WARNING: This blog post contains multiple instances of vulgar language.
To some readers who already know me prior, perhaps it is unsurprising to hear that Risk of Rain 2 is my favorite game of all time. It is. Ironically, its exclusion from my four favorite indies list is motivated by my intent to write a separate article describing the game, naturally expressing my love for it in a positive light. So it is honestly heartbreaking for me to come onto my blog and, for the first time, talk about my favorite game ever. Not excited — no — but disappointed. Disappointed at what the game became, and disappointed at what the franchise may yet end up being.
The newest DLC for Risk of Rain 2 released a few months back. And it was utter fucking dogshit.
The Years Leading Up to Seekers of the Storm
The story starts more or less on November 17, 2022, when Risk of Rain 2‘s publisher, Gearbox, acquired the IP rights for the entire franchise, overtaking development of any future RoR-related projects away from the hands of its original team, Hopoo Games. The last RoR-related project Hopoo would have worked on is (supposedly) Risk of Rain: Returns, as Gearbox entered the gauntlet of fire that is this “genre-leading franchise” and fit on the Mithrix-shaped gloves themselves.
And Mithrix-shape they did. True to the roguelite’s efficiency-hungry antagonist, Gearbox swiftly announced not long after their acquisition a new mobile addition to the franchise, Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds. The Android/iOS thriller was an isometric, MOBA-esque iteration of the same formula, suited with a whole tuxedo of downgraded item quality, a worse artstyle, and a frankly abominable gacha system.
Hostile Worlds was essentially a slap to the face for all fans of the franchise, as Gearbox started to generously ask for the open wallets of its supporters. To put it bluntly, Hostile Worlds was a complete fucking joke. A real, amusing joke. Perhaps, an expected joke.
However, even after everyone stopped laughing, Gearbox kept cracking jokes. Immediately after the Hostile Worlds announcement, Gearbox proceeded to announce a fresh DLC for Risk of Rain 2, titled Seekers of the Storm (SotS), to be developed by the replacing team in-charge. A few were optimistic, and many, following the perplexing Hostile Worlds fiasco, were rightfully skeptical. Still, though, the prospects of a new DLC kept the community excited for what’s to come.
The months came and went with little to no update from the team. Release dates kept getting pushed back. Impatience grew from the community. Me? I had no expectations. To be honest, I just wanted more reason to play the game. Yet, with almost surgical precision and impossible accuracy, my expectations were simply met with the most damning punchline of all. This, too, was a joke. And a deeply unfunny one, at that.
Seekers of the Negative Reviews
Saying that Seekers of the Storm was a failure when it launched on August 27 is an understatement. Seekers of the Storm was mocked, battered, bruised, and brutalized. Criticized to the ends of all realms and back. There were few supporters, sure, but for a DLC in a game of this caliber to receive a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam is miraculous, if only for the worst reasons.
But unlike what you may hear from much of the criticism bees buzzing online, Seekers of the Storm is not bad solely because of its buggy, unpolished nature. Certainly, those factors contributed to the unplayable state that the DLC released in, which I will talk about later, but it’s far from the only issue that bedeviled it on release. It’s not as though fixing the myriad of bugs would magically turn Seekers of the Storm from a 0/10 to a 10/10 product. No, I argue that SotS was a fundamentally bad product. Rooted from its rushed development as such. And perhaps this can be best illustrated by the way the new items were designed.
Item Design
Stemming from the nature of roguelites, items are one of the most important ludic elements to get right. The maps and the enemies within those maps merely form the canvas for the paint that is one’s chosen character and, in particular, their item inventory. It is my displeasure to say that the items of the SotS DLC were at the very least puzzling, and at the most god-awful.
From the way I see it, there are three principles to good item design in Risk of Rain 2: (a) item effect, (b) item synergy, and, quite unique to the Risk of Rain franchise, (c) item scaling.
