Wow, since that was going to be their ultimate fate anyway, now I’m envisioning what would have happened if they’d said yes to Bethesda’s offer to buy Human Head and completed Prey 2.
Welp. That’s that for them, I guess.
100% should’ve done it. At least they would’ve finished their game instead of undergoing one long, slow death to crawl back to the people that caused all this.
Uh, gets even weirder. A new update by the team on the Discord channel said the acquisition was a surprise to them, too, and that they’re going to have to build the team.
RUNE II | Human Head Studios Closing
Yesterday, we successfully launched RUNE II onto the Epic Games Store and the game’s demand has exceeded our expectations. We’re very thankful that everyone wants to play our game. First and foremost - we love this game and we will continue to support RUNE II. James and I are still here to answer questions and provide the same great open communication and transparency that you’ve come to expect from us.
Today, developer Human Head Studios announced that they closed their doors and will be starting a new studio. This is shocking news to us, as there are several entities working on RUNE II - we found out about this news when you did. Human Head had a longstanding agreement with RUNE II’s publisher, Ragnarok Game, LLC, to provide ongoing support for the game. We are working quickly to resolve any current technical issues while we build the team that will execute the exciting planned future of RUNE II’s post-launch content strategy. We appreciate your patience and understanding while we work through any launch issues.
Our plan remains to continue working on RUNE II and launch onto other PC platforms in 2020. We’re excited to show you the future of RUNE II content. Stay tuned!
Thank you for playing.
-The RUNE II Team - Matt, Dan, Sam, Mitch, James, Sam II, Tracie, Dan 2, Sam III, Ekaterina, Lennon, Anthony, John, and Lobo
That situation just screams that Rune II’s post-launch support dies on the vine. Hope I’m wrong.
Having to move Rune II to a new team is a tall order. I can’t think of a time when a developer has taken on an existing project, even post-launch, and had it succeed. The news sounds especially bad because the publisher had no idea that Human Head wouldn’t be fulfilling their contract (the Tweet below was liked by the official Rune account). Maybe the studio shut down was a way of avoiding fulfilling their existing obligations?
It worked out great for Anthem!
For some reason it’s hard to find reviews for this game, but I hear it’s buggy as heck. Is that right? With the new team, I don’t foresee this ending well.
It feels like it should be in early access, and releasing it as a 1.0 is asking for trouble. There’s a lot of issues that need addressing.
It’s rough as Hell. This really should be thought of as an early access title.
That will receive one or two perfunctory patches before being abandoned?
What a waste.
Given the fact that it’s a brand new team, it’ll be lucky if it gets even one patch.
What disappointing news. There is a great game in here. It will be a big missed opportunity if that doesn’t get realized because of this :(
PC or Console?
It PC only so far, I think. Anyway, I played on PC.
Yeah, you’re right. My mistake.
Given how it performs on PC, I think any talk of console ports, which were frequently discussed during development, won’t become a reality. It stuttered like hell for me when I played on the cinematic settings.
How is the gameplay so far, when it’s working?
I was thinking that if it had launched with console, that those may be better. But it didn’t, so I’m not expecting anything. I loved the first Rune, but right now it seems to be wait and see if there is any actual support or if it is just DOA/Wait for $10 price point.
I’ve been playing this for the last few days and I like it quite a bit. It’s a lot like Conan Exiles without the building. Which makes all the issues I’m having with the game that much more frustrating.
I really enjoy the combat and the challenge. It’s fun how you can 1-2 shot most enemies… but they can 3-4 shot you, so you have to be careful and pay attention. I enjoy reading the markers that provide backstory to Ragnarok and about the people that survived it. Exploration is rewarded… but probably not quite enough. After 13 hours I’m still trying to get a handle on how gearing works, but it’s fun and interesting.
Now for my issues. All / most / some Unreal engine titles cause stuttering. The way to fix is to turn on Vsync. Rune 2 won’t let you. The stuttering was fine at the beginning of the game, but now, for whatever reason, it’s stuttering quite a bit and it’s getting annoying.
You have to farm a ton of wood, and it’s slow and annoying. It’s not fun at all. I did recently get an item with a fast gathering ability on it. That helps some for trees, but it helps a ton for rocks. You only have to punch them once.
The game forces you to fight Loki every 60 or 90 minutes. For some reason. When you “defeat” him, he drops crafting mats you need to later craft a weapon that can kill him for good. I’ve lost a bunch of those mats. They just poofed.
Getting stuck in the environment is a thing. It’s pretty annoying. Fortunately you can kill yourself to get out. Unfortunately, the game penalizes you for this. You lose 1-2 items. You can run back and pick them up again if you’re close enough. But it’s super annoying that you’re being penalized because the game is broken.
But my biggest issue with the game is when it snows. You start to freeze to death and start taking damage. Frost resist exists, but as far as I can tell all it does is reduce the amount of damage you take. So whether you have to eat to heal every 20s, 30s, or 40s, it’s still annoying as fuck. And it can snow for up to 10 minutes of real time. Hugely frustrating and terrible design. There is a Time Skip rune… maybe I’ll give that another try.
There are a host of other annoying bugs as well, but you can generally work around them.
There seems like there’s still some lite dev activity going on with the game, so it may get patched. They made some trivial update with the soundtrack on 11/25. So there’s at least a shred of hope they can salvage this game.
The game has an online mode for some reason. I get that it’s probably subset of the main game, but last time I looked there were 9 players online total for the entire planet. Being an EGS exclusive may have given them the funding they needed to finish the game… but I’d guess their sales are 1/10th what they’d be on Steam. At best.