Amid Risk of Rain 2 DLC blowback, the roguelike’s creators say “it sucks” for fans and the new devs at Gearbox, but those new devs say fixes are coming and this is “just the beginning”

After selling the Risk of Rain IP to Gearbox and seeing the new caretakers stumble with the buggy Risk of Rain 2 DLC Seekers of the Storm, the original creators at Hopoo games feel “bittersweet” about the state of their roguelike. 

I reached out to Hopoo co-founder Paul Morse for comment on the Seekers of the Storm launch, and he directed me to a joint statement posted by fellow co-founder Duncan Drummond. “This is definitely a bittersweet situation,” Drummond said in a tweet thread. “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. 

“It sucks for the fans, who lost functionality for the game they love,” he added, seemingly alluding to the game-breaking physics bugs tied to an unintentional change that folds in frame rate in the worst way. “It also sucks for the developers at [Gearbox], 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, and that they have every intention of fixing issues and 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.” 

The new Risk of Rain 2 devs at Gearbox have been actively sharing workarounds for various issues, including capping your FPS at 60 to rein in wacky physics behavior, and have committed to getting the game back to a good place. One of those devs, design lead Bruno Fontanetti, a huge Risk of Rain 2 who was optimistic about the future of the game when we spoke with him in the run up to this DLC launch, appeared at Gearbox’s PAX West panel just hours after Drummond’s statement went up, affirming the team’s commitment to Risk of Rain as a whole. 

“I wanna take a beat and talk a little about how much the team loves this IP,” Fontanetti said. “We’ve been working really hard on patches to address all the feedback we’ve been getting out there. More patches and information will be coming out soon. We’re super excited to be part of the growth and the future of the Risk of Rain franchise … Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm is just the beginning of what we have planned and we’re so excited to share more with you soon.”

As Risk of Rain 2’s first Gearbox-made DLC takes a hammer to the beloved roguelike, the game’s original programmer fears it “must have been rushed out.”