Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm launched last Tuesday and was met with a mixed reception from co-op roguelite fans. How unpopular, you might ask. I'll break it down – it currently has a 79% 'mostly negative' rating on Steam. The main complaints seem to include… well, everything. The DLC is said to be so buggy that it's taken away most of the base game's core systems.
Gearbox, which acquired Risk Of Rain from Hopoo Games in 2022, has since published a blog listing of known issues they're targeting, encouraging players to continue sending bug reports in. The issues listed include a boss named Mithrix becoming invincible (“definitely not intentional”) and “an issue that allows players to get stuck while smelling flowers.”
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“This is definitely bittersweet. It's great to see new content for the game, but it's hard to see the growing pains of the new team in real time,” co-creator Duncan Drummond wrote on Xitter. “It's bad for the fans who are losing functionality for the game they love. It's also bad for the developers at GBX, who are probably under a lot of stress and can't really celebrate the triumph of releasing new DLC.”
“We believe Gearbox is still on the right track,” Drummond continued, “and they have every intention of fixing the issues and listening to feedback. I know the people on the GBX team – and they care deeply about Risk of Rain. It's definitely a tough situation for everyone involved.”
“I think the team working on the DLC did the best they could with the time and resources they were given, which is not hard to imagine,” ROR2 lead programmer, co-designer, and concept artist Jeffrey Hunt told PCGamesN. “I remember the Gearbox team we worked with on the Survivors of the Void DLC doing really well, especially in the early stages.” Still, Hunt said, “It’s hard to see rushed changes as disrupting that work.”
Randolph P. Itchford also reassured fans by telling Xitter that “we've been in the digital war room all day long trying to fix, communicate, and make up for things with RoR.”
From what I understand, the player base has been largely happy with Gearbox’s patronage so far. In May, they added a few free lizards — a harbinger of a thriving game. Gearbox itself was sold to Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two in March, which led to a series of layoffs.