Specifically, item effect refers to how fun the item’s effect is — how fun it is to execute, and how fun its results are. Included in this is item feel. An item doesn’t just have to be good, it has to feel good. Ideally, an item also synergizes with other items, creating for unique build types in the game. An item could theoretically introduce a new build type, but this won’t work in isolation. A new build type requires more items to supplement it, otherwise it would never be worth going for — “paperweight”, as we would call it. Useless. Finally, unique to Risk of Rain and its numerically impressive numbers, items must have good scaling. Unlike in many other roguelites, RoR‘s items can be stacked indefinitely, with each item stack adding an additive or multiplicative effect. That is the core difference which allows RoR to stand out so much within roguelites, making it the “genre-leading franchise” that it supposedly is. An item must scale well; otherwise, it is not worth going for. Paperweight.
Of course, practice must follow discourse, so let’s examine a few of the pre-existing items in RoR2, as practice. Take Runald’s Band and Kjaro’s Band, for instance. These two items function the same: they both essentially enhance burst damage. Effect-wise, these two items are fun. It’s satisfying to one-shot an Elder Lemurian with a spinning fire tornado, but it’s even more satisfying to specifically hold back damage so that one may charge a large attack — maximizing the bands’ utility. That’s because the bands scale well off damage. Synergy-wise, these bands could not do any better, as bands are the core of any builds that benefit from burst damage. Loader mains cream when getting bands. It doesn’t get better than that.
Although, with such a large array of items, not everything will hold up to this line of critical reasoning. Take Bison Steak for example. If this item was added today, I’d be equally upset to it as I was and had been to the DLC. +25 HP. That’s it. Certainly not useless, but not very interesting, is it?
For something with 154 items and thousands of item combinations, it’s admittedly fair that a few would fail these three principles, the rationale being that the deck remains relatively high quality as a whole. That is, the item pool remains rather fun, even despite a few oddballs. I’d go so far as to argue that, in some cases, an item’s raison d’etre is to be useless, but in a way that is still interestingly useless (see Bustling Fungus and its interaction with Engineer).
What is astounding to me is when a company has the financially smart idea to a release a DLC at a clearly unfinished state, the gall to add 17 items, and the incompetence to have most of the 17 items fail in these three principles. That is special. Specially fucked.
In case you have doubts, let’s dissect some of these aforementioned items added in the DLC following this critical line of reasoning. Of course, you may disagree with me at my points, or perhaps with my reasoning altogether. That is okay. But I hope you can at least see my perspective and understand my conclusion. And in case you don’t feel reading large blobs of rambling text is worth your time, feel free to skip these bullet points.
- Knockback Fin – The effect was not fun. It’s fairly decent CC for a common item, sure, but the distance at which enemies were “launched” in the air was meek. Enemies were not being “launched”, they were being tickled and their little skip was their gut reaction. Also, most enemies can still attack even while in midair, so what was the point?
- Bolstering Lantern – This lantern gave extra damage when low in health. “Low health” was a new build type that the DLC attempted to introduce. In theory, creating a new build type was great. But remember: a new build type necessitates that items supplement it. This “low health” build was one Gearbox tried to introduce, but not only was it deadly unreliable, it’s also not supported by many existing items, and in fact it only countered certain ones (e.g., Delicate Watch). Having contradictory builds is fine (and, in fact, rather common in the genre), but when one build type is far superior than the other, the new build just becomes irrelevant. Paperweight.
- Antler Shield – Chance to reflect incoming damage. Interesting effect on paper, and could theoretically be rather useful. Though, considering it lacked synergy with anything else in the game, it’s a rather lonely pickup. Additionally, if Gearbox was attempting to introduce a “low health” synergy, would too many of these antlers not make that synergy unreliable?
- Sale Star – The only good item with no strings attached. Sale Star duplicates the first chest opened in any stage. Considering the importance I’ve pinned onto items here, I hope it’s clear how unique and helpful Sale Star is. It’s simply good, and it’s even more upsetting considering that the development team seemed to flaunt that they like how they designed Sale Star, knowing everything else. Look at their item rework announcements. Sale Star was essentially the only item they could feel proud of.
