Rune II Gameplay Thoughts

Hey Friends! There are times when it is actually a good thing that I have way too many games fighting for my attention. So last winter I happened upon a game that looked interesting called Rune II, that was an epic games store exclusive. I had never played the first game, or at least I don’t remember playing the first game but what I was seeing about the sequel looked pretty cool. I picked it up… and then promptly forgot about it and never actually played during the launch cycle last November. Based on what I am reading it was really not well received because the core loop of the gameplay was a bit flawed. Since I am going through the “install all the games to play on the new rig” phase of new hardware, I stumbled upon this game in my library and thought to give it a shot.

The game that launched in November was apparently considerably different to what I am now playing. When you started the game you were thrust back into the land of the living with a timer ticking down in the upper corner of the screen. When that timer hit zero, Ragnarok happened and you were sent to fight Loki. If you died… and you were very likely to die… the loop would start over again with progression in your character saved as you continued to get stronger until eventually at some point you could defeat the final encounter of the game. From what I am reading there were no real quests or NPCs to guide you along your journey… just the death loop mechanic until you got strong enough to finish the game.

The game I am playing however feels very much like a single player MMORPG, where you are dropped on an island and do a number of quests for the NPCs where you help build the village back up to its former glory. You chop down trees, break rocks for ore, and eventually complete a number of buildings while you other quests to learn how the basics of the game work. Then before you move to the next village you are attacked by the forces of Loki who is trying to bring about Ragnarok. The end result is somewhat of a base defense game where defensive towers aid you as you take down several waves of encounters and a boss encounter ultimately saving the village.

Your adventure sends you forth after some arcane relics that Heimdall needs, to the next village… one that worships him. Again you do a number of traditionally MMO quests and also build this village up until the cycle repeats itself with waves of NPCs attacking it. Each new building you add however increases your access to crafting resources like the ability to craft healing items that come in extremely handy. Out in the world there are a number of runestones which will also teach you new patterns expanding the relative power of the type of items that you can craft.

What is interesting about this first town however is it also has a very MMO style dungeon in it. You venture forth into it in an attempt to reach some divine summit. However to get there you need to pass through this huge sprawling cave filled with various encounters. Clearing through it reminded me very much of Tamtara Deepcroft or something similar to that. There were several rooms with boss encounters and a ton of chests along the way that provided copious amounts of loot. The thing is… the dungeon respawns it seems and you can keep going back into it at will as you continue to level.

Upon reaching the summit you are given the opportunity to devote yourself to one of three gods of the realm. Thor serves as the DPS path with lots of AOE abilities and things that increase your time in berserking mode. Odin seems to be the more group support tree with things that aid your party members… which only really comes into play if you are playing through the game co-op with friends… that is apparently a viable option. Hel serves as the third option and her tree I think is supposed to feel like the more stealthy path… but mostly it is sneak attacks and life drain abilities. I had to go down the Thor path which apparently gives me a buff to using Hammers and then all of his side quests that are Thor specific involve me killing Draugr with Hammers. So it seems like I inadvertently locked myself into a specific weapon choice going forward.

Like an MMORPG there is plenty of loot and the loot is arranged into quality brackets following the traditional White, Green, Blue, Purple, Gold format. What is interesting is in a lot of games that focus heavily on crafting, the gear that is crafted is just the same stuff that is dropping. This is true to some extent but there are a number of things that I have seen drop that I have never seen a pattern for making it seem like both are worthwhile ways to gear yourself. One thing I particularly like is that you can dismantle items in the field keeping you from having to jet back to a smithy constantly. There is fast travel in the game, but each time you do it a rune of travel is consumed. These are easy enough to make at the Sage’s hut but they are still a depleting resource.

I’ve played the game far enough to reach the second age of Midgard, aka the Age of Fire as the cycle of Ragnarok begins. Now the sky is on fire and Loki randomly bombards you with fireballs from the sky. Additionally the spawn of Surtr the fire giant roam the land along with a new variant of the Dragr that are all burned and ashen. Loki has somehow locked away the gods so that they can no longer interact with the mortal plane and I’ve moved from helping Heimdall to helping Thor as he tries to collect some artifacts that he needs. Be warned… this isn’t loveable Thor but instead the self absorbed talks about himself in third person Thor. I am guessing each phase of the game is going to be another “Age” of Midgard. You can in theory travel to the entire map in any of the phases but you are specifically focusing specific areas if you are following the quests.

