Player God Alignment During Quests

[rancid needle]

Re-joining the discord after a few years away and picking my favorite God in OSRS has reminded me that in the past, such as during the hazeel cult quest, you could pick to side with your preferred God (hail Lord Zamorak).

But Ive noticed in recent years we seem to not have any choice in the matter. I know a lot of times it comes down to workload/level of effort, but it would be nice to once again be able to side with Zamorak, as he's the coolest god in runescape. (Just staing the obvious, of course)

[meager garden]

Just use gear asociated with a god?
Not sure what you want to "chose" during a quest, it doesnt really mean anything. The player is really just going all directions

[rancid needle]

What i mean is a few narrative paths in quests that allow us to side with one god vs another like in the Hazeel Cult quest.

Runescape is a game that heavily features roleplay, but as someone who likes to 'roleplay' as a Zamorak follower, just about every quest turns him into the enemy, (he is the bad guy, it does make sense), but i'd like to see more instances where we can side with him for less "world ending" ways.

[left radish]

I think in some ways these feel pointless because no choice is actually going to have any real impact on how the quest line turns out (see Hazeel Cult and Temple of Ikov route-choices) since the final outcome of the quest lines will always be the same. Honestly giving a choice is neat but feels counter-productive when you know it doesn’t matter at all.

[autumn goblet]

Temple of Ikov feels like it was written without While Guthix Sleeps in mind.

The player can essentially kill all the guardians of Armadyl, and help Lucien. And then the guardians of Armadyl magically come back to life, and want to fight alongside you to stop Lucien in the next quest. That’s incoherent story telling.

[rancid needle]

I think it can be done with talent and creativity, both of which the OSRS devs have demonstrated they have in droves right now.

People thought tolkeins work couldnt be translated to film. Its about being clever enough to do it well.

For example, it could be that at the end of the quest you aren't the one to stop the big bad, so if you help them, they're stopped anyway, or maybe its just fluff. But OSRS is the only true roleplaying mmoRPG we still have and id love to see that kind of expression expanded upon, as it fits with in universe lore.

[wise matrix]

player choice is nice, but difficult on the dev's end because to let players make a decision that means anything, either the choice needs to be not that significant, or they have to put in significantly more dev time to flesh out the different paths, which if there's future quests in that questline, those quests also need to consider the different paths

An example of this is happening is in RS3, where giving players the choice to kill Zanik in a quest later meant made things complicated when they wanted to use Zanik as a character again in the future