"It was a just a surreal experience of working with and saying, 'This is your IP. "Can we fix the giant's AI and have trees splinter when he runs through the forest? Yes, we can do that. "Can we have a horde mode? Yes we can do that. "Can we destroy buildings? Yes, we can do that. "Can we have villagers? Yes, we can do that. "Can we add new quests? Yes, we can do that. "The biggest difference that I have now with my new team versus Human Head is that whenever we come up with an idea or a question the answer is, 'Yes we can do that.' "Our obligation is to deliver a fun product for the fans that people enjoy and say they got their money's worth and had fun," he says. Studio 369's vision for Rune 2 is different from Human Head's And while there are obviously some hard feelings - not to mention ongoing legal battles - about the way things have played out, we ask Candler if he feels any obligation to stay faithful to what the original creators had in mind. After all, Human Head was the creator of the franchise, and the original developer of Rune 2. Only one of the developers has previous experience at Human Head.Ĭandler's list of changes Studio 369 is making to the game brings up the issue of vision. They now have 14 people at Studio 369, and plan to double that number by the end of the year. The decision was made in early March, and the company officially founded on March 31. Let's form a team, take over development, and this team will be the face on the game so the fans and community can understand who's actually doing the work." "We took out a lot of the survival elements like hunger and freezing that were just annoying."īefore long they had almost a dozen people working on the project.Īs Candler explains, "We did so much work in January, February, and March that I said, 'We're kicking ass guys, I think we should just form a company. We basically wanted to fix all the game systems where we said, 'This is not fun,'" Candler says. "Then we started digging in and said, 'Well what do we want to fix?' We wanted to fix combat, AI, how enemies spawn, the loot system. "We did so much work in January, February, and March that I said, 'We're kicking ass guys, I think we should just form a company'" He enlisted developers he'd had previous experience working with - including Studio 369 CTO Dan Nikolaides - to help reconstruct a build they could work off of, and they quickly put together a quality-of-life patch for the game. But Candler says Ragnarok still didn't have a full version history of the project and "was missing some crucial build configurations that had to be re-engineered." In January, Ragnarok revealed it had received a hard drive with Rune 2 source code and assets on it. Speaking with last week, Ragnarok manager and Rune 2 executive producer Matt Candler says solving one of those problems led naturally to solving the other. That left Ragnarok with a game in need of patching and continued support and two big problems: no studio to work on it, and no source code to work from. The next day, much to the surprise of Ragnarok, Human Head announced it would be shutting down, with the staff re-forming as the Bethesda-owned Roundhouse Studios. Rune 2 launched on the Epic Games Store November 12. Rune II is filled with the same undead draugr that populate the world of the PS4 award-winner, its world also traversed by boat and conquered with an axe (or hammer or sword). It's difficult not to compare the two games, and because of that, Rune II suffers.In the wake of the unexpected dissolution of original Rune 2 developer Human Head, publisher Ragnarok Games LLC has created a new studio specifically to take over work on the action RPG. Like the recent God of War, its setting is the Ragnarok, an apocalyptic event in the world of Midgar. Rune II proves that some games - and their gods - are better left dead.Ī long-awaited sequel to the 2000 PC game, Rune, the RPG-lite hack'n'slash is set in the fascinating and rich world of Norse mythology. And though a game (or in this case, franchise) may seem to be long gone, gestated and left to obscurity, it can always be brought back. While Loki may die to a swing from Mjolnir, he can be born again a teenager, for someone with that level of power never truly perishes. Games and gods of Norse mythology have a commonality: both are often resurrected. Rune II is a slog of a hack'n'slash-RPG with repetitive combat and mechanics, dated graphics, and an overall lack of polish.
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