All in all it is a pretty solid game experience and if you are looking for something that feels like a mix of Skyrim, Valheim and a quest driven MMORPG you might check it out. I have no clue what the co-op gameplay looks like, but it appears that you could spec a character exclusively for group play if you decided to do so. I am largely going down the DPS path because it seems to make killing things much easier. There is an AOE leap attack in the Thor tree that is brutal and is pretty much my opener for fighting multiple things at the same time. Similarly I can throw Thor’s hammer which does AOE damage and stuns the target, so while I love my tanking… there didn’t seem to be much of a point in Odin’s tree if you are largely playing solo.

This is at least one of those times when I am really glad that I didn’t give the game any attention at release, because it seems like they have mostly righted the ship after a bad core loop at launch.

The Splurge

Hey Friends! I did not make a post on Friday because I was more or less in “holiday mode”, but also a bit trepidations about something happening that day. Oddly enough it wasn’t actually about my Birthday and more about something that I did in honor of the day that made me deeply nervous. I turned 45 which seems like a big number all of the sudden and thank you all for your warm birthday wishes on various social platforms. Something you need to know is that spending large amounts of money on things terrifies me. On Thursday I did a thing… and wound up spending more on myself in a single sitting than I have ever done in the past… other than say an automobile. Even then the whole car buying experience stresses me the hell out.

First I think we need to get some details out of the way. My gaming desktop was getting a little bit long in the tooth as I have had most of the same set up for six years. The last major revision that I did was putting a graphics card in four years ago. While it still continued to perform admirably, I absolutely had planned on upgrading during this graphics card generation, and knew that realistically I needed to upgrade everything. In a normal climate I would have bought a bunch of parts and built my own system as I have done in the past. This is not a normal climate and pretty much all hardware is inflated to extreme numbers. Here is what my system of the last several years has looked like:

  • Intel Core i7-5820k 3.6 ghz
  • Asus x99-a / USB 3.1 Motherboard
  • MSI GeForce GTX 1080 ti Duke 11 gb
  • 24 gb ram
  • SSD Storage
    • 256 gb ssd system drive
    • 1 tb ssd storage drive
  • Mechanical Storage
    • 5 tb 7200 rpm storage drive

In the current situation we find ourselves in… everything is being scalped. Without extreme luck or the use of bots… you really cannot get a graphics card. As a result I could flip my current 1080 ti for about double what I ended up paying for it. However there has been a bit of a loophole if you are willing to take it. System builders seem to be getting a pretty regular supply of graphics cards though most of them have waiting lists if you are looking to buy a new system. Another thing that I learned about in this process is that effectively NewEgg is building new machines under the ABS brand and more or less sells them for the cost of parts. They arrive effectively as though you had slapped together the parts yourself and thrown an operating system on it with bare minimum of software installed.

Knowing I needed a new system… I had been periodically watching these machines to see what is in stock. On Thursday I noticed that they had a system with a 3080 in it… which is ultimately the graphics card that I really wanted. I would have settled for a 3070 had I found one of those… but I really wanted to stay with the product line equivalent of my 1080. Thursday I leaped and spent a significant amount of money… and when you are doing that… the extra $40 for next day shipping seems trivial. So around noon on my birthday I hauled into the house a truly ridiculously sized box and after some shuffling of my office I plugged the machine in and powered it up. The new system looks a little bit like this:

  • Intel Core i7-10700KF 3.8 ghz
  • Asus Prime Z490-P (wifi) Motherboard
  • Asus TUF Gaming Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 OC Edition 10 gb
  • G.Skill TridentZ RGB 16gb DDR4 3200 MHz ram
  • SSD Storage
    • Intel 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD system drive
    • 1 tb ssd storage drive
  • Mechanical Storage
    • 4 tb 7200 rpm storage drive

The first thing I installed and played… was Quake II RTX Edition that I have been wanting to piddle around with for ages but never could due to the lack of an RTX card. I went back and forth about whether to go Ryzen or Intel. The equivalent Ryzen system was about $200 more and I was honestly not sure if it was going to bring me $200 more in joy? I don’t use my machine as exclusively a gaming machine but do a lot of creative and development work on it, and right now… the software that does those things seems to have more optimization for the intel product line. In any case I think the difference would be felt in the margins and since I am highly unlikely to really do anything that extreme on either processor it was probably a wash out.

