all our costumes were very, very, very basic. This lends itself now towards fantasy, right? This is the, for me, a lot more of the fun aspects of RuneScape is when we start pushing into these shapes and the colors and the exotic materials. This is your bragging rights. Now, this is when I see players running around Dragonwilds, having killed the green dragon, and now they're crafting these more exotic costumes. This for me will be what I am very excited about. But yeah, so that's the answer to the question. So yeah, the Abyssal Whip for sure, although we did realise it did sort of bring an imbalance into the game. You are very overpowered in some instances. But, you know, like I said, it's been a journey for us.

Mod Doom: Yeah, I think it's a really, really cool opportunity to show something really exciting and different and special that I know that players expect. And that's something that we've always done is think about, okay, players are going to expect this. How do we deliver on that promise of this is the thing you know, but translated into something that's truly our own, which is really exciting.

Mod Aaart: I can talk really quickly just on one of the images I just showed. It's another word, it's when I talk about why I'm excited about that Dragonhead armour. This is where we started, right? In other words, this is where we moved away from RuneScape somewhat. We needed for a survival game to have an opening out for something akin to this. Why do you start a game like ours? You've killed something, you've crudely put something together. You've no idea how to build anything. You can see the kind of references we're looking at here over here on the left. You know, really, really basic. You're not a tailor. You don't know what you're doing. You're building this thing under pressure. It's somewhat functional, but it does not look good, right? One of the big things we were trying to do, this is a good slide. This is a key image we did literally the first week that we started making this game. And it is the progression journey. It's the player journey from where you start to kind of where you start to go. And visually, a lot of the logic that we follow is caught in this. So if you look to the very far left, now obviously I'm pulling images from movies here and things like that, and TV shows, just to give people an understanding and it just quickly align people visually. At the far left, now we didn't quite go to this extreme. We do start in that kind of green traditional outfit from RuneScape, but we nearly started like this. There was a point in our game where you did start on underwear. But you basically, yeah, you start, you have nothing, you then start to work about some very, very basic cloth outfits, you then becomes kind of animal skins, that then becomes more refined with cotton and the use of some very, very basic armor. And we start moving more into that night fantasy. You can see again the tabard has started to come in, but also chainmail, now your ability to craft metal. Start to move then again towards fancier metal. Again, you see Jamie Lannister, that now it's not just armor, it's art. You're really pushing it into the filigree and the fantasy aspect of what that is. And then on the far right, just an example of kind of where fantasy just starts really take off. It can be anything. Now you're making stuff out of Dragonhide. So, you can kind of see, like I said, it's this big, long journey. That's why I'm excited about the next armor, because we have been on that journey.

Mod Doom: Yeah, we've set the foundations for the more primitive, the more brutal, the more hand-to-mouth survival aspect. And now you're starting to figure out how to do more than just throw pelts over your shoulders and you're starting to learn the artistry of making more detailed armor, making more intricate materials, using more nuanced and magical materials, obviously, with the latest update, we've started to introduce Blurite, more familiar RuneScape-y ores, things like that, and then as we're going to progress through those tiers, steel is the next one, but then beyond that, we start to lean more into the fantastical and more exciting RuneScape-y materials that players know and love, but with each of those, there's that progression from, I just need a sheet of metal over me to stop me getting killed too. I am controlling this metal and there is that artistry. So, yeah, the sky's the limit with where these are gonna go. So it's very exciting. And that's always, as that picture shows, that's always been the philosophy, which is so great. So that's incredibly exciting.

Question 3 (at 16:34)

Krotan on Discord: Just a precursor question- How do you pronounce the name? Is it ahhhhrt? Or an aggressive AAAART? Or is it Gaelic/welsh and unpronounceable?

Mod Aaart: I wish it was more clever than it is. Mod Aaart, all that means is, number one, you can understand the connection with art. Art, I'm Irish. When people do imitations of me, they'll often, especially when I say art, and I start all my presentations with art, people always go, art. So it was a no-brainer. It was like, that's gotta be my mod name.

Question 4 (at 17:12)

LupusRexXIII on Discord: Have you had a difficult time balancing the look of the various armours between feeling like their RS3 counterparts and being something unique to Dragonwilds? Some items seem to go off in their own direction (not in a bad way!) Was this to help differentiate the feel between RS3 and Dragonwilds or was there somewhere else with RS3/OSRS you pulled inspiration from?

Mod Aaart: Yeah, it's an interesting one. And actually, it is one of the biggest parts of my job here is obviously on Dragonwilds is this. I've got to take great care, right? This is an existing established IP. It has been around 20 years longer, in fact, longer than that. People know it and they love it and they don't like you changing it is what I'm learning. I care deeply about very specific things, and it's my job is to try and find that balance between what can I change or tweak and what mustn't I change? What have I got to keep? And it's a- It's an approach I get right a lot, but it's an approach I get wrong sometimes. And I have different kind of ways that I can sort of limit the amount of mistakes that I make. Like for instance, Jake, you're one of the people that I talk to a lot, but also, there are other specialists within the team that I always go to, and I'm like, are players gonna like this, or they're gonna hate that? I've taken this away or I've tweaked these things, right? That grounds me, right, because I'm the artist, want to do all of these things. But I must stay true to the IP. It's like you saw this with Star Wars, for instance, when different directors came in and they started tweaking things. You saw the fans, they liked some changes, they didn't like others, but there were certainly lessons to be learned there. So I just know this, I take great care and effort to ensure I'm not changing things that players are going to not appreciate. But what I'm trying to do is to take all of those wonderful ideas and that wonderful imagery and the fantasy that comes from RuneScape from Old School and RuneScape 3. My job is to sort of reimagine that in Unreal. So in other words, we have an opportunity to sort of push fidelity for push our graphics a little bit.

Mod Aaart: But the other thing that I try to do always in the game is to ground it a little bit in real. Okay, now why am I doing that? I'm trying to create a world that feels a little bit more believable, that it's it's grounded in medieval, right? Some of those you'll see in the workstations, you'll see in buildings, you'll see it. Hopefully, you can look at anything in our game and kind of go, I get it. I can understand that that can belong to that kind of era. But I also understand, and I recognize it from RuneScape, and I learned it from Old School or from RuneScape 3. So it's a mixture of balancing the familiar with the new is how I would describe it. I mean, the other thing as well is what we found as well, sometimes RuneScape 3 and old school diverge visually. So, in other words, they reinterpret their own designs. So, you know, and which is the right one? In other words, I have to come in, and you know, if we're using the same thing, it's like, well, which one do I go to? I tend to go to Old School. And the reason being is the simpler, simpler graphics. Like when I used to look at it, I used to scratch my head and go, what is this and what is that? I've come to love the Old School art style because of what the artists have managed to achieve, what they had and what, know, and the limitations that we're working to.

