Jagex today announced that they are cancelling the weapon diversity update, a project that had been in beta for the last month. The weapon diversity program was meant to differentiate weapons from one another on a more solid grounding, but the major impression was that the update just wasn’t transformative enough. Most changes were being made to weapon DPS which left players simply choosing the weapon with the most optimized damage.
In the end, we were unanimous as a team. The QA resource could be used on projects that we are currently working on (and planning to announce at Runefest), tightening them up and increasing our confidence in them. That came with a caveat: we still believed in the aims of Weapon Diversity, so we agreed that we would get our design team to design completely new utility benefits for weapons, which could be introduced over time rather than in one big clutch. For example, a quest might have a reward of a javelin; we would then take the opportunity to release a javelin effect to be rolled out for all javelins at the same time.
With their options being plough ahead, restart the project from scratch, or cancel it and focus on other major projects, Jagex chose to cancel. The good news is that while this project is dead, the spirit remains alive and is still being planned for the future.
Regardless of all of this, the aims of Weapon Diversity have not gone away: we still want to bring strategy back into weapon choice, and we believe that will make the gaining of weapon rewards so much more joyful.
Incidentally the weapon diversity beta ran alongside the bank rework update which was also temporarily cancelled only to be brought back, so those who had been looking forward to this update may not be completely disappointed.
Source: RuneScape