My ultimate goal was to get the new machine which I named the “NormandySR2” moved in enough to be able to record the podcast on Saturday and edit it Sunday. I accomplished both goals and the only upgrade that I will probably make on the short term is to add 2 more sticks of matching ram in the system to take it up to 32gb. I’ve never had ram that looked pretty, and that I would care about matching to the existing ram that I had. I am still very much in the mode of install games and see what they look like with the new card. Cyberpunk 2077 looks really nice with raytracing turned on, and while I had perfectly cromulent performance before… it looks much nicer now.

As one is obligated to do so… I have also been playing some Doom Eternal because playing a Doom game on a new gaming rig just seems like a thing one needs to do. I still can’t believe I plunked down the amount of money that I did on a new gaming rig… but I am ultimately happy with the results. One of the catches with these systems is that you don’t exactly get to pick the SKU of the graphics card you end up with. I knew it would be a 3080, but I did not know which model so I was pleasantly surprised when it ended up one of the premium SKUs. The graphics card alone could be sold for around $2000-$2500 if one is to believe ebay sold listings, which isn’t that far off from the price tag of the total system.

The overall experience of ABS systems from NewEgg was pretty great. They used quality foam and one of those inflatable bag things on the inside to keep all the parts stable in shipping. While the concept of buying a prebuilt sorta hurts my gamer pride… I would absolutely do this thing again because it just worked flawlessly. So if you have been saving your pennies for an upgrade, you seriously might look at the prebuilt computer market. In many cases you can buy an entire system for less than the graphics card alone is selling in the third party market.

MixTape Mondays: Big Hair Tight Pants

Good Morning Friends! It is that time again, time for another MixTape. For those who don’t know what is going on here, every Monday I release a new MixTape as I share some of my musical tastes with you my readers. I was one of those kids who made MixTapes for my friends and as a completely failed attempt at flirting. There is a certain artform to a good album and this is my attempt to revitalize that whole experience that I have found I deeply missed. An old friend of mine told me over the weekend, that it seemed like I was missing creativity and creative outlets… and I guess this is one way of flexing those muscles. I do enjoy creating my nonsense album art for each release. However lets get on into the music.

Big Hair Tight Pants

This time we are diving back into the era kept alive by mascara, tight pants and copious amounts of extra hold hairspray. That’s right I am talking about the era of Hair Metal and Glam Rock. I am of a specific age that has allowed me to weather many trends, not the least of which is when the baddest dudes on the planet wore women’s cut tops and spandex pants. I have a deep nostalgia for this era of rock and once again I attempted to pull together some very well worn staples and a few deep cuts as we go. Honestly once again this is a bit of a build around… Hysteria by Def Leppard is probably my single favorite track from that era so of course I had to feature it.

  • Panama – Van Halen
  • Hysteria – Def Leppard
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Warrant
  • 18 and Life – Skid Row
  • Sweet Child O’ Mine – Gun N’ Roses
  • Livin’ On a Prayer – Bon Jovi
  • Poison – Alice Cooper
  • Dr. Feelgood – Motley Crue
  • Nothin’ But a Good Time – Poison
  • Thunderstruck – AC/DC
  • Cum on Feel the Noize – Quiet Riot
  • The Final Countdown – Europe
  • No More Tears – Ozzy Osbourne

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

An there we go, another Monday and Mix down. This one is probably going to be fairly polarizing since the hair metal era is not exactly loved by everyone. The older I get the more nostalgic about it I am. For some reason this era always reminds me of State Fair concerts and the little “coke” mirrors that you used to be able to win on the midway with album art for all of these bands. If you are tuning in late to this project and want to catch up you can do so through my archive linked below.

AggroChat #348 – Modding and Mechs

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Be warned, if anything sounds weird…  Bel is recording from a new gaming rig which seems to have brought back the whine for now.  Hopefully he can resolve that in the coming weeks.  We start the show talking about Mechwarrior 5 and the recent Mercs expansion.  We also talk about how it has essentially destroyed the mod that folks were running to get around inconsistencies in the base game.  This has lead to some mixed opinions among the AggroChat crew.  From there we talk briefly about The Outer Wilds and Biomutant before settling into a longer conversation about Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis.  Finally we wrap things up with a discussion about Ratchet and Clank and how Tam and Kodra are not as fluent in this universe.

Topics Discussed:

  • Mechwarrior 5
    • Mercs DLC Update
    • The end of Modding
  • The Outer Wilds
  • Biomutant
  • Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis
  • Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart