The Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm Controversy

Risk of Rain 2 is a great game, as you might be able to tell by my review over here, too, but both the base game and the new Gearbox-developed expansion are getting panned for the current state of the game. Originally, the game was only published by Gearbox Software, the studio behind Borderlands, but following their acquisition of the Risk of Rain IP in November 2022, fans of the franchise have been anxious about what the future might hold.

This Tuesday, August 27th, the first Risk of Rain 2 DLC developed entirely by Gearbox Softwares, Seekers of the Storm, released onto Steam, introducing many issues to the game, including game-breaking bugs, balancing problems, and performance issues.

To a degree, it’s understandable that fans of the game are upset about the changes made, the issues introduced and the varying quality, but I don’t think reviewbombing the title is the solution, and in general, I do find the discourse surrounding the game to be incredibly toxic and harmful.

So, today, I wanted to talk about the discourse surrounding the game and its newest expansion, and give my two cents on the matter.

What are the main criticisms?

For starters, I wanted to talk about people’s main criticisms, so we’re all on the same page here.

Many elements of the game are affected by a bug that leads to their behaviours changing depending on a player’s FPS. So, for starters, enemies will attack slower when you’re on 30 FPS or faster when you’ve got a high FPS count while some survivors have increased stats depending on their FPS setting. This issue has a planned fix with the upcoming patch but for now, Gearbox did say that it’s best if players play at a fixed 60 FPS for the best experience until that patch is there.

Aside from that, some items don’t work correctly. As such, Warped Echo – an item that splits incoming damage so that you take 50% of it instantly and another 50% after three seconds, theoretically allowing you to heal through big bursts of damage – will damage Rex (who has a lot of self-damaging abilities) even more whenever Rex uses his ability. That said, items like Warped Echo and Chronic Expansion are also making Mithrix, one of the game’s final bosses, unkillable, which is definitely not intentional, even if people make it out to be so.

There are also performance issues, UI, sound and graphics glitches, some hitboxes not working correctly (rip Acrid) while other abilities don’t work at all in the way that they used to or were supposed to (rip Mercenary).

On a whole, there are lots of folks complaining about the content not being enough since the three characters in the game only have one alternative ability or since you can only see the stage variations on successful loops. There are not that many new enemies, only one new boss, and overall, people seem upset at the fact that this game is priced the same way as Survivors of the Void when it doesn’t have the same level of polish.

Of course, there are many, many, many other facets to this but those are sort of the main criticisms at the moment and Gearbox seems to be aware of it and are working on fixes.

My thoughts on these issues

While I do think that the bugs, especially with enemies glitching into walls, at times, are incredibly difficult to deal with, I don’t think the game is unplayable. In fact, I’ve been having a blast with it these days, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the new expansion for the past few days without many issues whatsoever.

Rather than making fun of the FPS-based bugs and the bandaid, I just play the game at a capped 60 FPS because it works best that way. Yes, when it slows down in terms of frame rate, I do notice the issues here and there, but overall, it’s not been that big of a deal for me, really, and quite frankly, there is practically no difference between 60 FPS and 200 FPS for me.

At least on my 60 Hz monitor, it doesn’t make a difference whatsoever in terms of quality. People with a 60 Hz monitor won’t be able to tell either btw. If they say they do, they’re lying. If you have 200 FPS in a game, then that’s just wasted processing power, especially given that most of those extra frames won’t get displayed on a 60 Hz monitor.

Frankly, the game has been more than just playable on 60 FPS. Others have reported that playing the game on 144 FPS matching their monitor refresh rate respectively has also caused no issues at all, so just do that. Yes, it’s a bandaid solution but if you cannot even be arsed to do that while we wait on the new patch that is supposed to fix the issue, then you shouldn’t complain about it.

Of course, I do want to see adjustments to the items, especially since Longlasting Solitude, a new lunar item that was added, sounds incredibly interesting to me, as a Sacrifice enjoyer but it sadly affects all people in the lobby the same way when you pick it up.

Some items just dilute the item pools and don’t have enough of an impact… literally squid turret-level items, essentially. Warbonds, for instance, is a new red item that gives you gold at the start of each stage, something that is not an issue at all later on. It’s okay… but you’d want to see any other item rather than this one.

More than anything, there are issues obviously, like the regional pricing that just got fixed, or Xbox ports not being playable at the moment, and all of those other bugs and game-breaking problems… but the DLC literally just came out a few days ago and it takes them a while to fix most of the game-breaking stuff.

People in the modding community are also saying that it sounds more like the developer team got rushed into releasing the game in its current state rather than them being clueless.

How are people reacting to it?

Overall, people are incredibly toxic about it. They make fun of it. Armchair programmers are acting as if the developers made beginner mistakes. They look at individual lines of code and claim that they could do it much better…

Then do it better. Make a game that someone else programmed work better. Right now. Under time pressure and with all the expectations of all the fans of the game resting on your performance. Do it.

There are a ton of people acting in bad faith, calling members of the team names and just bringing out the pitch forks for no particular reason.

Even under the announcement about the new patch fixing most of the critical errors, people call for Hopoo to come back to the game.

Dude, Gearbox didn’t force Hopoo to sell the game. They agreed to it. Hopoo Games’ team said that they don’t want to spend their whole lives working on Risk of Rain 2 bug fixes. They said that they ran out of ideas already for the game especially after they released Survivors of the Void.

Imagine being a chef and coming up with one dish and really enjoying the creative process of developing a dish like that. That one dish is amazing but all of a sudden you spend all your life, every single day, 24/7, cooking that one specific dish and never ever having the time to work on anything else, especially because compared to other kitchens, your kitchen only features you.

Hopoo Games is a small team with but a few developers and they are creative people. Risk of Rain 1, Risk of Rain 2, Deadbolt, and Risk of Rain Returns showed to use how great they are at what they do. It’s only understandable that they’d want to leave for other ventures and try out other things, make new games, or just take a break for once.

Anyway, people are being really overeager here and keep acting as if Hopoo would have done it better or whatever when Hopoo Games wouldn’t have done it at all. The new content is fine. The bugs and technical issues are not but those are getting fixed soon enough. Just give them time.

Toxicity on Risk of Rain 2 YouTube

I think what contributes the most to the toxicity are channels that produce Risk of Rain 2 content mostly… namely Woolie, a content creator I unsubscribed from recently.

For quite some time now, it’s become so incredibly popular to shit on Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm that Woolie seemingly has to do it every single day. Wild. His talking points are the same over and over and over again and I see people on the Risk of Rain 2 Discord and people in Twitch chats and YouTube comments and on Reddit posts all regurgitate those very same talking points.

“Gearbox doesn’t know shit”, “Hopoo Games never should sold off their IP”, “the game is garbage now”, “the DLC is trash”, blablabla

In his (at the time of writing) latest video, Woolie talks about “Gearbox addressing the Risk of Rain 2 DLC”, seemingly. He doesn’t really do that, actually, though. He reacts to a PAX Livestream by Gearbox and some tweets by Hopoo Games’ co-founder, artist, coder and designer, Duncan Naoki Drummond.

Now, it’s been less than four days and Gearbox just released a statement addressing the issues that the game faces at the moment. They talk about the most critical errors that they plan on fixing in the next patch. They also say that they’ll keep working on the game and these issues even after that patch.

The statement released about eight hours ago (at the time of writing this). The DLC released less than four days ago. Had Gearbox not responded for a whole week or more, it would have been a totally different story… but Woolie acts as if they’re been radio-silent aside from that one live stream at PAX.

This statement here came out after his video, to be fair, but on the discord server of Risk of Rain 2, many people from Gearbox, including CEO Randy Pitchford, have made comments, acknowledging issues and confirming that they’re working on it as soon as possible. Woolie doesn’t acknowledge that these exist and frames it in a way as if the only thing Gearbox is saying is “thanks for the feedback”.

It’s disingenuous and toxic. It’s bad faith. Woolie does this because he knows that upset viewers will keep tuning in to him to then complain about it. This overall attitude and behaviour are incredibly upsetting to see from one of the bigger creators in the community… especially because it just adds fuel to the fire. Completely unnecessary stuff right there.

Some other thoughts

Jeffrey “Ghor” Hunt was the main programmer, co-designer and concept artist at Hopoo Games for Risk of Rain 2 until late 2021 and is a big voice in the modding community. He previously stated “I think that the team working on the DLC did the best they could with what time and resources they were given, which isn’t a stretch to guess wasn’t enough. 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”.

Duncan Naoki Drummond, the co-founder of HopooGames, stated (in a tweet yesterday) that “this is definitely a bittersweet situation. 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.” He goes on to say that it sucks for the fans as well as the developers, but they (presumably at Hopoo) “still believe that Gearbox is heading in the right direction and that they have every intention of fixing issues and listening to feedback”.

Preston Weiler, the brand lead for Risk of Rain at Gearbox, has also consistently been answering questions, confirming that the dev team is aware of the most critical issues and has just been such a great force in communicating and being transparent. And yet, people keep attacking Gearbox’s staff and act as if they don’t care and are being radio-silent, presumably because of people like Woolie who create or at least imply that narrative.

Anyway, that was just some thoughts on the situation. I love the game. I don’t think it deserves the hate and review-bombing is definitely not going to help the situation at all.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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