Originally posted at https://www.rune2.com/feb20update/
Greetings, Vikings! In the last month working on RUNE II, we laid the foundation for what’s to come.
February was a busy month for our small but mighty team. At the beginning of the month, we published the RUNE II Spring Roadmap. We’ve put a ton of time into revamping RUNE II’s combat, and we think it’s in a better place than before. Our high level goal with combat is to replace the mindless hack-and-slashing with more meaningful fighting.
On Valentine’s Day, we put out the RUNE II Public Test Realm (PTR) for all current and new owners of RUNE II on the Epic Games Store. Our goal with the PTR is to make larger changes, gather feedback, iterate, and repeat until we feel that we’re in a good place to patch the retail version of RUNE II. Hop on and try the combat changes for yourself, then give us feedback on our forums and Discord!
Speaking of iterating, our artists have been doing a ton of iterating on the Ages of Ragnarok. These screenshots are taken from the same vantage point with different Ages and weather patterns turned on:
We’ll be tuning the art and feeling for the remaining Ages of Ragnarok (Awakening, Renewal, War and Chaos, Treachery, Fire) in the future. Stay tuned for updates!
This month, we’re talking about changes to the core loop of RUNE II. By core loop, we mean what you’re doing from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, and game session to game session. We want to address the repetitive grind that exists in the campaign: Look on your map, go to place, kill dude/walk in right spot, turn in artifact, repeat.
We don’t think this is fun, so we’re going to change it.
Another major area that we’re looking at is player progression.There is a lot of work that we want to address within the Damage Formulas, Enemy Scaling, and how the Open World Environment (OWE) system’s work. Our goal is to address the math ‘under the hood’ which will greatly improve the feel of the game. For example, here’s how damage is currently calculated:
For each damage type (base, blunt, sharp, pierce, etc): (attack * attack) / (attack + defense).
In the current system, any defense with a small order of magnitude would trump the attack value. When we looked at our player progression data per each level, we found that defense capped out somewhere around the 100-130 point range around level 15, with no meaningful way to boost your defense stat. This leads to situations where players either feel entirely overpowered, or completely underpowered against enemies. Both situations are frustrating, which leads us to our new damage formula.
New damage formula: attack / (1 + defense/100)
In this new formula, if your defense value is 100, you take half damage. If your defense value is 200, you take 1/3 damage, etc. In this new system, defense can scale endlessly but each point of defense is less valuable than before. Additionally, we are rebalancing all attack and defense values for all gear. At level 15, we now expect players to have around 100 attack and 100 defense, which leaves plenty of room for those values to grow as you obtain more powerful gear. We’re still tweaking these values as we play internally, all numbers are subject to change.
As we adjust player progression, we’ll also be adjusting how enemies scale to fight you. For instance, we now have the overworld set up where every island of Midgard has a level range that enemies and Open World Events (OWEs) will spawn at. With the exception of a few islands, expect the world to get harder as you get further from Heimdall’s tower in the center of the map.
Last but not least, we’ve been giving away full game and PTR keys to RUNE II on our Facebook, Twitter, Discord server, and right here on this blog. Make sure you’re following us so you don’t miss a surprise giveaway!
– The RUNE II Development Team