Runemaster production halted by Paradox

Runemaster is no more.

A post over on the Paradox forums contains some rather terminal news for the future of Runemaster, the internally developed Norse-themed RPG. According to Paradox Chief Operating Officer (COO) Susana Graham, production on the game has been indefinitely frozen.

By the sounds of things, Runemaster was not living up to Paradox’s self-imposed standards so the studio has taken the tough decision to shut it down.

The project seems as if it is effectively dead, with Graham stating that “we will take the lessons we learned to heart as we move forward with new endeavors. We will also look into how we can re-use the best parts of the game in other ways.” Based on that, it doesn’t seem as if the game has any chance of returning in it’s initially proposed form.

The team who were working on the game will, according to Graham, now be moved to “other projects within Paradox Development Studio.” Those probably include Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV DLC projects, among other things.

Runemaster was intended as a top-down, third person Norse RPG with an emergent story and some degree of choice/consequence to your actions. It was revealed and demonstrated at ParadoxCon back in January of this year, where we covered the game.