Portfolio: Glorious Memories, RuneScape quest

Released April 2009, ‘Official’ Wiki, Fan Wiki.
My credit: ‘Content Developer’ – quest design, writing, script implementation, cutscene scripting, etc.
In the unlikely event that you ever plan to play it (and unfortunately it’s dozens of hours into RuneScape) please note that there are spoilers after the fold.
This video is a decent walkthrough, but not good for my purposes since the player is speed-motivated and rushes through a lot of content.

Glorious Memories was the first of my two RuneScape quests, the latter being Blood Runs Deep, the sequel. It brings together various characters and plot threads from the prior Fremennik (Viking) quests and the various developers who made them.

Highlights for Me

Unfortunately, since I first wrote these notes six years after release (and another six have passed since), there’s a lot about the gameplay in particular that I don’t remember well.

I had a lot of fun with unreliable narrators, since the quest is based on several NPCs’ recollections of an adventurer they were on fifteen years before present day. Playing with history like this also gave me a lot of scope for the characters, including making a historical version of a character the PC had previously interacted with as a ghost, and an unrealistically buffed self-image of a particularly proud character.

The cutscenes were pretty good for the time, being some of the last we made with the old jerky camera (and a lot of the moves are designed to work around that), long before cutscene responsibility was moved to artists.

In Hindsight

Glorious Memories is a much more typically RuneScape quest than Blood Runs Deep, and has several of the ‘use item’ puzzles that I’m not fond of. Both quests occasionally reuse other interactions I don’t like; this annoyed me at times but was generally appropriate given that the players had already encountered them.