November is the month of the Viking, apparently, but we’re not talking about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla this time. Today, Rune 2: Decapitation Edition came out. It’s an open world action-RPG where you play as some Viking trying to save Midgard, but truly, I’m glossing over the interesting bit.

Rune 2 has gone through nothing but drama over the last year – which most recently involved its publishers accusing Bethesda and Zenimax of intentionally sabotaging the game.

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Bethesda and ZeniMax intentionally sabotaged Rune 2 by secretly snapping up its developers days before launch, the game’s publishers have claimed in a lawsuit. The Viking fantasy action-RPG launched in November 2019 then, the very next day, developers Human Head announced they were shutting down but their employees had been hired for a new Bethesda studio. This was quite a surprise, even to the publishers who had been relying on Human Head to support the game after launch. They sued to regain control of the game’s code and continue updating it, and now are going after Bethesda and Zenimax too.

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Rune 2, sequel to the much older RPG Rune, has been sailing through uncertain waters since its release two months ago. The publisher Ragnarok Game may have finally reached the eye of the storm as of last week when they regained control of the viking RPG’s code from the former developers whose studio suddenly shut down and quickly after accepted positions at a new Bethesda studio. Now Ragnarok can get back to work.

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Nordic action-RPG Rune 2 released on November 12th. The next day, its developers Human Head Studios announced their closure and that all of its development team were offered new positions at a new studio with Bethesda. Apparently they failed to mention this crucial detail to Rune 2’s publisher. Now Ragnarok Game are suing Human Head to regain control of the game’s source code and assets.

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It’s been a wild week for Human Head Studios. They finally launched Rune 2, the oft-delayed sequel to their third-person Viking murderer from way back in the year 2000, then shut down and immediately reformed under Bethesda as Roundhouse Studios. I was surprised by this, but my surprise is nothing compared to what Rune 2’s publishers felt. “We found out about this news when you did,” they said yesterday, and they’d been counting on Human Head being around for ongoing support. They assure they’re working to fix bugs and will continue their post-launch content plans but sheesh, that’s a surprise alright.

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It should’ve been a big week for Human Head Studios. Rune 2 finally completed its rocky voyage onto store shelves, nineteen years after its predecessor. Unfortunately, Human Head’s latest would turn out to be their last. Today, the developers announced they’d be “closing the book” on the studio as we know it.

Fortunately, it’s not quite the end of Human Head entirely. The developers will continue their day jobs under new moniker Roundhouse Games, thanks to the intervention of Bethesda Softworks.

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