Rune: Ragnarok - You have my axe, Human Head!

I’m one of the people always singing its praises. It was amazing. But I didn’t include it, because it’s 3rd person.

I know. My pronouncement was thread-wide!

I’m sure there are topics on it here, since the corpus goes back to like 2003… searching… surprisingly, no. The game is from 1998 so it’d be on the really ancient blue boards if at all. The developer was Treyarch, the COD folks?

Yeah, it always warms my heart to see that Treyarch are still around. Any studio that made Die By the Sword deserves to stick around forever. Though I very much doubt anyone on the development team now is still a holdover from the old days of 19 years ago.

Dying Light is awesome, why don’t you play it? Its very good. Oh I’d love another Condemned. The melee was so immediate in that game! It had good scares too. As well the shooter aspects in Condemened were meaty. Remember Soldier of Fortune 2? Shooting off limbs? Why don’t they do that anymore?

Mostly because it’s from the developer of Dead Island. I really hated the gameplay in Dead Island, so I’m reluctant to even waste my time on more of that.

Plus I missed my window on sales on the Xbox version. Two black Fridays ago, I had the chance to get it at Walmart for $15. It has never been that price again. That was cheap enough to be “even if I hate it as much as Dead Island” price.

I hated Dead Island and loved Dying Light. I can’t overstate how much I recommend trying it!

I wasn’t crazy about the expansion in the countryside even though I thought I’d like that more, but the base game is awesome.

I too hated Dead Island, and cannot stop gushing about Dying Light - Even if I am too scared to play at night. GO PLAY IT RIGHT NOW!

It also has the most amazing aftersales support I’ve ever seen.

Over on the Rune Discord sever, a H.H. employee confirmed the game’s running on UE4. If you sign up for the mailing list on the official Rune Ragnarok site, you get a chance to win closed beta access.

As part of the studio’s 20th anniversary celebrations, the team posted a company timeline on their website, which could suggest a 2017 release for R.R. (I would take this with a grain of salt, though).

Finally, PC Gamer offered some positive remarks in light of the announcement in their weekly roundup.

You know what, I’m well up for a new Rune game. The original hails from an era when your main character was a texture stretched across a couple of hundred polygons and games were 90% brown, but I enjoyed its dedication to melee combat and its (now primitive) dismemberment system. Rune doesn’t need to do much to this formula. I want a big stupid game about hitting monsters. I want Norse Space Marine that lets me hit hundreds of goblins with a rock on a stick. Throw in a boss fight with Thor or something and we’re good.

Is there now an advanced dismemberment system?

Interview with project director Chris Rhinehart:
https://i.imgur.com/Kd1o6cx.gif

TLDR

  • You don’t play as Ragnar

  • Ragnarok has raged for 7 years, you are one of remaining humans trying to survive and end the battle

  • Mostly takes place in Midgard, but also across the nine realms which merged when the war began

  • There will be interactions with the Norse Gods. From the press release, “By pledging allegiance to one of the Norse gods, players gain favor and special abilities to aid them as they raid enemy villages, fight the undead in brutal melee combat, sail to new lands, and craft powerful weapons to complete the goals of their god and conclude Ragnarok,”

  • Though first publicly discussed in 2012, development started this year

  • They found a partner willing to fund the project (without selling the IP) and allow them the creative freedom to modernize Rune

  • Brutal melee combat is a key pillar of the game.

  • You can still lop off your enemy’s arm and beat them to death with it

  • Nothing to say about MP at this point but they are aware of how much people loved MP of original Rune

  • Platforms: PC initially Mac, Linux, and consoles in mind for the future

that high-resolution lizard wiggle is amazing

It sounds great but if they only started development this year, aren’t we talking 2019 at the earliest for release or so?

I would think so, but it depends on the scale of production. I figured they announced it a little early because they own Rune and it was a nice way to cap off the studio’s 20th anniversary celebrations with some positive news after a rough patch following Prey 2’s cancellation. They’ve also overhauled their social media presence and the reveal might have been a useful way to gauge interest.

Plus, since they’ve been hiring like crazy this past year, it will hopefully raise their profile a tad, which might help them draw talent to the studio.

Human Head have started a new video series, The Rune Recap, and the first episode offers some new details about multiplayer, player customization, and when we’ll see some gameplay footage.

An article on VentureBeat reveals that the outfit behind Rune: Ragnarok, ESDF, a capital firm, is being partially funded by the PUBG dudes.

“We want to produce games we’re fans of. The kind we really want to play when we hear about them, which is exactly what happened with this new sequel to Rune. We deploy smart development practices to be able to rapidly respond to fan feedback … while the process for creating hits is sometimes elusive and unexpected, there are those amazing times when you catch a shooting star. We look forward to sharing more games in the ESDF pipeline as they get closer to release.”

There’s a neat quiz over on the official Rune website, which offers a run down of various scenarios and rewards you with a Norse God alignment when you finish.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-25-2017/FkyCvY.gif

The first trailer is up:

Check out the abs on Loki!

I want to see a game where the gods have guts.

The game is no longer called Rune: Ragnarok. It’s now called… wait for it… Rune. -_-

This change was partially brought on by the project’s scope expanding. Here’s a brief snippet of gameplay:

Is this the same as this game?

That’s the original Rune.