RUNE II May 2020 Monthly Update

Originally posted at https://www.rune2.com/may20update/

This past month on RUNE II, we moved the needle. 

As we mentioned in our Summer Roadmap and April 2020 Update, the noodle baking continues. Today I want to tell you more about our plans for a new tutorial, announce our RTX 2060 Giveaway winners, talk about our upcoming update schedule, and more!

Epic Mega Sale

I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that RUNE II is on sale for up to 50% off and discounted even further when you use your Epic Coupon on us! The Epic Mega Sale ends on June 11 at 11:00am Eastern. As part of the Epic Mega Sale we have raised all Support-A-Creator payouts, so make sure you use your favorite creator code at checkout. Get your copy of RUNE II today! 

Baking The Noodles

As we were designing our new tutorial, we looked at a ton of feedback from the community and external partners. What they knew, what they didn’t know, and what they wished they were taught in the tutorial. Throughout the last few months we have seen an explosion of players that need a bit more explanation than is currently provided. 

The current tutorial in single player is great once you can combine all the concepts that you’ve learned together, but right now it feels like being thrown to the deep end without knowing how to swim. Our plan is to keep what’s there as a part two, and create a PART ONE that teaches everything you need to know. Playing this tutorial is highly suggested on first launch. If you’re a good player and know what you’re doing, you should speed through it in under 30 minutes.

All About That Bass

One of the most fun things about being the Lead Community Manager is getting to assist with all aspects of production. Some days that involves designing marketing plans, writing the monthly update, creating patch notes, digesting actionable feedback, assisting our server hosting partners, working with our web team, asking our artists if we can publicly use their cool stuff, or recording temporary voiceover so our designers can get the pacing of in-game events dialed in. 

Making games is a significant investment in time, talent, and financials. We’re a small but mighty indie studio, so we’re always trying to make the most of what we have, especially when it comes to working with voiceover artists. It’s better for us if we only ask them to read one take as opposed to several.

Here’s an example of just that where I’m reading (temporarily) as Heimdall. Worry not, we’ll have our amazing voice over talent record these lines as part of the next major update.

Be gentle. 

Whether it’s temp Voice Over or raw professional VO, our audio designer will take those files and then: 

  • Bring the files into Pro Tools

  • EQ and compress the files so they give proper normalized levels

  • Add environmental reverb (if needed)

  • Break the recorded files files up into individual lines

  • Export those individual lines out of Pro Tools

  • Bring those exported individual lines into Unreal Engine 4

  • Hooking them up into the correct audio tables.

  • Our designers can start calling those voice lines to play at specific scripted events (or vice versa)

This process repeats for every character and every line that plays.

RTX 2060 Giveaway Results

To celebrate The Lazarus Update, we launched a month-long giveaway with our friends at Vast.gg to give away an RTX 2060 and RUNE II God Slayer game keys. Over 10,000 people entered, but only 5 can win. Today, we’re announcing the winners.

RTX 2060 and 4x RUNE II God Slayer Game Key Winner: https://twitter.com/Houdinator 

RUNE II God Slayer Game Key Winner: https://twitter.com/HiddenNinjaX 

RUNE II God Slayer Game Key Winner: https://twitter.com/aellessi 

RUNE II God Slayer Game Key Winner: https://twitter.com/cpgraham5 

RUNE II God Slayer Game Key Winner: https://twitter.com/ZuBei_ 

All winners will be contacted by email with their game keys.

Thank you to everyone who entered! Should we do another giveaway after our Summer Roadmap is completed? Let us know on our usual social channels: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, YouTube.

Website Updates

If you’ve visited our homepage in the last week, you might have noticed our web team has released some important updates to coincide with our vision that RUNE II is an evolving game. Thanks to our partners at Xsolla, we are able to sell RUNE II more like a traditional e-commerce product. We’ve given a larger spotlight to our Updates section and added a newsletter sign up form.

Make sure you sign up for our email newsletter, as we plan on doing exclusive newsletter-only promotions in the future.

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Upcoming Updates Schedule

For the last month and a half, we’ve been in a reactive mode. In mid-April we pushed out update 1.0.919, on May 1 we pushed out The Lazarus Update and update 1.1.14177, a week later we dropped update 1.1.14285, a few days after we dispatched update 1.1.14394, two weeks later we released update 1.1.14691. 

Two days ago, we shipped RUNE II Update 1.1.14731. This update fixes an issue causing main and side quest data to be reset after every time you go to the Vigrid Plain, as well as containing performance optimization improvements.

Today, we’re shifting gears. While we’ll still continue to monitor feedback to the retail version of RUNE II, our focus is shifting from reactive to proactive. We are continuing to work on additional quests, narrative content, boss fights, and more as part of our Summer Roadmap. We will be a little quieter while we’re all heads down, making the next major update to RUNE II as amazing as it can be.

Keep an eye on the RUNE II PTR. When it’s time, you’ll find the first part of our next major update there. In the meantime, we invite you to speculate what role the below screenshots might play in a future update. 

 

We’ll see you next month. Mitch, out!