Mod Aaart: And genuinely, when we create anything, you'll often see it in some of the images I'll show you today as well. You will see us referencing directly what was in RuneScape and then giving it that sort of grounded medieval twist that we add to it. And then that final stage that we do as well is we have a slightly different art style, right? Again, a slightly different. We must realize that design in our art style as well. So we're not intentionally just throwing all the RuneScape three-year-olds good stuff at, though. And it's not that at all. It is a journey. And the kind of journey that that is, is we tend to start with, well, let me see if I can pull up an image here in fact. Old School did a version of bronze armor, which is again quite different to this one. This is the RuneScape 3 equivalent bronze armor. You can see how we are recreating this, but again, look at what I've just described here. We squint, we look at these things. So again, you might want to look at the shoulder straps holding in the kind of crudely built bronze plate. It's misshapen, it's crude, you can see there's dents and things like that. And like it's in the original, a lot of this stuff, the ideas are here. We see evidence of chainmail in the original. There's a specific, there's a kind of a shape to the helmet. Same with the shield, that, you know, if we look at the kind of the knee braces, the armor on the legs and feet, and so on. We look at these things, and then the artists go and they find equivalents. In other words, what is the kind of medieval equivalent? Did it exist? Was this logical? Did it make sense? We mash it all together, and then we apply our art style over the top, and we put those wonderful materials and shaders and so on that we talked about right at the beginning. All of those different technicians and artists come together to deliver the sort of thing that you're seeing here on the right. So we're trying to keep true to the essence of what was there before, but then obviously realize it in our art style.

Mod Doom: Yep, it's a truly enormous undertaking to take two very visually distinct games that have been around for 25 years, 25 and 13 years respectively and say, you recognize the shape language, the visuals, but it's something that it's familiar but different and it's unique. And with the tools and the talent available to us, we can really push the envelope with how far we want to go with all of this stuff, which is really exciting. yes, am constantly, unfortunately, unfortunately for Mod Aaart, I'm constantly showing stuff and myself and Mod Raven and Mod Pointy and innumerable other RuneScape fans in the team will take a look at something and go, "Hmm, I don't like how different that head shape looks." Then, Mod Aaart's their head in hands saying, "Okay, just let, but it has to look believable. This looks ridiculous." And we're like, "I'm sorry, it just does look ridiculous." And that's, that's going to be how it looks. Nothing like that has come up so far. Don't worry, we're not calling anything ridiculous yet. It will get ridiculous as we go on. But for now, it's just been making sure that we're not going to be upsetting anyone or stepping on anyone's toes and saying something or change something that is expected.

Mod Aaart: That is so important. We're not looking to do that. In other words, I want players who are familiar with the RuneScape IP to play our game and to feel nostalgia and to feel a sense of, I know that, I recognize that, and also to be pleased. In other words, if I'm doing my job correctly, that is the effect that I'm trying to achieve with it. What we're not trying to do is to reinvent things in a way that people kind of scratch their head and go, "Well, that doesn't feel like RuneScape." or "That doesn't feel like what was in the previous game." If that's happening, then somebody will come and give out to me I would imagine.

Mod Doom: It's something that we've seen from the moment we first announced the game, people saying, this is what I thought RuneScape was going to look like when I grew up. When I grew up, this is what I imagined it would look like. so keeping along with that same track of the familiar but new is so important and something that we constantly are circling back to.

Question 5 (at 25:09)

DividedStoryTime on Reddit: When creating the art direction of the game did you take inspiration from one of the MMO's or was it all creative freedom?

Mod Aaart: So the MMO we took inspiration from is obviously RuneScape. So, RSC and OSRS. So we definitely took huge amounts of our inspiration because obviously we're building a game within that IP. So we must, that is where we should be pulling our inspiration from. We did get creative freedom. And the creative freedom was this too. It was very much, like I said, it was like, so the game has obviously been out a long time RuneScape and it was like, if we were to give it a lick of paint, put it into Unreal and reimagine that, you know, and to really push Unreal and what Unreal can bring in terms of lighting, in terms of kind of just the graphical fidelity that you can achieve in that engine. What would happen if we took RuneScape and pull it in here? You know, kind of where can we push? You know, what is the key things to keep? So that was the of the path that I started on right at the very, very beginning. So when you set an art direction on a game, it's the most important thing that you'll do. It's so important to get that right. I could have gone ultra real. Can you imagine an ultra-real version of RuneScape? Some players may have liked it. But think how visually jarring that would be with what you're familiar with, and the visuals you've become accustomed to over the years playing the game. So I knew immediately we needed to find a visual link, a bridge somewhere between where we could go with Unreal, but also pay homage and stay true to our RuneScape roots.

Mod Aaart: So the kind of journey that we went on with our characters was, well, just looking at stuff like what works well in RuneScape, what's important that we should keep. A lot of time, it's shape language, it's the shapes, it's the colours, it's the saturation, it's a colourful magical world. So there's key things that we take and we go, well we mustn't lose this. You mustn't, you know, there's a lovely quaintness. You know, when you're in Gielinor and you're walking around villages and so on and there's a sense and you see farming and creatures and windmills and castles and these things, there was key things that we just thought we must bring that into this game. can't, I know we're in a different continent, we've moved away from Gielinor, we're in Ashenfall, but I still knew that that was really, really important. We want players to make that visual connection. It'd be jarring, like, no, that's in space. You know, that's the joke we have on the team. It's like, we've changed it. It's not. It is an expansion of that world, but we must maintain the familiar as well as bringing the new.

