Originally posted at https://www.rune2.com/summer-roadmap/
This past month on RUNE II, the world saw us come back to life. This past month in the world, time lost all meaning. In these strange and weird times, I hope you’re staying safe and healthy.
First of all, thank you for playing and giving us feedback on the RUNE II Lazarus Update. We’re very pleased with how it’s been received so far. In response to community feedback, we’ve released two patches to address the top critical issues. You can see the patch notes for those updates here and here.
Today, we want to check off the Spring Roadmap and provide our Summer Roadmap. We are planning on baking some noodles….
Core Loop and Content
We are continuing to discuss internally the best way to improve RUNE II’s overarching story and Critical Path. Here is what we are working on:
More quests and narrative content.
Updated story and dialogue.
Artifacts as quest rewards.
Hide, and eventually remove, The Ragnarok Timer.
Non-repeatable Ages of Ragnarok
We have big plans here. Stay tuned.
Loki
We have 3 specific points we are focused on:
No one enjoys being kicked out of the Vigrid Plane when your lives are gone in CO-OP, even if there are more players still alive fighting Loki.
The first time you drop Loki’s shield and he teleports away, it’s cool. After that, it is frustrating. Leading to…
We’ve heard your feedback that you don’t like fighting Loki 8 or more times before being able to beat the game.
Look for all of these to change in a future update.
New Tutorial
We’re making lasagna! We’re going to implement a new Tutorial to support all of the new features we have layered onto RUNE II since launch. As we develop for additional platform support, we feel it’s important that every first time user experience with RUNE II is positive.
Combat
After months of iteration, we feel that Combat for RUNE II is in a MUCH better place. A few highlights of the updates:
New Animations, and cleaned up animations
Weapon model adjustments
Stats and Numbers Tweaks
Block and Parrying adjustments to enemies
You can read the full list of combat changes as part of our Lazarus update.
We’re continuing to work and tune Combat. Feeling is only half the battle, combat needs to look good too. We’re working to update combat animations to look more natural and give you finer control of your character.
User Interface and User Experience
We have made a lot of UI and UX improvements, such as:
Exposing more stats.
Adding a visual representation of your character.
Moving the building widget
We are evaluating internal and community feedback on what other changes we can make to improve RUNE II’s user interface and experience. THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT TO US!
Ages of Ragnarok
We tuned the Age of Night, Age of Frost, and Age of Fire to have a ton more visual and gameplay polish. The below GIF doesn’t do it justice. Hop in game and experience the updated Ages of Ragnarok for yourself!
We will continue to tune the Ages of Ragnarok in future updates.
Bug Fixing, Optimization, and Quality of Life Updates
I’ll just copy/paste from what we said previously, as it remains true:
We’re constantly working on fixing bugs and optimizing RUNE II. We want as many people as possible to be able to run RUNE II on PC and not have to worry as much about system specs. This will be an always-ongoing effort. Similarly, Quality of Life updates are always at the forefront of our minds. When you interact with these systems on a minute-by-minute basis, all the little tweaks and improvements add up to make the experience that much better.
Here are just a few of the improvements we have made over the past few months:
Dramatically optimized engine, graphics, and audio for better performance.
Fixed several fatal error crash issues.
Updated support for ultrawide monitors.
Split roll dodge (space + ASD) and hop dodge (Double tap WASD)
Added the ability for players to pick up all materials, consumables, and ammo in the area around them by holding E for 1 second.
And more!
It’s been a very interesting 6 months since we launched RUNE II:
We’ve put out (and now updated) a roadmap.
We launched a Public Test Realm where we could deploy updates and iterate rapidly on feedback.
We shared a long development FAQ showcasing our vision for the future of RUNE II.
We shipped the Lazarus Update covering 4+ months of work, 15 pages of patch notes and all.
We issued two more updates in response to community feedback and high priority issues.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We’ve got a long way to go, and a short time to get there.
I want to take a moment to address the OG RUNE Classic community. We’ve heard you, RUNE Classic community. You want a remastered RUNE Classic and an Arena mode. We do not own the RUNE Classic IP, and we will refrain from any statements about the RUNE Classic IP owners. However, we are planning to deliver continued updates to Rune II that we believe you will enjoy.
We are always listening to feedback and using it to help us inform our decision making. If you have Tweeted at us, left a Facebook or Instagram comment, made a Forum post, chatted in our Discord, or talked with us about RUNE II at any point, I want to personally thank you for helping us to make the best version of our vision for RUNE II.
On behalf of everyone on the team, thank you for playing our indie game, RUNE II. We can’t wait to show you what comes next. See you next month.