Here's how Old School Runescape's Sailing skill came to be, as Jagex's 18-year odyssey finally arrives in port

It's been just over 20 years since I started playing what is now Old School Runescape. A tremendous amount has changed in that time, as Gielinor's borders have expanded, providing entirely new adventures to embark on in one of the best MMOs. For the first time in its history, its world map has been completely filled in, waving farewell to the last of the black boxes that have punctuated it over the years. Although Gielinor's overworld is, for now at least, a known quantity, there's still a vast ocean of blue tiles to explore. Even back in the day, forum threads were rife with rumors about the possibility of sailing being added as a skill, granting the means to weigh anchor and uncover what the sea has to offer. Two decades, countless memes, official April Fool's jokes, and even a failed poll or two later, and Sailing is finally upon us. Ahead of its launch on November 19, Jagex trio Kieren Charles (design director), Ed Pilkington (principal narrative designer), and Elena Nordmark (senior game designer) pulled back the curtain and took me behind the scenes.

Sailing is one of Runescape's longest-running odysseys as far as the lore is concerned. For decades, we've been hitching ship rides across Gielinor. From being ferried into Crandor aboard the Lady Lumbridge, ready to take on Elvarg in Dragon Slayer I, to hopping on the Tempoross party boat, sailing is as endemic to the Old School Runescape experience as low-rolling Barrows drops or having weird, politically charged debates with Gemstone Crabbers. However, we've never been able to cobble together a boat of our own and journey forth, leaving what lies beyond Gielinor's shores a complete mystery.

Soon after the concept of Sailing blew up, Jagex, being Jagex, immediately leaned into it. In 2007, the studio announced the feature would definitely be arriving; that was on April 1, 2007, to be specific. In 2014, Jagex ran the Sailing April Fool's joke back, before unveiling its vision for the skill for real in 2015. In Runescape, all new features are put to the community via polling. If something doesn't pass the yay threshold, it's nixed. Unfortunately for Sailing, the playerbase, like Marty McFly's audience in Back To The Future, wasn't ready just yet, nor would it be until it finally gave the skill the go-ahead in 2023. So, after all these years, what kept Jagex coming back to Sailing time and time again?

"I think it's the mystery of what is out there on the ocean," Charles begins. "It fits the thematics of the game incredibly well. It's a section you've never really been able to do much with. It's already in the game. You go on boats with NPCs; you just have never really been able to get your own. But what's undiscovered? What islands could you find? What underwater stuff might exist one day? It feels obvious. We've been talking about it for years, off and on. It's about time we give players that access, right? And when we look at what the world map's going to look like once Sailing's out, it's staggering."

"I do think there is something both brilliant, but also quite funny as well," Pilkington adds with a grin. "With Old School, it's all about being 'old school.' It's all about how the game used to be. And even though the game gets updated weekly, it's all about retaining that feel, that vibe. And in some weird, strange way, there's probably nothing more on brand than the skill that people were joking about."

Jagex has broadened Gielinor's landmass over time, most notably adding the sprawling continent of Zeah in 2016. Content for the region's last main principality, Varlamore, arrived piecemeal over the past year, its expansion cycle concluding as OSRS' popularity rocketed with record-breaking results. These updates brought homogenous landmasses, but Sailing introduces various, scattered biomes throughout the world. Some islands are a goldmine for resources, while others are home to oceanic species like the turtle-y Tortugans. Jagex has also faced the extra challenge of ensuring the sea itself is filled with things to do, bringing the depths to life to ensure we remain engaged we they travel. It's a huge design challenge on a global scale, and Nordmark says it's been a major learning experience for the team; managing space and keeping things interesting is one such lesson.

"The ocean is massive, so we had to ask ourselves a few questions, like, 'what is it that makes you able to sail some places but not others?'" she tells me. "With woodcutting, for example, you have these axes that you can't use yet because you don't have the knowledge. So what is it with sailing? It means that there are some places you can sail and other places you can't. And once we realized that there are different types of waters, and some require your skill to be higher to know how to navigate through them effectively, that's when we also started realizing that maybe we should limit the space a little bit, not just so that we have interesting progression through the skill, but also so that we have some place to go in the future as well. So that was really the start of it.

