There was a noble goal at the heart of RuneScape’s Weapon Diversity project: making every individual weapon type feel like a distinct choice beyond raw stats so that you really have a reason to think about the difference between a sword and an axe. Unfortunately, the results of that project have led the team to axe the entire thing. In short, the team felt like most of the modifiers that wound up on weapons were functionally just DPS alterations, which meant that players could just pick the most damaging option and made weapons less diverse.
The problems weren’t insurmountable ones, but based on the number of effects that would need to be redesigned and failed to hit the intended goals of being transformative, the team estimated that the project was only about half done. That meant resources devoted to it would be better devoted to other projects that didn’t require as much design work but more polish; the current plan is to revisit weapon diversity piecemeal over time, rather than make it into a single overarching project in one patch. It’s a bit of a letdown for players looking forward to these changes, but the team does appreciate that enthusiasm, even if it ultimately didn’t work out quite right.
