Risk of Rain 2 News

Dev Thoughts #18 - The Future of Risk of Rain 2

Hey! Since we released 1.0 on PC (and continue on-going efforts to get 1.0 on consoles), our team at Hopoo Games has finally had time to evaluate our development over the last year-and-a-bit. It has given us insight on how RoR2 has gone so far - and where we want to take it going forward.

Here’s the plan:

Early Access Post-Mortem

Since we’ve officially left Early Access, we thought some players may be curious as to how the whole thing went. RoR2 was our first ever Early Access project, and so there were many lessons to learn.

Overall, Early Access was a fantastic way to get feedback, spread news of the game, and engage with players. However, it came at a cost of creativity and quality to meet deadlines.

The Early Access Roadmap kept us honest and on track - and as a result, we created a game that was way more ambitious than a small team should really make. It kept fans engaged for over a year, hitting over 70,000 concurrent players at the 1.0 launch. We also received thousands of hours of feedback, and as a result have improved the quality of the game as a whole.

However, the same Roadmap also impacted other aspects of the game in a more negative way. Ideas that were cool but challenging had to be cut to hit release dates - for example, the Grandparent boss couldn’t be completed in time for Sky Meadows, leaving it with no unique boss. We also fell behind on internal roadmaps for lore entries, leaving them uncompleted for 1.0. There’s a few bugs that have been issues since Early Access’ release that we haven’t had the time to fix. Not all survivors have the same number of skill variants. We have a passionate modding community that has no official mod support.

These are all things that we plan to address.

Moving Forward

Our goals moving forward is to have sustainable, creative development on RoR2. We want to expand our team, and we want to see how far we can really take the game.

We plan on releasing one more Content Update to all platforms, as a final thank you to all players - and also to ourselves. We’re incredibly passionate about the game, and there’s so much we wanted to do during Early Access that we haven’t had the time to do yet. Our goal for this content update is to complete internal content we had to cut, and to do another pass on feedback from players. We have no timeline or release date on this CU, and will most likely look a bit different than the other CU’s we’ve had during Early Access. Please let us know if there’s something you’d want to be included in this CU.

During this time, we’re planning on hiring a few more members for our team. We don’t have job listings ready yet, but we’ll let you know when they’re available.

Afterwards, we plan on creating and selling “Expansions” for the game. The goal for Expansions is that they would be multiple Content Updates in size, and would occur only 1-2 times a year. These Expansions will most likely be themed - for example, we could have a “Void Expansion” or an “Imp Expansion” - with new content built around that theme. Quality of life, bug fixes, and balance changes will still be free as patches to the base game.

The reasons we’re planning on large, expansion DLCs are:

The additional income will help pay for the new developers we’re going to hire, and help pay for porting costs to consoles

A large expansion pack will be much more likely to engage players back into RoR2. The reality is that RoR2 is competing with every other game on the planet for your time and focus - and as the game ages, and new cool games come out, we want to make sure that if we’re compelling you to come back to RoR2, it’s with something more exciting than 1 new survivor and 8 new items.

We think Expansions will be a good way to continue on-going development on RoR2. Please let us know if this sounds exciting!

Modding

We have always been excited by our growing mod community for RoR2. We love seeing your creative work, thoughts on the game, and really out-of-the-box designs. Mod support is something that we really wanted to be able to do officially, and each content update we would sneak in a few changes to support that community. One of our other goals moving forward is to let modders have an easier time with RoR2. We don’t know the exact shape of that yet, especially since there are many moving parts, but we’re hopeful to support the mod community.

Stadia & Sundered Grove

Today, we’re happy to announce that Risk of Rain 2 will soon be available on Stadia! Thanks to support from Google, you will be able to play Risk of Rain 2 anywhere through Stadia. The Stadia version of RoR2 will also contain a new bonus map, ‘Sundered Grove.’

‘Sundered Grove’ is a new alternate fourth-stage map created by our partners, Ghostpunch. They have been instrumental to our success during Early Access, and we’re glad to have formed our partnership with them! We hope that Stadia players enjoy the game, and can’t wait to get this map to more fans as soon as we can.

We’ve always enjoyed the transparency we’ve had with the community, and so we hope this Dev Thoughts is insightful to how we think about development going forward. Please let us know your thoughts and ideas. As always, thank you for making this possible.

-Hopoo Games

Risk of Rain 2 - PC Patch v1.0.1.1 (Build ID #5440050)

The goal of this quality of life + bugfix patch is to address a variety of bugs, fix a few unintended changes to Merc, and to make the final fight a bit more engaging and a bit less cheesy.

Captain
- Captain’s Supply Drop now presses the buttons on Abandoned Aqueduct

Equipment Drone
- Now recharges equipment much faster, approximately 5x as often. We don’t expect Equipment Drones to suddenly become super strong, but there may be a few cases where it is now worthwhile.

SPOILERS! Final Boss, Last Phase. SPOILERS!
- Developer Notes: The goal with these changes is to make the final phase of the fight more consistent, fix a few softlock scenarios, and to remove a few cheeses. The expectation is that with these changes, the final phase (and only the final phase) will be much easier. We want this to be a fun phase, not a frustrating conclusion
- Remove “unique” scaling on health and damage. This has a significant reduction on the way his health and damage scales over time, especially later into the run. Expect him to have less than half of the current live build, depending on time.
- Lunar Shard Attack
  - Projectile Cone: 20° ⇒ 0.5°
  - Developer Notes: The intent for this change is to reduce the cone that the attacks come out of, reducing the chance you randomly get hit by a stray shot.
- Energy Ball Attack
  - Damage Coefficient: 1000% ⇒ 700%
  - Knockback Force: 400 ⇒ 4000%
  - Projectile Radius: 3m ⇒ 2m
  - Now glows with a stronger effect to make it more visually noticeable, especially when swinging around corners
- Item Steal
  - Add immunity while channeling.
  - Can no longer use Mired Urn and Crowbars. He will take them, but will be unable to use them. This is a mechanic we already have in place for a few key items (Razorwire, Tougher Times) that can cause softlocks or impossible scenarios.
  - Now steals items from minions, like Engineer Turrets. He won’t use the items he takes from minions.
  - Minions can now retrieve items for their owner.
- Add visual effect to Tesla Coil being active

• Fix certain network prediction projectiles appearing to bounce off targets instead of disappearing as intended
• Fix Mercenary’s Blinding Assault duration scaling from attack speed
• Fix Mercenary’s Blinding Assault having missing iframes on startup
• Reduce Mercenary’s Blinding Assault hitpause duration to 0.1 from 0.15 to match pre-1.0 hitpause values
• Fix Gorag’s Opus not working on Captain, Engi, or Equipment Drones
• Fix the fog on the last stage being entirely opaque if soft particles are disabled
• Fix Captain’s airstrike dealing 1500%/500%/500% damage into dealing 1000%/1000%/1000% damage
• Fix Wandering Vagrant’s portrait having a double red outline
• Fix Forgive Me Please not triggering Frost Relic
• Fix Forgive Me Please not triggering Berzerker’s Pauldrons
• Fix Loader Thunder Gauntlet not bouncing
• Remove luck from Artifact Key drop calculation since it can cause soft-locks with Purity
• Consumed Dio’s is now considered unremovable, and the scrapper no longer gets clogged if somehow there is an untiered item inserted
• Update some missing people in special thanks
• Fix dedicated servers not showing in game browser
• Fix game browser trying to connect to dedicated servers via steam p2p instead of ip
• Fix incorrect boss track on Sky Meadows
• Fix Titan eye glow and foliage missing
• Fix Captain’s shocking beacon missing name when pinged
• Fix unchecking "Show Started Games" in the Games Browser still showing started games
• Fix scrap interaction with cauldrons
• Fix Visions of Heresy interacting with Captain's orbital drop
• Fix Captain getting a new defense drone every time he scraps
• Fix REX being executed by freezes
• Fix Prismatic Trials counting your run in leaderboards when you die
• Fix Meat Hook causing a cascade of issues, preventing certain on-hit effects from working when it would trigger
• Fix Shadowfade not being usable by Captain in hidden realms
• Fix “Killed by: The Planet” for players who weren’t dead at the end of the run
• Fix Merc expose mechanic not awarding cooldown reduction to non-host players over the network
• Fix Captain umbra only spawning one Captain with Swarms
• Fix Captain showing up in logbook before commando
• Fix Final Boss health bar not showing for clients (including phase 2)
• Fix final boss fight sometimes not triggering
• Fix Little Disciple always triggering once as soon as it’s picked up, regardless of sprint state
• Fix Imp Overlord void spike fan firing sound not playing on non-host machines
• Fix Imp Overlord void spike fan chosen animation not being the same over the network
• Fix missing out-of-bound floor under the starting room for the final stage
• Fix Lunar Chimera (Wisp) sound loop still playing after death
• Fix a floating node in Sky Meadows
• Fix a gap in the final boss arena causing you to get stuck
• Fix the ceiling in the final boss arena not being solid for projectiles and Lunar Chimera (Wisp)
• Fix Void Fields safe zones on Eclipse 2 being larger than the actual charging radius
• Fix Server Browser not refreshing by default, only shows 1 person when you click it for the first time
• Fix custom languages from appearing in the main menu dropdown if they are missing essential files
• Fix MUL-T’s Rebar Puncher effect leaving behind objects that aren’t cleaned up until scene exit
• Fix Milky Chrysalis flight not being refreshed if used while in exhaustion descent
• Fix Void Reaver death chain reactions
• Fix Forgive Me Please not animating or playing effects on non-host machines
• Healing numbers are properly green

Hopoo Games Development Thoughts #17

Hi. First and foremost, thank you all so much for jumping into the 1.0 Update. It has been a ton of fun for the team to watch streams, read reviews, hang out in the Discord, and even hop in some multiplayer games with the community.

Since the update on Tuesday, we’ve been working and compiling the first targeted hotfix patch. There will also be another more comprehensive patch to follow, as with all of our previous Content Updates. Apparently, the game is not perfect. This is a collection of community responses and feedback from a variety of channels - keep 'em coming!

=== What We’re Workin On ===

Some of the things we’re checking out right now are:

• Players are getting marooned on a remote island on the final stage. This has been addressed in a hotfix today.
• Players can create infinite loops with Forgive Me Please and Soulbound Catalyst. This has been addressed in a hotfix today.
• The Server Browser has some issues with filters not filtering
• The Loader’s Thunder Gauntlet and Merc’s Blinding Assault is behaving a bit different than before the patch
• Scrap and Lunar Cauldrons have a weird interaction, where it takes more scrap than you have

Some things we’re keeping an eye on:

• LAST BOSS SPOILERS: We’re really happy with the difficulty of the final boss, but some players are feeling frustrated with the last phase. Our intent was for that phase to be a bit of an “oh crap” moment, and to have some unique edge cases from item interactions Our intent was not for players to avoid good items, destroy their own build, or to feel bad for picking up powerful items. If that seems to be the best strategy, we will be changing the last phase appropriately. It is not intended to be the most challenging phase of the fight.
• Merc players feel that the base stat hits were a bit too harsh. We want to give the community enough time to learn the changes - and potentially to change item priorities - but we’re watching this as well.
• Keeping an eye on overall balance for some of the changes we made to survivors and items, and make sure everything is still fun to play.
• Players wished for more skill variants and lore entries - and felt bamboozled when they weren’t there for 1.0. We wanted to highlight that feedback here, since it’s totally legitimate and we’re listening.
• Players want to know what’s coming after 1.0! While we’re totally exhausted getting 1.0 up and done, we still have plans for RoR2 in the future. We will absolutely be supporting RoR2 after 1.0, and we’ll have some big blog posts about it once we’re ready to share.

If there are things you feel we missed or should be looked at, please leave us a comment here and we will check them out. As always, thanks again for your support and patience as we work out the kinks!

-Hopoo Games

Risk of Rain 2 Mithrix guide: how to unlock Captain

Struggling to get through the moon stage, beat Mithrix, and unlock the Captain in Risk of Rain 2? Join us as we break down how to access the moon, find Mithrix, beat Mithrix, add the Captain to your roster, and even get the Captain's secondary abilities.

After a few months spent fermenting away in early access Risk of Rain 2 has finally turned 1.0. And along with dozens of new items, enemies, and environments, there's a brand new character to unlock. The Captain is the 10th Risk of Rain 2 survivor to land on the roster, and you will need to complete the new ending to unlock them.

This takes place in the Moon, the new world added in the 1.0 release. It's a peculiar level that can get a bit tricky by the end, facing you against a boss that feels completely different to the ones we have met before. This guide covers everything you need to know to survive the fight with Mithrix and obtain the Captain as soon as possible, as well as how to unlock their secondary abilities.

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Risk of Rain 2 leaves early access with a tenth character, the Captain

After just over a year in Early Access - and one delay - Risk of Rain 2 has officially launched. The 1.0 update arrived today, bringing with it a new final boss and the community-selected final survivor, the Captain.

As we've discussed before, the Captain is the tenth playable character in Risk of Rain 2, and he wields a gun that can shift from rifle to shotgun depending on the situation. He's also able to call down probes from the orbiting UES Safe Travels that can either provide a healing buff to everyone in range or additional armour. He has a nice captain's coat and hat, calling to mind the ones worn by Captain Haddock in Tintin's adventures.

The final stage takes players to the moon, where they're face off against the Risk of Rain 2 final boss, who is accompanied by a new set of lunar monsters. Like everything else in Risk of Rain, they're increasingly unfriendly the more time you decide to stick around. So you'll want to polish the big guy off as quickly as possible, yeah?

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