OSRS devs react to the MMO's massive Sailing vote: "It's almost certain, if we do this skill, we'll probably do another"

gamesradar.com:

This week, the results for the vote on Old School Runescape's first new skill in 17 years came in, and the winner by a razor thin margin was Sailing. The natural next questions are: what does this mean for the skills that lost in the poll, and how likely is it that Sailing is ultimately added to the full game after testing? GamesRadar+ sat down with Jagex recently and got some answers.

"Shamanism isn't necessarily dead. It's almost certain, if we do this skill, we'll probably do another," said associate design director Kieran 'Mod Kieren' Charles. "I think that's fair to say. Who knows when, but certainly, if we come around, let's say Sailing moves forward and everyone's on board with it, polls, refinement, we deliver Sailing. Hell yeah Shamanism is going to be on the cards. I mean, clearly people liked it."

That's good news to nearly an equal amount of Runescape players as voted for Sailing, which beat out Shamanism by a mere 600 votes out of 178,000. Unfortunately, Taming's prospects are less optimistic, as it lost by a much more significant 34,000 votes.

"Taming? It's not to say it's dead forever," Charles added. "But obviously, there's bigger changes that would need to be made to get that up to a place where people do have more favorability for it. I think we already know that from the feedback we've received over the course of the poll, as well as from what we read on social media, that we needed more meat on that bone to really capture Taming and address some of the problems people raised with it."

Despite the closeness of the race, Sailing is the clear winner for OSRS's new skill, but it's not set in stone just yet. It first needs to be refined and then tested in beta form, after which Jagex will poll the