Nearly twenty years have passed since Rune’s first release, and fans have been anxiously awaiting for the action game’s return. Well, the wait is almost over, and from our demo time with Rune: Ragnarok during E3 2018, it just might be worth the wait.
New Game, New Character, New Story
Fans of the original Rune will note changes right from the start. Instead of playing as a predetermined character, players will be able to create their Nordic warrior. While only the male version was available in the E3 demo, the developers stated that a female option will also be available. After creating their characters, players will be able to choose which god to align themselves with. This will determine how their character’s stats grow as they level up. Our options were between Hel, Thor, and Odin, with Freya and Loki to come at a later time.
The story will be original and takes place at the beginning of the end of days, Ragnarok. The best news about the sequel is there be separate servers for PvE and PvP. Rune and the end of days can be played with friends, but beware of friendly fire and greedy allies, as anything dropped, thrown, or left unattended (say your corpse after you die) can be picked up by other players.
If You Build It, Players Will Try to Get There!
While traversing the world, if it looks like you can climb it, you most likely can. One of my favorite elements of Rune: Ragnarok is the ability to climb small ledges. In many games, ledges may appear to be reachable but aren’t accessible. That’s usually due to developers not allowing their characters to use their arms while platforming. Rune: Ragnarok enables players to grab ledges and climb them. While it’s not as advanced as Link’s ability to climb nearly anything in Breath of the Wild, it’s a welcome improvement when compared to other games that have minor platforming elements.
There will also be a crafting system, weapon durability management, and teleportation. We weren’t able to see the crafting system just yet, but the rune teleportation allowed us to travel between activated runes. As for weapon management, our weapons started to show wear after about 10 minutes of slaughtering but never broke. They also take more damage when thrown, which is another nod to other games with Breath of the Wild being the most recent example.
Bodies of water separate the multiple islands that makeup Rune Ragnarok’s map. There are various ways to do traverse water. Swimming is the obvious way, but there are also rafts, and large Viking ships that can be used to accomplish this much faster.
Combat in Rune: Ragnarok
Combat is reminiscent of other open world action-adventure games like Arcania, Elder Scrolls, and to a lesser degree Viking: Return to Asgard. The various locations are free to be explored in any order, but higher level enemies guard them.
The combat system employs multiple weapons such as greatswords, axes, spears, and even appendages. Dismembered body parts and decapitated heads are usable as makeshift weapons or projectiles. During our demo, we even managed to finish off an enemy by throwing his recently deceased allies arm. Body parts aren’t the only thing that can be thrown; weapons can also be projectiles. It was the safest way for us to combat the frost giants (see above). These colossal titans offer lots of experience points but hit extremely hard. Even after gaining a few extra levels they were still slapping us around like ragdolls and sending us back to respawn.
While death isn’t permanent, characters will lose everything you are currently carrying. Everything is reclaimable by returning to where you died, just like Dark Souls does for reclaiming souls after death. Items that you don’t want to risk losing can be stashed in various “vaults.” These can be accessed around the world and used to store and retrieve items from.
Another element of Rune: Ragnarok are runes; these along with other items can be fastened to a hotbar to be made readily accessible. Many of the runes we found were single use and gave us a global cooldown on all rune uses. They included ones for replenishing health, stamina, and cooldowns, but we imagine we will get more runes in the full game that will temporarily increase attack, defense, and speed.
Impressions
Our time with Rune: Ragnarok at E3 was bittersweet. It’s a common emotion when seeing a classic brought back from the past with updates. We feel the team at Human Head have made the right decisions on which elements to bring back for the sequel and new ones to introduce. The game is still on the rough side but still in closed alpha, so there is time before it fully releases.
It’s first closed beta will open on June 23rd, and run from 12 PM to 4 PM CDT, for a chance to be invited players can do so by signing up to their newsletter. If you don’t make it into the beta and want to play it sooner rather than later. It will be heading to Early Access later this year.