"We thought a lot about the content density at sea, because it is so different to land," she continues. "If you look at Lumbridge, for example, you have a million things to do around there. There are trees to cut, there are sheep to shear. You can kill goblins. There's so much happening in such a dense area, you have like, five quests you can start there. And when we looked at the sea, we were like, 'are we even trying to replicate that?' Probably not, because when you think about the real sea, it's quite bare; there's not too much there. But we also realized that as a game, you kind of need something to happen. It's a bit boring if there's nothing at sea, so striking that balance was a new and quite interesting challenge for us as well."

Another factor at play with balancing Sailing's exploration is the speed at which you can move while at sea. Think of Gielinor as a giant chessboard of tiles. For each server cycle or 'tick,' you can move one tile when walking, or two while running. For the first time in the game's history, you'll be able to zoom beyond that at a rate of knots (four tiles per tick) on your ship.

"It does feel really nice to be moving faster," Charles chimes in, beaming. "It's one of those things that sounds mind-blowingly simple, but we've never really had the ability to move faster like this. Sailing around the ocean on a ship going four ticks per cycle while you see people on the beach nearby watching it happen feels amazing. […] It's awesome that a new skill can introduce basically a new way to interact with the world. And in this way, we've never had anything that's really fundamentally changed the way it feels to even just move around. And it's probably another reason why we don't think we could have possibly pulled off sailing until now when we've had all the right people in place, and we've had the team up to the scale it needs to be, because it's been a monumental technical challenge to make this actually happen."

Though Sailing has existed in various conceptual forms over the years, its final iteration has been in the works since late 2022. Of all of the challenges Jagex has faced in that time, Charles says the biggest obstacle has nothing to do with scale, nor content density. The element that took the longest to nail was getting ships working properly in the first place.

"We're using something we called World entities to make them happen," he begins. "Basically, you've got a thing that's moving. The boat is physically moving around the ocean, but you can also run around the top of the boat, so you're moving on a moving thing. That's never been something we've had to deal with before, let alone the controls. A boat doesn't move like a human (not that our humans move necessarily like humans). They have turning circles. A boat can't just spin on the spot in an immediate second and so on. Should it decelerate? How fast should it accelerate? How do you change the sails? Should it move permanently? When you click to move as a player, you click a tile and the player runs to that tile and stops. Should a boat do that, or should a boat keep going?

"So what we've settled on is that boats keep moving. So you select a direction, the boat will turn in an arc to face that way, and it will keep moving indefinitely in that direction; well, until you hit something. And so that feels a little bit different. But that took so much work. One of our engine developers built something in Unity as a prototyping tool to vet different ideas before we even built it in, in our own engine. In that whole process, we involved players immensely as well. We were constantly getting small groups of players, under NDA, doing tests in the office until we eventually settled on what felt the best.

"[…] We talk about these three years of the project. For the entire first year, we were still trying to get that right. It's very hard to go and think about, 'How should combat work? How should cannons work on the ship? How should our Barracuda Trials work?' All these different things we're going to do with Sailing when you don't quite know how ships are going to move. That caused this big dependency chain that meant it was really hard to make a lot of progress on other parts of the work until we knew the basics of how a player makes a ship move."

Unlike the siloed Hunter, the most recent skill released in the 2007 version of Runescape Old School is built on, Sailing is integrated into over ten other skills, potentially opening up entirely new ways to progress across the board. Perfecting your ship alone taps into the likes of Construction, Crafting, and Smithing, while you can also discover new fish to cook, and create new, potent potions with coral and other marine ingredients. As Pilkington explains, this was tantamount to helping the first new Old School skill in nearly two decades feel like it was always a part of the game.

"We knew very early on that a potential risk with sailing is that it could feel too detached from the rest of the game. In some ways it quite literally is. You're stepping off land and onto a boat. You're no longer doing the thing that you've been doing for the last however many years you've been playing the game for; you're entering uncharted territory. One thing we knew was really important is that Sailing had to feel part of Old School, even though it's all completely new, using completely new tech in a completely new area. Integrating with existing parts of the game was a huge part of that.

"I think most good skills do a certain amount of integration. Obviously, some of it's very bare bones and basic, but when Construction came out, it added new trees so you could make new planks, for example. So I used that as a starting point. We evaluated every skill - 'could this fit into Sailing?' There were some, like Runecrafting, where we were like, 'If we tried hard enough, we could probably find some way to integrate it, but this probably isn't the one.' But what we found while we were evaluating them was that so many of them were perfect fits. If you're going on a boat, you obviously need to build your boat, so straight away Construction's in play."