Mod Aaart: So again, that's the balance. So one of the things, you want, I can show some imagery, for instance, around what we did with characters and so on. So just to give you an idea, why on earth would we even look at these ones at the bottom? What we're trying to do here is, like I said, bridge that gap between the kind of where we've come from to where we're now moving into. And we thought, let's abstract, let's pull all the information that we don't need, but let's focus in on the stuff we need. So players will never have seen these two, but these were the sculpt tests we did right at the very start. These are three, four years old, these tests that you're seeing. But, what we're trying to do is, we need nostrils? Do we need this? Can we stylize an ear? Do you need all of that? Probably not. Think about what you see on the screen with our players. We made a decision very early on to sort of, we call it just abstracting. We're abstracting the sculpt, the shapes, pulling that detail out. Why on earth would you do that? Because we want to think about how we can contrast it with the armour, the clothing. Like for me, in this game, the clothing, the outfits, the progression is the star. It's like, because the first thing the players are going to do is put a helmet on. They're going to want to, you know, and you're not going to see all that lovely fidelity in the face, but they're going to care a lot about their capes. They're going to care a lot about the clothes they're wearing. It's those kinds of, as I- the bragging rights as you progress. So these kinds of decisions, you know, let's simplify, let's pull out, do we need detail? We had arguments about do we have belly buttons? know, it's your fingernails. It's like, this is what happens when you go through this. So again, some of the references you can see here, like Mike Mignola, why now? People would say, what? The guy who did Hellboy, but it's things like how you can communicate an emotion at a distance. And you can see the way we do it with shadows, we did lighting tests on those simplified sculpts. You'll see the sort of the brow, this sort of pronounced brow. We're not putting in details like wrinkles and stuff. That's not what we're about. For us, it's a magical, colorful world. It's a fantasy IP.

Mod Aaart: We don't have to chase real. It doesn't have to be this gritty world. It can be a beautiful world. So like I said, part of that meant finding the balance between that abstraction and our character bodies and then putting this amazingly intricate clothing. And one of the artists that we were heavily inspired by was a guy called Ashley Woods. He creates these wonderful little miniature maquette dolls. He does this. Like, these are collectibles, but we looked at, we just loved what he did. Just all the, almost like fashion. When you look at his work, the pose and the attitude these dolls had, and we just thought, we want our player characters to have that too, to look great and to be full of attitude and communicating visual kind of intent at a distance. So these were the kind of exploration that we all did at the start, just on our characters, just finding that balance between those abstracted forms of the body. And again, these much more detailed grounding sort of approaches to our clothing.

Mod Doom: Yeah, creating a stylized mannequin template that the player can impart themselves onto. Obviously, we've got loads of amazing customisation options, and we're going to keep adding more as the game grows and develops. There's going to be more hairstyles and more facial things and features and things like that. I know they're intensive, resource-heavy things that our poor character artists will stress themselves out over to no end, but we want to give those players those options to make something that they feel is truly their own character. But it is a template around which you can build all of your achievements. wear, obviously, that's something that we've taken from the other RuneScape games, is that you wear your achievements, your progression is displayed on you. We want that to be the star. We've got that slightly abstracted player with the really grounded, earthy textured materials placed on it, and that contrast is really striking. That's I remember seeing the first God years ago now seeing the first art of the player model at that time, even when we weren't on Ashenfall, even when we were slightly removed from it all. I was like, oh, wow, that's that's so such an interesting direction for us to go. So distinct.

Mod Aaart: One of the most interesting parts of project is that it's the most frightening but it's also some of the most rewarding because you're creating art, you're creating something that hasn't existed, you're grabbing a load of references and you don't know, it's high risk but when you land it and people like it, it's like wow, I made that feeling, they're feeling relief and it's just like okay so now we can start pulling flags on the sand and saying with this, this is what we know.

Question 6 (at 32:44)

DividedStoryTime on Reddit: How much stress comes from ensuring everything feels 'in universe' if applicable?

Mod Aaart: Do you want the honest answer do you want the—

Mod Doom: How honest are you going to be?

Mod Aaart: I make, is there stress? Yes, yes, there's stress, the stress on any job, the stress on anything you do in life if you care passionately about it. I think, I think the whole idea of the universe, right? So again, it's a huge game. RuneScape is a massive game. And again, we have the Old School/RuneScape 3 kind of sort of versions as well. What is in the universe? We talk about this all the time. What is— and the term we use is RuneScape-iness. Is it RuneScape-y enough? Is it too RuneScape-y or is it just right? It's that Goldilocks kind of judgment that we make on things. And I promise you this: we get it right, and then we get it wrong. So, and we are there. We are the checks and balances to one another on these things. And rightly so, right? There is no singular voice here. Sometimes I'll put my beret on and go, well, no, for an art point of view, we must make this visual decision. And then we have other voices on the team go, "Are you crazy?" You know, our players are going to expect this, do this. And what will often happen will be that negotiation and a back and forth, and we'll sort of settle on something. Know this, we deeply care, we deeply care. And each one brings a different perspective, but those different perspectives mean that we hit the target more than we miss it because we are the checks and balances to one another.

Mod Doom: Yeah, it's it's it is amazing as someone with no real background in art to be included in those conversations and then being able to put post-it notes on, know, given a selection of options for a character and being told, where do you land on this? And then being like too tall, hat too strange, don't like this color, players will notice this. And then Mod Aaart comes back and is like, "Okay, meet me halfway. What if this instead? we go—"

Mod Aaart: What this week is what happened.

Mod Doom: Yeah, it did. It happens all the time. And it is such a labor of love. Every single character, every single object, item, you name it, is a labor of love because it's trying to find that Goldilocks area in this is ours. It's something different. And also, it's visually reads clearly enough to be what it is. It's also groundless; it's also fantasy. It's different angles. Yeah, it's such an amazing process to be part of, and it is such a labor of love.

Question 7 (at 35:40)

Syl on Discord: I really like the modular system that you have in place for building structures... How did you determine what was going to be necessary and what wasn't for this to be both visually appealing and function to such a wide extent? Are there any rules you've followed (or made) to create it?

