The makers of Risk Of Rain 2 “still believe that Gearbox is going in the right direction” despite the problems with the latest DLC

Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm released last Tuesday and hasn't been well received by fans of the co-op roguelite. How bad, you ask? I say ripped to pieces – it's currently sitting at 79% of “mostly negative” reviews on Steam. The main complaints include… er, everything, apparently. The DLC is reportedly so buggy that it's broken many of the base game's core systems.

Gearbox – which acquired Risk Of Rain from Hopoo Games in 2022 – has since published a blog with a list of known issues they are addressing and encourages players to continue submitting bug reports. Issues listed include 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 coming to the game, but it's hard to see the new team's growing pains in real time,” co-creator Duncan Drummond wrote on Xitter. “It sucks for the fans who have lost functionality for the game they love. It also sucks for the developers at GBX who are probably under a lot of stress and can't really celebrate the success of releasing a new DLC.”

“We still believe that Gearbox is going in the right direction,” Drummond continued, “and that they are committed to fixing problems and listening to feedback. I know the people on the GBX team – and they care deeply about Risk of Rain. Definitely a difficult situation for everyone involved.”

“I think the team that worked on the DLC did the best they could with the time and resources they had. And it's not far-fetched to assume it wasn't enough,” Jeffrey Hunt, lead programmer, co-designer and concept artist on ROR2, told PCGamesN. “I remember the team at Gearbox that we worked with on the Survivors of the Void DLC doing a really good job, especially on the new levels.” Still, Hunt said, “It's difficult to see how some of the rushed changes are crippling that work.”

Randolph P. Itchford also assured his fans on Xitter that he “spent the whole day in the digital war room while we worked out some things with RoR that we wanted to correct, communicate and compensate for.”

From what I can tell, the player base has been largely happy with Gearbox's support so far. In May, they added some free lizards – the telltale sign of a thriving game. Gearbox itself was sold to Rockstar parent company Take-Two in March, resulting in a number of layoffs.