Devlog - Legend of the Abyss

[Carl-Richard]

Meanwhile, I'm playing an unofficial restoration of a 22 year old game.

Quote

What is Lost City?

Lost City is focused on RuneScape preservation through open-source accessibility.

We are an initiative that has been ongoing since 2022 to recreate and restore forever-lost RuneScape 2 versions.

The old game will only live in fleeting memories otherwise. Jagex has no backups.

Development is at a steady hobbyist pace - after 2 years of active open-source development (2023) we hosted Lost City publicly for players in 2025.

If you want to help, potential contributors are encouraged to visit our development Discord to chat with us. We can teach people willing to learn.

https://lostcity.rs/t/faq-what-is-lost-city/16

Edited yesterday at 01:20 AM by Carl-Richard

[LordFall]

17 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Meanwhile, I'm playing an unofficial restoration of a 22 year old game.

https://lostcity.rs/t/faq-what-is-lost-city/16

I played runescape a bit in school, I didn't get into it I'm french so I ended up falling for another popular mmorpg at the time Dofus.

I like the job system from runescape, I like systems so the different jobs going from 1-99 seems cool to me.

Can you elaborate on what you like about the game and why you still play it all these years later?

Also why do you think the MMORPG and gaming industry as a whole is stagnating? Seems a lot of the biggest mainstream games are just reverting their game back to 10 years ago and people are liking that more than their new versions. Happened to World of Warcraft, Runescape, Dofus and League of Legends now also released a classic mode that is just the 2014 game. 

@Leo Gura Chris Roberts the founder of star citizen is apparently a black sheep in the game dev industry and is known for being a narcissistic micromanager that's clearly destroying the actual business efficiency of Cloud Imperium Games to produce actual value for their customers.

Edited 20 hours ago by LordFall

[AerisVahnEphelia]

VR is shit, but I would like a huge mmo who is the pursuit of guild wars (1) with more deep lore like WoW.

[AerisVahnEphelia]

On 10/06/2026 at 4:50 PM, Leo Gura said:

Game development with AI is very deceptive because early on in development it seems like you're making rapid progress, but late on in development you will realize how much of an illusion that was. Game development gets exponentially harder as you try to ship a commercially meaningful game. The complexity of the game multiplies. The bugs multiply.

It's relatively easy to make half-assed unpolished game prototypes. What's really hard is creating a shippable, polished, commercial game.

But hey! I'm not saying it's impossible. Of course there are ways to leverage AI to help you make games faster. I'm just saying you should not expect it to be as easy as the AI hype-mongers claim.

Good luck with your game! I hope you succeed.

AI is very far away for making full games if you're a noob.

I think AI is good to complete your code or your ideas when you're ALREADY an expert at something, it complete an expertise but don't replace a true expertise and years of contemplation and epistemology in a domain.

[Leo Gura]

A chatbot will never make a good video game. Pure nonsense.

[LordFall]

7 minutes ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

VR is shit, but I would like a huge mmo who is the pursuit of guild wars (1) with more deep lore like WoW.

What don't you like about VR? How uncomfortable the headsets are or you don't believe in the concept fundamentally even if they made the headsets way better? 

[AerisVahnEphelia]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

A chatbot will never make a good video game. Pure nonsense.

No, it won't, but it will increase ideation and improve speed.

Also, it's crazy that people still underestimate GPT, especially the latest versions.

I've seen crazy stuff built with Claude. Sure, COMPARED to a real game, it's still shit, but many are already better than games made by solo indie devs.

I mean, currently it's shit, but what even is a chatbot? Neural networks are almost magical. No one really understands what makes them "understand" the meaning of words in the first place.

Stats alone can't explain reasoning, and they do have some form of it.

Will chatbots replace game dev? Certainly not. But the next iteration of AI, built with the help of chatbots or in association with them, might.

but what even is a chatbot : no fucking clue.

we got this magic box that spit words and sometimes does words really create something new from the old.
 

[AerisVahnEphelia]

14 minutes ago, LordFall said:

What don't you like about VR? How uncomfortable the headsets are or you don't believe in the concept fundamentally even if they made the headsets way better? 

the headset is annoying indeed. not confortable.

We aren't there yet to my taste.

[LordFall]

33 minutes ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

the headset is annoying indeed. not confortable.