Mod Aaart: Yes is the answer. Great question. So firstly. I'm delighted to hear that you're enjoying using the building system. I can promise you this is not one where art can take all the far from it. This is very much a team effort. So in other words when you're building a modular gameplay system and you know something that's going to have to the players are going to want to build, enjoy building and most of all not be frustrated by. So we had these, these were literally our goals right from the start. In fact, we used the term, it was like, if our players wanted to build a Millennium Falcon, we should allow them. We wanted to give as much sort of creativity to players as we could without overwhelming them with just so much intricate pieces. I mean, there's so many different ways you can go about it. So, how do you go about even planning that? Well, one, you put on some very clever designers who will study lots of other games and they will figure out what have they done well. Because if they've done it well, we should pay attention. We can also learn from other games that perhaps have done it and sort of made a few missteps along the way, and we can kind of go, okay, well, you know, we can learn from those things too. But ultimately, we were driven right from the start by the goal. It should be intuitive. It should be pleasing. It should be a relaxing thing, not a thing that frustrates the player. And if we can, maximise our players ability to be creative and to create whatever it is they're trying to create So that was part of it So the process for that basically means that the designers that we call it gray boxing, but they create template shapes whether it's squares, triangles, all of those different pitches of roof all of the different compared that wall with window wall with door all of the different things, you start with a base set of shapes and things that are gonna snap together. You figure out where would they snap? How would that feel? How is that process of snapping it together gonna feel? Even things like, what if I don't have the equipment, or I don't have the resources, but I wanna build? So ghost mode comes from that. It's like, actually, I still wanna build, and I don't have the materials yet, but can still build, and then I'll come back later. When I have the resources, it will complete.

Mod Aaart: But like I said, we wanted it to be intuitive and a pleasing, relaxing experience, not a frustrating experience for players. That's number one. But when it gets into visuals, I can share some visuals. Just an example of when does art get involved? Art gets involved when design hand this to us and say, "Guys, we feel that we've proven our gameplay.", feel we are now hitting the kind of, it feels good on the sticks. We think players are going to like this. Art then goes, ok, just jump straight into to go and art. We're going to art this up. It's where you can see what really if you go into these are this is our environment where all of those individual pieces are coming. This is only a subset. This is a tiny amount of what is actually in the game.

Mod Aaart: You get an idea like this is a wall, this is a 45-degree pitch, here's the door, that's the door frame, and so on, and we look at it in very modular ways, you can imagine. At this point, these things have now snapped together because the designers have done their part. They have done that work to make this all feel good for what's the next image. Just to give you an idea, again, this is part of what we do. We prove it out. It's like, okay, we'll come in and build a house. What's that going to look like? I mean, you know, this takes trial and error. You don't just get this right. This— this things with, you know, the foundations, how this stuff is going to feel. Does it feel grounded? Does that would match the trees that are next to it? Does it really not? Is the resources you're using to build it? And again, we have to think about. How should it look? Should it look high fidelity? No, it's the first time you build a house. Have you ever tried to build a house? I guarantee this is the first house you're going to build. You're going to be misshaping wood. You don't have a sawmill. You've chopped these trees down. The wood is as good and misshapen as you're going to get it. But it should have gaps. It shouldn't look like it's accomplished. It should look like you and I have just, give it a go. We've built it hurry because there's a wolf about to eat me. Where visual aesthetics come in, this is art, this is the kind of stuff I put into the art direction document. In other words, what should we aim towards?

Mod Aaart: I will talk about the word compromise. So in other words, you might say, like the feeling of this. And what's the feeling of this? I love it feeling organic. I love the fact that it's misshapen. It's a bit ramshackle. I love the fact that maybe that first floor overhangs slightly, very medieval. You know, love, there's key things here. Now, what am I looking at here? This is a model. So model making is an aesthetic. I mentioned it before with characters where we looked at Ashley Wood dolls and things like that. When you miniaturize things and kind of, why that's pleasing and what aspects we like to keep. These are models, models of little houses and things. But look what happens. Look at the oversized hinges, the oversized handles, the lintels, the fact that the frames around windows and doors is in relief and comes out, the corners of walls and things like that. There's key visual things that I'm pulling from this and I'm going, I wanna see this. Now you don't always get it. So compromise is a thing, right? If I was just making this building in our game, guess what, it probably would look something like this. We're not, we're making modular buildings. Here's another example, lots and lots more model making that we looked at again, again, same principles, we're pulling, we're looking at what these oversized elements, just playing with proportion. We're not looking for real. We don't want, we can do real, but we're not looking for, we're looking for something that's charming, magical, know, pushing into fantasy, pushing into stylized away from just real.

Mod Aaart: These are all key references. And again, we start with things like this. So now there's a big concept over those shapes that the designer handling. So what is the compromise? Where can we, where do we align? I can't have some of the things I've just shown you. I can't, you can't do it in a modular system. Because we have to put things next to things, you'd see it all repeating, and we can't have the misshapen things because that won't work. And then the overhang is a bit trickier. Although players can do it. It's a compromise. We always have to make these compromises. So these are the kind of key things I wanted to show you here, just around when you build a modular system like this, there are great things you can do, but there's things you can't. There's things you have to compromise about. But what we're trying to do is to capture some of the magic as much as we can, but most importantly, make it to be a pleasurable, intuitive experience that players don't get frustrated doing.

Mod Doom: Yeah, a building has become something that obviously our community loves. Just recently I shared internally to the rest of the Dragon Wilds team that one of our players had, I think a mixologist had created a one-to-one recreation of the Senntisten Colosseum from RuneScape where you fight Keropac the bound, a beautiful, beautiful, amazing build made possible because of just how modular the system is, and just how well it all melds together and that philosophy is obviously how we're approaching everything building-wise that we're going to be doing going forward as well. It's the same thing of how does this fit, how does this build together, does this look right, it's balancing all those different aspects in a way that feels nice. So I'm really excited.

Question 8 (at 43:35)

Psy-Duck on Discord: When you designed the art for the Garou, what made you think of designing them the way we see them in game, and what inspiration did you follow in order to come up with them?

Mod Aaart: Yeah, it's an interesting and again, I'll take it a journey again. These were one of the very first things that we did. So, so Garou, all right. Well, it was interesting very early on, right? We did this even before we did the Godlands. We were trying to bring something new into the RuneScape universe, right? Something players hadn't seen. Now, we also brought in the Godlands afterwards because we knew actually familiarity is also very, very important, but we wanted to bring something new. So some of the original creative direction, and again, this comes from our designers, it comes from our creative director. It was just this idea that they weren't native to the land that they had arrived. I think they were described as a race that had fallen from, I think they'd been much, more, I guess, technologically smart, had, you know, there was a sense of highborn and lowborn. So just to give you an idea, this guy, the Melly Broller, I we called him a Berserker at this time, you can see how old this concept was, but this is going right back. This guy was supposed to be kind of lowborn.

