Risk of Rain 2 Devs Stand by Gearbox Despite Stormy DLC Launch

Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm launched last Tuesday, but the much-anticipated DLC has hit a rough patch with fans of the co-op roguelite. How rough? Let’s just say it’s currently sitting at a dismal 79% ‘mostly negative’ rating on Steam. The primary complaint? Pretty much everything. The DLC is so buggy that it’s reportedly taken down many of the core systems from the base game with it.

Gearbox, who took over the Risk of Rain franchise from Hopoo Games in 2022, has acknowledged the issues and released a blog detailing the known problems they’re working to fix. They’ve also encouraged players to continue submitting bug reports. Among the most glaring issues is a boss named Mithrix becoming invincible—something Gearbox assures us is “definitely not intentional”—and another bug that somehow traps players while they’re “smelling the flowers.”

Co-creator Duncan Drummond weighed in on the situation via Xitter, calling it “bittersweet.” He acknowledged the excitement of seeing new content for the game but also expressed sympathy for both fans and developers dealing with the fallout. "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," Drummond wrote. "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."

Despite the issues, Drummond remains optimistic about Gearbox’s direction. "We still believe that Gearbox is heading in the right direction," he continued, "and that they have every intention of fixing issues & listening to feedback. I know the people on the GBX team—they care deeply about Risk of Rain. Definitely a hard situation for everyone involved."

Jeffrey Hunt, lead programmer and co-designer for Risk of Rain 2, echoed Drummond's sentiments. Speaking with PCGamesN, Hunt mentioned that the team behind the DLC did their best with the resources and time they had, though he suspects those were limited. "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," Hunt said. "Seeing some of the rushed changes crippling that work is difficult."

Randolph P. Itchford, another prominent figure in the Risk of Rain community, took to Xitter to reassure fans that he’s been in “the digital war room all day as we worked out some things with RoR to correct, communicate and compensate."

Up until this point, the Risk of Rain 2 player base has generally been pleased with Gearbox’s stewardship. Just this past May, Gearbox added some free lizards to the game—a sign that things were going well. However, Gearbox has faced its own challenges recently, having been sold to Rockstar parent company Take-Two in March, which led to a series of layoffs.

While the launch of Seekers of the Storm hasn’t gone as planned, it seems that both the original creators and the current developers at Gearbox are committed to steering the game back on course. For fans, the hope is that these stormy skies will soon clear.