Risk Of Rain 2 creators “still believe that Gearbox is heading in the right direction” despite troubles with recent DLC
Raining on my parade
Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm released last Tuesday, and hasn’t gone down too well with fans of the co-op roguelite. How not well, you ask? To shreds, I say - it’s currently sitting at 79% ‘mostly negative’ rating on Steam. Among the chief complaints are…uh, everything, it looks like. The DLC is reportedly so bug-ridden that it’s taken many of the base game’s core systems down with it.
Gearbox - who acquired Risk Of Rain from Hopoo Games in 2022 - have since put out a blog with a list of known issues they’re targeting, and encourage players to keep submitting bug reports. Among the listed issues are a boss named Mithrix becoming invincible (“definitely not intentional”), and “an issue that allowed players to get stuck while smelling the flowers”.
"This is definitely a bittersweet situation. It's great to see new content for the game, but it's hard to see growing pains of the new team in real time," wrote co-creator Duncan Drummond on Xitter. "It sucks for the fans, who lost functionality for the game they love. It also sucks for the developers at GBX, who are probably under a ton of stress and can't really celebrate the win of launching a new DLC"
"We still believe that Gearbox is heading in the right direction," Drummond continued, "and that they have every intention of fixing issues & listening to feedback. I know the people on the GBX team - and they care deeply about Risk of Rain. Definitely a hard situation for everyone involved."
“I think that the team working on the DLC did the best they could with what time and resources they were given, which isn’t a stretch to guess wasn’t enough,” ROR2 lead programmer, co-designer, and concept artist Jeffrey Hunt told PCGamesN. “I remember the team at Gearbox we worked with on the Survivors of the Void DLC was doing really well, particularly on the new stages.” Still, Hunt said, “Seeing some of the rushed changes crippling that work is difficult.”
Randolph P. Itchford also took to Xitter to reassure fans he'd been in "the digital war room all day as we worked out some things with RoR to correct, communicate and compensate".
As far as I can tell, the player base have been largely happy with Gearbox’s custodianship up until now. Back in May, they added some free lizards - the telltale sign of a thriving game. Gearbox themselves were sold to Rockstar parent Take-Two back in March, resulting in a number of layoffs.