Viking RPG Rune will skip planned Early Access release, full version due later this year

The developer of Rune, the Viking RPG that lets you use severed limbs as weapons, has secured enough funding for the game to skip its planned Early Access release, and will instead release the full 1.0 version later this year, it has announced.

The game, which is a sequel to the 2000 hack-and-slasher of the same name, was supposed to release in Early Access this winter. But in a tweet yesterday, the development team at Human Head Games said that "through additional funding" they will be able to deliver everything they want on day one of release.

"We no longer have to utilise an Early Access development process," the team said. "Instead we will be launching directly into a 1.0 release later this year, paired with a strong roadmap of post-release content to follow."

The team will provide a launch time frame "very shortly", they added.

Rune entered beta testing in August last year. Chris got to try a slice of it in June and was impressed by the combat, which he said was "gory, fast-paced, and fun". Read his full hands-on preview here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.