Mod Aaart: So, in other words, he's the fodder, the cattle that the Highborne send in to sort of fight. His armor is very basic. can see, I managed to wrangle in a leather kilt in here. I wanted that kind of, these kind of Scottish warrior feel to this guy that, you know, like he is adorned in the same kind of stuff play as I, he's got fur and leather on it, but he doesn't have metal. He's not as protected as others. He also then, was a couple of key things. Look, if you look at the character, of the group is cat-like, so we definitely took inspiration. And we were experimenting with different sort of, could one be a leopard, could one be a lion? All these kind of things about underlying textures. But we already had so many other visual complexities to them. They're new in our art style. The other thing that you're seeing on the red, for instance, here, and the thorny aspects are sticking out the shoulders. This is to do with the anima twist, right? This is another layer of complexity we tried to bring to these things. So in other words, the anima, the magic that's all over Ashenfall mutates these creatures. Any creatures that live there will have some kind of a mutation around them. Now they're not necessarily ugly, they can be beautiful, but this guy's a predator, so we lean into the spikier shape language of thorns and so on. So, in other words, he's mutating.

Mod Aaart: He has this sort of the red, the moths and stuff, the colouring have gone for the way you find them. I've talked a little bit about his costume, but look at the little icon on his belt. That icon is repeated across them all. at the time, I'm not sure how successful we were with it, but really what we were trying to do is Highborne Crown. It's either the idea that it's a horseshoe or it's kind of like a look downward pointing horns, but a separation of highborn and lowborn just as a sigil, just as an idea behind it. His tail is cropped. Now, he can't have a fancy, lovely tail. There's key little visual things that we're always trying to add. But jump into some of the early concepts as well. This is the ranged version. Again, you're thinking in their hierarchy, he's probably a bit up from the melee guy. Again, he's got a little bit more armor to it. This guy had, look at his cool weapons. He's got again, that sigil that we just talked about on his belt. We did some concepts around the kind of stuff that he has. You can see they're making the fashioning armor, just like the player, out of what lives here. So as you can see, the deer antlers is in there. We're pulling in the wood.

Mod Aaart: This is kind of the 3D, some of the early stuff that we did, but you can definitely see like the fashioning weapons out of things that they've killed, just like players will. It's somewhat grounded and moves us away from kind of the more real into a little bit more towards fantasy. This is kind of how they ended up. Again, another key visual that we're really paying attention to is making sure that they're visually distinct from one another. know, a Ranger and a melee fighter. I don't want a player not knowing what they're about to go into. These are deliberate visual choices that we make just to help players not get frustrated. Again, this guy, this was the of the druid, what we described as the magic druid version. Again, you can see some of the shape language here, believe it or not, if you look at even Anna's weapon, you can see the kind of crown. And the same shape carrying through, it's on his belt as well. And players will never probably have seen this, I saw it, but maybe players hadn't. But just little details, see it in, again, the sigil is on the bottom of his skirt. But again, in terms of hierarchy, there's somewhere between, again, the lower and the highborn, these would have some significance. We had to come up with a bit of a shape language there for the pattern. But you can see, we're trying to ground it as well. We're trying to bring in materials and go, okay, so that, you know, some of the materials these guys will have, you know, maybe they've brought with them from wherever they've come from, and others they've had to fashion from where they've landed. And again you see there's lovely the horns again from one of our deers, so again they're fashioning things from the land that they're in.

Mod Doom: And it breaks up the silhouette so that in a moment if you're looking in the distance you can say I see a hood, that's a ranger, I see horns, that's a—

Mod Aaart: And it is honestly, it's very much part of how we design. We do not want to frustrate players. We are trying to make life simpler for players. Let me see if I've got one more. think I have it. Yeah, again, there's a lot stuff to say about Thane. So this is the Highborne. His hair is allowed to grow long, His armour is metal. He has gold on everything. Again, that sigil proud on his chest. You know, he is your Highborne. Again, you see it there repeated on the weapons. Look at the axe itself. The axe is made of it. So again, I don't know if players ever spotted it, but this is very much how we design. We're always trying to bring little things and sort of, and it links things, and maybe subconsciously it sort of visually makes it a little bit more cohesive.

Mod Doom: We want it to be— to have that parity with what you expect. We want to have that parity with what you would expect from a Zamorakian race of, you know, things like the Black Knights or Zamorakian demons and things like that. They will all have the horns. Bandoshian goblins will always have the Bandos' symbol. Armadillians will wear the crest. And so that visual language is there, Saradomin armor will have the star, Guthixian armor will have the symbol of Guthix. So Lougrim is one of those pantheon of characters whose iconography is embodied through the characters around them. So having that expectation there is obviously it's very RuneScape-y that, you know, it's the God Wars style, everyone wears the crest of their race, of their creed. And so it's just implemented in a way that I think is very RuneScape-y. Maybe, as you said, maybe not everyone noticed it, but the care and attention, the passion is there, the attention to detail is there to make sure that it's in a way that the players would expect. So, I hope the players notice it and see it and love it.

Mod Aaart: I'm going to go out and say Psy-Duck did notice it and asked a wonderful question. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to show it.

Question 9 (at 51:03)

Keplare on Discord: When did you start your role as the Art Director in RuneScape: Dragonwilds, and have you been with the RuneScape team prior to becoming the Art Director?

Mod Aaart: Yep, so I started, think I had to dig this one out actually. It was August 2021 when I started. So again, I started, think, an Associate Art Director role, but really, I was the Art Director at the start, there was no Art Director. So I moved into that role. I worked with some people here at the company, but we basically set the art direction very early on. A big part of it was proving it out, know, getting alignment, getting people to agree, yes, this is the visual direction. But yeah, so like I said, I've been on it since 2021. I was at Jagex for a previous, I think another year or two, maybe two years. I did work on a different game. I didn't work on RuneScape 3 or Old School. I worked on a different prototype that was in development. Now that, unfortunately, was paused, but some of the team that had worked on that formed the core team that then spun off into Dragonwilds.

Mod Doom: Yep. That was before my time when I, was before I became a J-Mod, but there is still the occasional, I think there's a door in the office that has some of that old projects on it here and there. So there are still a few bits and bobs from around there, but yeah, you've been here from the very start, and I've gone back, back in time, and I've done my research. I've got two history degrees. I naturally, the moment I got the chance to go rifling through the archives, I went back and had a look at the formative process of defining character, defining what our shape language was, all of the stuff that you've built out, the design documentation, and seeing that carry on through different proposals of, obviously we ended up setting this on Ashenfall and the art direction there, but there were lots of different versions of that. And what if it looked like this? What if it was this place? What if it was set here? What if it was set there? I know that Mod Dutch spoken about it a little bit as well of there was a point where it was set in the abyss, in the void with void nights. That was a little bit limiting in what we could do.

Mod Aaart: You talk about the kind of what's too RuneScape-y, what's not RuneScape-y enough, that possibly was not RuneScape-y enough. It was a niche area. Really interesting idea. The creative direction, I think, was solid. The idea of setting it in the best way was to be the actual faction— what was the name of the Knight faction?

Mod Doom: Void Knights.

Mod Aaart: Void Knights, correct. Really interesting ideas, but maybe a little bit off, not that it was expected.

Mod Doom: You have to have done a bit of reading around RuneScape and know what a Void Knight is to really be like, okay, I understand this. Whereas I think when we kind of took a step back and said, okay, when you think of RuneScape, do you think of the Abyss? The consensus was, no, I think of Lumbridge. We were like, okay, great. So it's medieval, it's fantasy, it's windmills, it's grass, it's... okay.

Mod Aaart: I'd like to think we've learnt our lesson on these things, but we'll see. Time will tell.

Mod Doom: You never know, that might be hidden up our sleeve in the future. We'll flip the script, we'll bring it back. I hope not. What we've got is beautiful, I don't want us to stop doing that.

Question 10 (at 54:31)

Zenathrius on Discord: Hi Mod Aaart, the skeletons and lesser green dragons are looking amazing in Fellhollow. Will you bless us with some more sneak peeks in the nearby future?

Mod Aaart: Zenathrius, that's a great question. I will fashion you with an updated image of our green dragon. So this is our green dragon. This, the name of our game, Dragonwilds, dragons are hugely important, right? As we're launching all of these new regions, we're obviously gonna bring in lots and lots of dragons. This is our lesser green dragon. And I'm so pleased when we sort of landed this and got this one over the line. This to me, in terms of art style, is kind of what we're always trying to do. I talk about this abstraction of shapes and silhouettes and pulling detail out, and then finding the right level of detail and textures and so on. This to me is really landing kind of around, it means that the art team are maturing, the style is maturing, we're pushing in slightly different directions as well. But I was so pleased to see this over the line, the Leicester Green Dragon. So yeah, I can show you this one, skeletons. We are still finishing up our skeletons. I'm not really ready to show them yet, but maybe my dims arm could be twisted at some point to maybe show something before we release Fellhollow in December. Who knows? I'm very excited to show it because I'm very proud of what we've been doing with the skeletons. But I will, I'll show you one thing, why it's not a skeleton.

Mod Aaart: But I will show you what we describe as the zombie cow. This is an undead cow. But just to give you an idea of the kind of some of the creatures you're going to encounter when you play Fellhollow. It is a world where, you know, creatures aren't quite dead, not quite alive as well, their souls have somehow been stripped away from them. this was a lovely experiment where we were playing with things, trying to take a creature that, again, we'd already established in Brynmoor and go and follow in, it's like, ok, well, what would an undead version of it, how much is too much, how can we expose, what kind of palette, how does it read in the daytime, can you see it at night time, all of these different decisions. You know, the fact that it exposes bone and bone is a certain colour, and then tying that in with skeletons. And there's a whole myriad of visual decisions you have to make. But just to give you an idea, like kind of what we're doing in the background around Fellhollow, it is exciting. It is a significant upgrade and an expansion of kind of the experience players will have had. I'm very excited visually. I'm very excited for players to see it because we're bringing in new palettes, new creatures, new experiences, new gameplay mechanics. So I'm delighted that Zenathrius, let's go with Zenathrius, I'm still guessing, let's go with it. I'm delighted that they are excited to see more of the Skeletons. We are excited to show you, but just not yet.

Question 11 (at 57:35)

Marv_Schar on Instagram: Are there any plans to expand the range of buildable or decorative objects soon?

Mod Aaart: Yes, yes there are. That's a segue. So obviously, we've got tier— what we describe as tier three building is imminent. We want to put that in the hands of players. I will give you a little sneak peek. Don't tell anybody I showed you this. Hopefully you can see based on building. But this is just our gym in other words, this is just us playing with the base materials. Those modular pieces that we talked to you about before, know, kind of how each individual piece links to the other. That's what these pieces are. There's two images I can show you. But just to give you an idea, what we're trying to do now is allow players to now build castles. You heard it. In other words, castles, building stone buildings. In other words, you can still mix this up. You can mix this with wood. You can mix this with the other two tiers of building. Of course you can, but think about kind of the visual aesthetics of our world and how this is now going to change when players can start building structures like this. You know, it's to do it for, you know, strength as well. We can build higher now because it's stone. But also just the look and think again how, you know, when Gielinor, when you think back to those kinds of stone buildings and kind of, you know, what really we wanted to look and feel like. We're now giving players the opportunity to do it. So it is definitely coming. In terms of things like decorating decorative objects and so on.

Mod Aaart: We definitely want to expand on that. So basically, everything we build and put into the game, everything, we're always thinking about how can we give that to a player? So even when we're designing our AI and we're designing our goblin helmets and you name it, all these other things, we're always thinking, well, the players are going to want that. So we're always thinking of these things. How are we going to be able to start sharing things? So it is very much on our roadmap. It's just to always expand on kind of what we're allowing players to have access because we want players to be able to decorate their homes, to sort of express themselves, and you know that is definitely part of what we want. So it's in our roadmap at the moment, obviously we're working through a broad set of priorities as well, but we will get there you can expect to see this other stuff in the future.

Mod Doom: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's something that we've always had feedback on, and players have always been very vocal on is the moment they see a decoration, they're like, can we have that? Which has proven to be a challenge sometimes. But we've done a lot and the team have been amazing at going through just about every area in the game and saying, okay, you know, the guru decorations are a great example of saying we've got these amazing camps, these war bands, these sort of roaming, sort of nomadic setups with lots of different ornate decorations and really lovely themed setups that the environment artists and level designers work together to build that are gorgeous. And then we've sort of gone back and said, okay, can we take this specific wall hanging? Can we take this pile of tusks? Can we take this seat? Can we take this? And how can we start to pull some of these elements out and give these to players as a reward for exploring, finding things, monsters? How do we impart that to players, but then give them the options to make it their own? But it does take time. We want to make sure that it works, that it fits, that it looks right. So it is something that's going to continue to be worked on, I'm sure. it's... Yeah, it's something.

Mod Aaart: When players express themselves and play around this stuff, honestly, you've no idea how happy it makes me. I think we'd looked when we just launched, I watched one person use our wardrobe, which was not part of our building system, but used it as a method to stack and access areas of the game we didn't want them to access. And that to me was genius. You've no idea how happy I was when I saw players do that. But in other words, we're giving objects to players and they're using them in ways we hadn't expected. So we have to be careful of that too. So we can't just give them everything, or they may break our game in ways we don't expect. But to know this at a high level, we want to give players this. We want players to be able to build homes and decorate them in whatever way they see fit.

Mod Doom: Yeah, but then also it's just seeing players. It doesn't necessarily have to be the biggest, most enormous builds. Obviously, some of them are. Players like Divine Gaze and Mixolution making these enormous ornate palaces and incredible pieces. Yes, but then also just building cozy little nooks. I know that Mod Dutch, every now and then I'll send a photo of something I've built. I like to tinker around in custom mode just as something to do to relax. And every now and then I'll send one. They often end up becoming the background for social posts. Things like this Q&A, the post that we've put up that had an image in it that I just made in creative mode. But even those little ornately detailed bits that let people kind of express themselves have a bit of an environmental storytelling-y moment, fantastic and I love that sort of thing. Yeah, more of that is so exciting and letting players put down as much as they want and go a bit crazy with it is always exciting.

Question 12 (at 1:03:02)

BrianR_XX on Instagram: How do you balance artistic vision with the technical limitations of the game and the different graphical setting choices? So many people will be playing this game on many different types of hardware and I'd image striking that perfect balance can be extremely challenging.

Mod Aaart: That's a question, Brian R. So how do you strike a balance? You strike a balance between visual and tech limitations carefully. You consult with your team. So in other words, we've released on PC. PCs come with myriads of different graphics cards and technical abilities, which can all affect both your visuals and your performance. Those are the two things I have to consider, whatever your decision I make is visual fidelity performance. It's like, yes, I can make it look amazing, but you'll lose your frame rate. I've got to also think about the player experience across all of those different machines and different setups. So again, it tends to be dialogue. How do we strike a balance? Lots of dialogue. I start with by asking for way too much. We have a bunch of technical artists, we graphics programmers, have technical directors. They come to me, scratch their head and go, this guy's insane. He can't have that, but he can have this. So in other words, the dialogue begins, some things I'll really push for, some things I'll kind of go, yeah, that's fair enough, that wears my hat. We absolutely can't have that because what we absolutely don't want is players getting a really slow frame rate.

Mod Aaart: I'm watching it like a series of static images that look very pretty. So the art director's happy because they look great. I have to strike that balance. So every visual decision I make, whether it's VFX, lighting, the environment, the fidelity of the environment, the buildings, know, characters, cloth sims, all of the dynamic things, everything that you're seeing on that screen comes about through a series of decisions like that, where we talk to experts. I ask for too much. They talk sense into me, and we find a compromise somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I win, sometimes they win. But the idea is always that common sense prevails. My job is to push fidelity as much as I can. The tech director's job is to sort of make sure that we get the frame rate and the performance that we want. And like I said, sense should prevail. But that's how we do it. Obviously, when we get into full commercial launch, a whole new set of things, we're releasing different consoles.

Mod Aaart: All right, so now we now, it's not just that we need to think about all the different fidelity settings across all the different machines and specs, plus the different graphical options. We now also factor in, know, all of the different requirements of each individual platform we're now going to release on as well. But my job is just to try and make sure that what we present looks great and performs well. And then obviously do my best to make sure that that is maintained across every platform that we release on.

Mod Doom: Yeah, that's it. At the moment, obviously, some of our players are very excitedly building entire cities and then saying, "It's taking a while to load into my game". And we're like, "Yes, we're aware of that." That is unfortunately the trade off of building these things.

Mod Aaart: Didn't someone cover the entire of Brynmoor with... floors?

Mod Doom: Just floors. Yeah, floored the whole thing. I saw that video too. They completely covered the entire region in floor so you couldn't spare the trees.

Mod Aaart: Yeah, so we give players the tools to break the game and they break the game, you understand my meaning is I have to assume players are going to do that too and that sort of stuff does feed into some of the decisions we make.

Question 13 (at 1:06:50)

FamousPat21 on Instagram: When I will be able to sit on a chair?

Mod Aaart: Right now. Give yourself a chair. I think he means in Dragonwilds. So when can you do it? No word of a lie. The animations for sitting down in a chair were done probably two years ago. We did invest a bit of time in this, how players will interact with furniture, not just chairs, all kinds of things. But it takes time to balance and to technically support systems like that, because there's edge cases everywhere where it will break. And we can imagine the different priorities that we have across the project. So many features, so many game features we try and push in, so many different systems. It's all down to priority. So we will get to this. It will be in the game at some point. I promise you. There's a promise for me. We will get this in. It's just when. And I don't have that answer at this point. It would be way down the list of priorities based on what the ambition of our project right now, how much we are trying to do. And we're trying to deliver to the systems that players will probably appreciate the most. This is a nice to have, what I would describe it. It would be nice. I want it. want players to have to sit next to a thing in their house, and so on. I absolutely want those things. We also, we've got some good stuff coming that players will also like, and they may want that more than that. And that tends to be what governs our decision.

Mod Doom: I think if I was able to, and if I was brave or stupid enough to go to players and say A or B, sit in chairs or this, we would be very interested to see the answers. It would also be very foolish to show players what they're trading off. That's our decision to make, unfortunately, it's our cross the bear. Obviously, we hear these feedback points, we hear all of it, not just I want to sit in a chair, it's I would like more decorations I want to this, I want to do this, I would love to do this, whereas I would love to see this introduced to the game. All of that stuff is always heard across not just art, but every department in the entire team. Hearing all of these exciting passions, please, we hear you. And it is always about finding the right balance and finding something that— that's going to be beneficial for us all in the long run that we're all going to be happy with.

Question 14 (at 1:09:25)

NinthCloudArt on Twitter: The stormtouched highlands and starry night sky are some of the favourite visuals in game, how's the process been working with the team to create elements of beauty while still having areas of danger in Dragonwilds?

Mod Aaart: Yeah, it's a lovely, well firstly, thank you, NinthCloudArt. Thank you for that. It's absolutely lovely to hear when players appreciate visuals and appreciate kind of what we're trying to do and the effort that we're putting into these things. So again, just the sky that you're talking about just really quickly. How do we come to a visual decision around this or you know, why do we? We're not just trying to do real right? So again, one of the big things we're done. That's not what we're doing. We're trying to do something magical something colorful something that feels visually interesting and slightly stylized and more linked to RuneScape. Okay, so we're not we could have gone into unreal put an absolutely high fidelity and realistic sky up there but that's not what we're doing. So we want players to look at the sky and kind of okay so they're yellow. The more astute of you will know that yellow I think are normally planets whereas white are stars. This is a visual to us right we're just playing. Twinkles— we've put twinkles into our skies. What is that purple wisp? It's anima. We're trying to show that this world is magical, and we want you to look around it. You know, when you really look around, hopefully most of the time you'll see something magical in that little frame when you look at it. So those magical wisps of anima in the sky, you also see them in the, you know, in the ground. It's the stuff that's ripping open the chasm. You see it around the dragon tower.

Mod Aaart: You know that huge chasm of anima it is what is mutating the land it's also what's mutating the creatures when you die you know and you see that the kind of VFX and the colors of those VFX you'll see that we've actually tapped into anima it's almost like the creatures in this world return it's like there's an anima connection we're trying to infuse anime into a lot of the visual decision making so I appreciate thank you for saying you like it I like it too. We've also done a huge upgrade on clouds recently as well. This is, again, your sky should be looking a lot, lot better now as well, which is wonderful. You also mentioned the Stormtouched Highlands. I thought it'd be interesting just to whip back to this. This was one of the very first imaginings we had of what the Stormtouched Highlands might actually look like. Now we've abandoned the mountains again. I know you don't see them as much, but the key things that I would say that we stay true to were it is a land, it's a slightly different palette. We wanted this to feel different. So if you look at the grass, it's yellowy brown.

Mod Aaart: It's different to the green lush meadows that you see below. Why are we doing that? We're thinking, look, it's rugged, it's thinner soil, less nutrition. How do we visually show that this is why things look different? Less flowering plants, these are more heath and you'll see the kind of plants that we invest in, it's a bit more hardy shrubs and so on. Again, this is one of the original visions. What kind of creatures are we gonna find up there is important. We also wanted to show that it rains a lot. It rains a lot, a lot of weather, it's harsh. There's resources here you need, but it's not going to be easy for you going up here. So for instance, we also want to throw dragons, bones, bones of creatures that have lived in this world. Why do do things like this? It adds a kind of believability, a sense of history to a place. It's an unspoken kind of story. You don't know enough about it, but we wanted these bones littering this location, again.

Mod Aaart: You so you start layering this up. What if it was darker? What if it's raining? What if there's lightning? What if there's bones? Everything is all about making a player feel a certain way. And we're leaning into that kind of friction, that kind of survival friction that players have to, yes, you can do this, but we're going to make it a little difficult, and it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable. Just like anything, we do lots of research. We know, this is, these are some of the studies we did just to help guide some of the sculpts and stuff of the environment. This one, I just took an image this morning, just quickly. But you get an idea of where all of this sort of thinking leads. What was important? We wanted the player to feel a certain way. We wanted them to see a certain bunch of things. And this is kind of where you end up. It's always a journey where you're trying to kind of bring something visually interesting, but tell a story as well, but also serve as gameplay.

Mod Doom: Yeah, it is that it is a balance and a contrast of at the time, you may not feel like it but when you're in Brynmoor, when you're in the starting areas, when you're in Bramblemead Valley, it is not hostile. It's very reclaimed by nature. And there's a sort of melancholy to the ruins. But as you progress into Stormtouched Highlands, the weather, the bones, the lightning, everything is actively hostile to you. Everything around you is so much more powerful, so much more hardened by the environment that there's such a contrast there that once you do step beyond that threshold, you make it through the swamp, you step into that threshold and it's an entirely different atmosphere and entirely different space and that distinction is always so striking and it's something that I love about not just Ghornfell, not just the Stormtouched Highlands, but also even now having seen Fellhollow taking shape, being able to, whenever I see a screenshot of of Dragonwilds I can be like, I know what game that is because we've got such distinct palettes and you can see exactly where someone is because of our really strong use of colour and it's so lovely to be able to immediately recognise a location and say, I know where that is, my god!

Mod Aaart:We do try, and we will continue to try because obviously graphics, care a lot about it, the visuals, we care a lot about it. And like I said, the colour, the magical aspect of RuneScape, we don't want to lose that. That's something we're going to lean into more and more as we expand in all the different regions.

Conclusion

Mod Doom: I'm very excited. It's going to be an amazing journey, and obviously I'm going to be doing my best to show everything to players, take them along the journey with us. Maybe we'll be able to share some more that we've alluded to today in the coming days and weeks. So I'm really excited to take players on that journey with us. I want to thank you so much for taking so much time out of your schedule. My word, I've eaten into your day. I do apologize. You poor thing, having to put up with me. Thank you so much, Mod Aaart, for taking time out of your very busy schedule to come and talk to me and our players.

Mod Aaart: Thank you to the players for obviously coming with these questions. I hope it's been of some interest to you. But yeah, I'm just looking forward to actually getting this stuff into your hands and playing it. So yeah, I guess we'll talk later when Fellhollow drops again, and I'd be really curious to see how you all feel about it.

Mod Doom: So on behalf of Mod Aaart, myself and the entire RuneScape: Dragonwilds team, we want to thank you so much for watching. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for submitting your questions, and as always, have a brilliant morning, afternoon, or evening wherever you are in the world, and we will see you in the next RuneScape Dragonwilds video. Until then, take care, and we'll see you in Ashenfall Adventures. Be good. Bye.