We aren't there yet to my taste.

Yeah, that's fair. I think it'll 10 years it'll be the new thing but right now the headset is a huge problem.

This girl is blowing up with her AI videos on Instagram. I'll give it a go and report back if it worked. If I can start getting tens of thousands of views on the Legends of the Abyss instagram then that's gonna be the start of a customer base. Fuck then I'll have to really code the game asap haha let's get it going! 

 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

improve speed.

By 5%  maybe.

[Carl-Richard]

19 hours ago, LordFall said:

I played runescape a bit in school, I didn't get into it I'm french so I ended up falling for another popular mmorpg at the time Dofus.

I like the job system from runescape, I like systems so the different jobs going from 1-99 seems cool to me.

Can you elaborate on what you like about the game and why you still play it all these years later?

The thing about Runescape is that there is always something to do, always something new you can try (on Oldschool Runescape, I have like 10 accounts with different combat builds, used for PvP, and I'm still making new ones), and it's self-directed. You choose your own destiny. Psychology says self-direction is what makes you feel the most alive. That's just one of the factors: the game is also incredibly interconnected through the skill system (what you referred to as the "job system"):

For example, and generally speaking (as there are niche training methods that are exceptions, and most resources and items can also be bought with money, but let's assume no money; you would also usually earn money by engaging in a skill anyway):

For Firemaking (I will capitalize all skills), you need Woodcutting. For woodcutting you need an axe which you need Smithing for. For smithing you need Mining, for mining efficiently, you need to run efficiently which needs Agility. To run even more efficiently, you need energy potions so you need Herblore (or weight reducing equipment which you can get from quests and Hunter skill). For making potions, you need potion ingredients which you get from Farming and monster loot. For farming you need seeds which you can get from monsters (particularly some higher levelled ones which you more readily encounter in the Slayer skill), birdhouse runs (Hunter) and bird's nests falling out of trees when woodcutting, clue scrolls (buried treasures), Thieving chests and stalls, thieving farmer NPCs, etc.

If you want a deep dive, this guy essentially made a PhD thesis on what makes Runescape Runescape:

 

 

19 hours ago, LordFall said:

Also why do you think the MMORPG and gaming industry as a whole is stagnating? Seems a lot of the biggest mainstream games are just reverting their game back to 10 years ago and people are liking that more than their new versions. Happened to World of Warcraft, Runescape, Dofus and League of Legends now also released a classic mode that is just the 2014 game. 

Might be that the later versions of the game became hyper-capitalized (microtransactions) and for Runescape in particular, a revamp of the combat system in 2012 ("Evolution of Combat") changed the game significantly in an attempt to become more modern (and it made people have to essentially re-learn the game, so a large portion of the player base quit). All in all, earlier versions of the games could be seen to represent a more authentic game experience, while later versions fell more prey to non- game experience factors like survivability and competition.

Oldschool Runescape now polls all their updates and they need a 70% agreement to be implemented in the game, which is again a form of self-direction and ensures people like the game they are playing. And in that sense, Oldschool Runescape is not as much stagnating, as there are new additions being made to the game, but really nothing revolutionary (it's very incremental and "content-based" so that it builds on previous content and makes the interconnections between content larger). The biggest recent addition was probably the Sailing skill (but that has been anticipated since the beginning of the game 20 years ago and people wanted it).

But even within this model, you run into problems like power creep and also Quality of Life creep (making practical sides of the game increasingly more smooth and more seemless), which the former threatens especially certain aspects of the game like PvP, while the latter of course makes parts of the game easier. And then, the appeal of the restoration project I mentioned is that you can play a version of the game which is not as over-powered and has little Quality of Life additions such that it becomes more challenging and raw (and of course nostalgic).

People already are doing self-directed versions of this "challenge-increasing" inside the main versions of the game with gamemodes like Ironman, Ultimate Ironman, Hardcore Ironman, Group Ironman, and unofficial concepts like bronzeman mode, various "snowflake" ironman / restricted accounts (e.g. area-locked ironman, popularized by YouTuber Settled). Sometimes restrictions make you think outside the box and make you have to find new solutions, and in Runescape, this is incredibly fun because of the already self-directed and interconnected nature of the game. Ironman especially increases the level of interconnectedness exponentially as you can't trade with other players and you have to engage with more aspects of the game.

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard