Risk of Rain 2 News

As we prepare to launch the Anniversary Update - more on that below - we’ve also been looking back at our journey with Risk of Rain 2. On March 28, 2019, Paul swaggered onto stage at PAX East and we launched Risk of Rain 2 on Early Access - to wonderful reception from all our fans.

Since then, we have (yes this is about to be a huge flex)

• Sold over 4,000,000 copies on Steam alone
  
• Launched and grown to over 180,000 users in our official Discord
  
• Received ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ from over 137,000 Steam Reviews alongside an 85% on Metacritic
  
• Gained new community members with 88% of players playing for more than 1 hour - and 57% of players playing for more than 10, numbers we are extremely proud of
  

So, yeah. We’ve grown a lot since Risk 1 and DEADBOLT.

We have also expanded our internal team, and hired new great talents to help work on RoR2 and future games to come. If you’re interested in joining, we’re currently hiring! At the moment, we’re looking for a 3D Animator and a VFX Artist. Interested? Apply!



We’re happy to announce that the free Anniversary Update (or Content Update March, as some of you have started to call it) will be launching on March 25th 2021.

Our goal with this update is to really flesh out and round out the base game, and also be a ‘thanks!’ to all our fans that supported us through Early Access. A lot of the focus of this update is revisiting old items and finishing up content that didn’t make it into 1.0 release - we’ve added like 88 lore entries. Shoutouts to Sivelos for helping us do a ton of heavy lifting for these log entries.



We’re also adding our newest survivor - the Bandit - back into RoR2. Working on the Bandit was both fun and rewarding for us, because it really highlighted how much better we’ve gotten at making content since the original scrapped inception of the Bandit in internal development. Let us know how he feels!

PS: We know that the scrapped Bandit has always been a favorite for modders to add their own finishes and ideas to - and so we have implemented our Bandit as a separate survivor from the modded Bandit, in order to preserve community-made Bandit mods. Enjoy both!





As we announced in our previous Dev Thoughts, we are planning on releasing a paid Expansion late (very late) this year. While we’ve admittedly been spending a majority of our focus for the Anniversary Update, we will internally be starting to shift towards working on the Expansion. As we develop and shape it over time, we will let players know how it’s going, and how big it will be.





Since our Early Access release, PlayEveryWare has done a fantastic job keeping up with the breakneck pace of development and ensuring that console players experience Risk of Rain 2 at the highest of quality (alongside taking advantage of specific features) on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

We’re also glad to announce that we have a new, internal team at Gearbox that is focused on continuing to bring all future content of Risk of Rain 2 to our console players with even closer parity to our PC version of the game.

While the Anniversary Update will be staggered from PC releases like before, our goal with Expansion #1 is to ship on all platforms at the same time. We can’t guarantee 100% that we will achieve that - its something we’ve admittedly never done before - but that’s our goal.



As always, thanks everyone for being passionate for the games we make. We have a lot of exciting things cooking - both for Risk of Rain fans and Hopoo Games fans in general - and we can’t wait to share them with you - one day.



-Hopoo Games

Hey!

Believe it or not - we’re still here, and we haven’t fled the country with all our earnings. At least, not yet.

All of us at Hopoo Games have been keeping ourselves very busy these past few months - and we’re excited to catch everyone up on what we’ve been doing.



After the success of RoR2, we knew that we’d eventually expand Hopoo Games to better support RoR2 long term. During Early Access, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to find, hire, and onboard new members to our team.

Now that we hit 1.0 - and got a bit of a breather - we’re happy to announce that we have expanded the core Hopoo Games Team from 3 to 6.

[h2]Ben Schofield[/h2]

My name is Ben, and I’m here to say
I’m the newest programmer at Hopoo Ga... (mes)

In my eight years in the game industry, I've worked on pretty much everything, from UI to servers to tools, but my player-first mentality has kept my focus on gameplay. I love gameplay programming so much that I spin up side projects in my spare time just to get more of it, so I'm thrilled to dedicate my time to gameplay for Risk of Rain 2. Beyond that, I'm super excited to support this community. There's nothing better than building a game for an enthusiastic audience, so I look forward to seeing your reactions to the stuff we're cooking up!

[h2]Nick Bizzozero[/h2]

Hiya, I’m super excited to join the team - I am a huge fan of Risk of Rain 2 myself. A little about me: I started my 3d career doing mods of Project M, and I also made Strafe! Some of my favorite games include Quake, Team Fortress, Super Mario 64, and Super Smash Bros Melee. My favorite things in games are slipping and sliding around and rocket jumping : ) I will be doing my best to keep Risk of Rain 2 an engaging and visually slick experience! (╯ ͡❛ ⏥ ͡❛)╯┻━┻ 💪( ͡❛ ⏥͡❛ ҂)
[h2]Javid “Snonepe”[/h2]

Greetings! I'm Javid (Jah-vid, if you were curious). Both Risk of Rain 1 and 2 are games I've highly enjoyed and I'm absolutely ecstatic at this opportunity to contribute to the future of Risk of Rain 2!

Previously, I worked at Airship Syndicate for a few years where I handled a wide variety of animations for Battle Chasers: Nightwar and some additional work on Darksiders: Genesis. Additionally, I've worked on a couple of Source Engine based projects such as the Civil Protection Machinima, the No More Room in Hell mod and workshop items for Team Fortress 2 such as the Box Trot taunt.

I grew up playing a lot of JRPGs, some of my favorites being Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 9 and the early Paper Mario games. When I'm not playing Risk of Rain 2, I can be found playing Final Fantasy 14, Slay the Spire or Team Fortress 2.

--

We’re excited to work with our newest members, and we hope that you’ll treat them as kindly as you have me, Paul, and Ghor :^)



As we leave 2020 (god finally) and enter into 2021, we wanted a way for fans to know how RoR2 was going to be supported going forward.

So, more roadmaps.



This roadmap is intentionally different from our Early Access Roadmap in both cadence and detail. As we explained in our last Dev Thoughts, we want players to know the game is still being supported, but we also don’t want to sacrifice our internal goals to hit the deadlines on a public roadmap. We’re keeping things flexible - so please note that the details may change over time.



March 2021 marks the 2nd year anniversary since the release of Risk of Rain 2 in Early Access. To celebrate this milestone, we’re doing a free content update!

This update is aimed towards upgrading and rounding out the game as a whole. This means that the Anniversary Update will be smaller in content compared to other CUs. Internally, we’ve already made great progress towards lore entries, quality-of-life improvements, and other meaningful changes to existing RoR2 content. We’re also revisiting some assets - like the Grandparent boss, for example - that were cut during development.

We’re also keeping an eye on our ever growing modding community, and are making some internal changes (like moving away from fixed enum indices for content and more towards scriptable objects, investigating an engine upgrade) to work toward an easier and more sustainable modding environment for RoR2.



Near the end of 2021, we will also be releasing our first ever paid expansion. The hope for this expansion is that it’s big - we’re aiming at around 2-3 content updates in size, and it will easily be the biggest infusion of new content that RoR2 has received. We believe that we need a truly meaningful update to give RoR2 fans a reason to come back and support the game - and we’re sure that this expansion will hit that mark.

Doing an expansion of this size is new territory for us - and we’ll be keeping very busy - but we will still update players on our progress as we work on the expansion. While we still plan to ship the Anniversary Update on consoles at the same cadence as previous updates, we also have an internal goal of shipping Expansion #1 on all platforms at the same time - we’ll keep you up to date on that as well.



The continued enthusiasm and support from the community makes hiring an easy choice - and we are excited that we can match our growing community with a growing team. As always - thank you for making working on RoR2 fun.

Catch you next year!
-Hopoo Games

The goal of this minor patch is to fix bugs.



• Fixed Sundered Grove’s outer bounds being inconsistent and super far
• Fixed Sundered Grove's geometry having a hole
• Fixed Sundered Grove’s floating pink mushrooms
• Fixed Sundered Grove boss spawns being extra far for Titans and Vagrants
• Fixed Sundered Grove having locations where the map disappears if you move the camera into nooks and crannies
• Fixed the Environmental Log of Sundered Grove not spawning if you had Abyssal Depths' Environmental Log unlocked
• Mitigated additional causes of Brass Contraption corpses still causing endless hitstop on melee attacks
• Properly synchronize open-and-closed doors and other permutations on Abyssal Depths, Distant Roost, and Rallypoint Delta

Hey everyone, 2020's been a tough year for many of us as we all navigated the global pandemic, but also an amazing year for games and we are proud that Risk of Rain 2 continued on its journey of delivering robust content to players with our official launch of 1.0! If Risk of Rain 2 has been a source of fun, challenge, and joy for you and your friends, please consider nominating us for a Steam Award. We'd be truly grateful.

It's been an incredible year for the game and we're genuinely thankful for your support, feedback, ideas, and precious game time. We look forward to sharing more with you in the future!

-Hopoo Games