Integration has the potential to be a double-edged sword. Go too hard, and Sailing will hold too large an influence over the way we experience Gielinor, and will effectively become a must-train skill. Player agency is crucial to the MMO experience, and Charles knows that striking the balance is critically important if Jagex is to avoid riots in Varrock.

"There is a need to hold our feet to the ground because it's easy to take it way too far. If almost every skill is involved, Sailing becomes more important than other skills. Sailing is going to be amazing, but we don't want it to dominate the game more than the other skills already do. So it's getting that sweet spot right. When Sailing is unlocking islands and new places to go, it's very easy to put literally anything on them. Maybe there could be a Runecrafting altar we discover on an island, maybe there could be this new type of mining rock, and so on. If you take it too far, all of a sudden it's too heavy handed. So we've got to have that sense check in place, such that the whole game's meta doesn't devolve down to 'train Sailing then do everything else.'"

Narratively, Sailing could have required all sorts of retrofitting for its vast questing library. Take Dragon Slayer I, for example. Here, you must fix a special ship called the Lady Lumbridge in order to reach the island of Crandor, before defeating one of Runescape's most iconic bosses, Elvarg. Should Sailing allow the player to simply cruise in on their own ship, then this Old School element could be completely circumnavigated. The good news, to Pilkington's relief, is that the narrative team of yesteryear had clearly covered all potential bases.

"It was a big worry initially, but when we actually came to look over the quests, we came to the realization that, actually, it's not as bad as we first thought. In reality, we haven't really made any major changes to any existing piece of content to make Sailing work. It's been little narrative bits here and there. One of the most interesting ones was Dragon Slayer I […] 'Why couldn't you just sail there yourself?' When we were refamiliarizing ourselves with the dialog in Dragon Slayer, we realized that they (the writers) actually already answered the question 20 years ago.

"In the quest dialog, it already said the map isn't to show you where Crandor is. It's actually to show you the hidden path through the reefs that any boat would get destroyed on, and it all ended with the dialog that literally already said that there's only one or two boats in existence that can make the journey, because you require a special Crandorian boat they don't make anymore. I'm just sitting there, like, 'Oh, my job has literally already been done!' I think it was a nice reaffirmation that Sailing does fit in the world, and that even back in 2004 - 2005 they were already not necessarily thinking about Sailing but very clearly about how the wider world worked. So by the end of it, we actually changed very little, which I'm really happy about. It didn't need us to go and retroactively change old quests."

Once it had the basics down, Jagex began scaling Sailing towards its first public alpha at this year's Runefest. A full beta took place in June, showcasing the early skilling experience. While much of the response has been positive, Sailing has had its fair share of detractors. Some of the criticism comes from a perceived lack of clarity as to where Sailing sits as a bonafide skill, rather than as a world expansion that provides more skilling opportunities elsewhere. There is, of course, the purist minority that is naturally resistant to change in any form, while others remain worried that any large shifts in direction for Old School will take it closer to Runescape 3. Charles, alongside the rest of the team, understands this, but remains steadfast that every possible effort has been made to retain the Old School spirit.

"It's a big change. It's a huge addition to the game. It's deeply woven. There is potential for us to get it wrong, but that's why we've had to approach it so carefully, in consultation with the community, back and forth, showcasing publicly different segments, testing with players, behind the scenes, all of these things to make sure that we get it right. And now there is so much more positivity around Sailing from the community than we've had the entire project. It feels like we've now culminated and are hopefully delivering something that people are buzzing for, and hopefully continue buzzing for once it's out and they get their hands on it. I believe it's the best skill we've ever done. I genuinely think that, and the impact it has on the world, the addition to the world, the skill itself feels so fun. No one could tell me doing a lap of Ardy rooftops is more fun than doing what you can do with this skill."

Sailing has, undoubtedly, been a labor of love for Jagex, requiring huge technical leaps and careful craft to create a whole new experience that is indistinguishably Old School, bringing fresh and exciting gameplay without overpowering the existing skill system. As Charles noted, OSRS' community has been involved at every step, providing invaluable feedback and necessary vibe checks. It has been built upon years of ideation and iteration; a 20 year-old meme, materialized. Regardless of how it lands, the studio's dedication to the spirit of Old School cannot be questioned, and I for one cannot wait to hoist my sails, weigh anchor, and find new fortunes on the high seas when Sailing arrives on November 19. Just don't expect Sea Shanty 3 (sorry, friends).

How're you feeling about the incoming OSRS Sailing update? Head over to our community Discord server and let us know your thoughts on the game's most expansive skill yet.