- Unstable Transmitter – Teleported the player to a random location at low health. The transmitter’s a bit of a controversial item, as some liked its effect (as do I), though many disliked its random nature. Truthfully, that discussion was made irrelevant as its adherence to the “low health” synergy made it as valueless as Bolstering Lantern.
- Sonorous Whispers – A rather interesting effect of dropping items when killing elites and large monsters. Much like Sale Star, I enjoy items that allow one to get more items, and certainly Sonorous Whispers followed that trait. However, its legendary rarity prevented it from being of any actual use in normal runs. Still, I must point out that an item being “fun” is somewhat separate from it being “useful.” Overall, Sonorous Whispers was not bad, though its numbers remained unimpressive.
- Growth Nectar – If you have at least 5 buffs at once, gain extra buffs. Way too niche of an effect for a red item, and the fact that it was a binary conditional made it all the more purposeless. It’s either you have the 5 buffs necessary for the effect to take place, or you don’t.
- War Bonds – Boy. Where do I even begin with War Bonds. This item gave you a certain amount of money (a puny amount of money) at the start of the stage. That’s it. War Bonds was the item that summarized my issues with SotS best. Its effect was bland. Almost uncaring. Its scaling was abysmal, being completely useless by Stage 4; its synergies non-existent, and an uncommon item (Ghor’s Tome) was more effective as a means of amassing money. Whereas War Bonds allowed the player to buy one or two chests at the start of the stage, Ghor’s Tome allows the player to obtain around three to five throughout its duration. Let me repeat: an uncommon item was strictly, objectively as good as (or better) than a legendary item numbers-wise, with no further nuance. Red items are meant to be “run-defining”. War Bonds, a red item, a “run-defining” item, was outdone by one thrice as common.
Though not quite as severely designed as the list above, the rest of the unlisted items fell under the same pits too. In a sense, these SotS items were either unfun, un-synergetic, un-thought-out, or straight up un-Risk of Rain. Some of these items felt as though they were never made for the very game they existed in — as though they were for some other roguelite and somehow managed to teleport their way here. Maybe it was Unstable Transmitter’s doing. But this pattern of the DLC additions being fundamentally incompatible with the base game will unfortunately only continue from here.
Enemy Design
If you’ve ever played Risk of Rain 2, you would know the ridiculous numbers that you start pulling once you reach late / post game. Depending on your run, you could deal upwards to millions of damage at any one time as a natural consequence of the game’s exponentially scaling nature.
Would it not be an absolutely grand idea to introduce an enemy type that reflects some of millions of damage back to the player? Twisted Elites, marketed as “target priority” enemies, did nothing but let your attacks on nearby enemies be reflected towards you. This was acceptable early when there aren’t so many enemies of which to keep track, but due to the sheer monster density later on, it became nigh impossible to find who’s who. Oftentimes, you’d find yourself bleeding HP as you shoot some foes, oblivious to the truth of the situation, and by the time you realized your shots were being reflected, you’re probably already dead. It seems hyperbolic to say it like this, but considering that such a scenario could unfold in about a second, it feels rather common in actuality.
Twisted Elites are one of five new enemy types in Seekers of the Storm, and already it is (or was) rather problematic considering the nature of the game. The other Elite type, Gilded Elites, were… fine. Not really of interest and could easily become irrelevant as the run progressed. And, likewise, the standalone enemies were quite fitting to the game — so long as Halcyonite stays in bounds. Overall, the new enemies seemed relatively reasonable (at least, more so than the items), except for perhaps Twisted Elites, which, as RoR2 YouTuber Disputed Origin put it: “are probably the worst enemy type I’ve seen in any game, ever.”
That is unless you consider the new boss, False Son, to be an enemy. He… is weird. On one hand, I believe False Son, along with the journey to Prime Meridian, are a natural and reasonable extension of Risk of Rain 2‘s core gameplay loop, which is an understandably complicated and controversial opinion. On the other, I think that False Son, as an individual, isolated bossfight, is kind of subpar.
To begin with, the actual idea of getting to False Son via an alternate route is truthfully an idea I subscribe to, even if the lack of stages often means a lack of readiness when it comes to fighting the first creation himself. That much is fine, and is part of the challenge of it all.
What was not fine was False Son’s actual fight, which may be one of the most confusing fights for newcomers I’ve ever witnessed in gaming history. Seriously, almost every one of his attacks are incredibly horribly telegraphed that it’s a complete nightmare trying to read his next move. Your best bet is to simply encode his attack cooldowns into your brain system and play a game of turn-based combat, which is rather disappointing considering his strong predecessors, Mithrix and Voidling.
The nail that inflicted the worst wound for me, however, was False Son’s final phase. I got there twice without understanding why or how anything was happening. One moment and my abilities were gone. Then, before I knew anything, I was dead. It’s inexplicable design.
For the sake of it, let’s compare Mithrix and False Son’s last phases for a moment. Mithrix’s Phase 4 is very clearly telegraphed. You can see your items getting sucked out of your inventory and flying their way into Mithrix’s crimson claws. False Son’s last phase, in contrast, starts with False Son awkwardly spawning lightning out of seemingly his asshole, with a lot more visual effects and yet less finesse, all this as your abilities… just… disappear. Your abilities go, and it’s fairly likely that you’ll be holding left click before realizing that you’re shooting nothing. There’s no cutscene of False Son vacuuming your abilities — it throws you into the phase like a little baby being thrown into a pool of one big, angry alligator. And even after you’ve figured out that he rids you of your abilities, you then have to figure out from there that you must crack geodes to re-obtain them. While geodes are scattered throughout the meridian, they never once give the clue that they’re necessary for the final phase. Not to drag the comparisons, but this is again unlike Mithrix’s final phase, where the mechanic of re-obtaining one’s items by shooting the king feels much more intuitive and natural.
Again, there’s the recurring theme of unfollowed precedence here. The game exists. Risk of Rain 2 has prior examples of good items; of good enemies; of good bosses. The blueprint is already there. All the studio must do is follow it, and, to their credit, they did for some aspects. Music? Chris Christodoulou is still going crazy on those tracks. Maps? They are beautiful, and absolutely fun to play. Characters? They’re surprisingly pretty good, even if Chef is a complete pushover. But everything else just makes you and I ask: what happened? Why are the items and enemies so bad, when everything else is at least passable, if not straight up beautiful?
The situation becomes especially unclear when you consider the one constant clouding this entire DLC, both in the good and the bad, which is everything being unpolished — all of it being rushed.
Unpolishedness
These flaws in item and character design are understandably subtle for those unsuspecting. Admittedly, it requires decent prior knowledge of the game to identify even half of these persistent issues, but there are problems that any player, regardless of skill and experience, can feel tacitly. The lack of polish is undoubtedly an issue felt by many. Indeed, an unsuspecting newcomer may not be able to tell why Bolstering Lantern was a fundamentally bad item, but they can definitely tell that Loader’s special move was 400% louder than it normally should ever be. The DLC was incredibly buggy at launch, shattering not only new things, but even old things that were never previously broken. In fact, I challenge the reader to look at any patch notes for Seekers of the Storm and tell me how many bugs they can count. Now tell me how many of those should’ve never made it into the game. For your information, here are some of the many bugs that plagued the DLC around its release:
- Save files randomly being deleted.
- So many things in the game being tied to framerate. Enemy attacks, player attacks, enemy spawn rates, UI elements, buff cooldowns. Pretty much everything was tied to framerate in some capacity.
- Some sound effects being delayed or not playing at all, which is especially awful for key audio cues.
- Warped Echo. Just Warped Echo.
- Teleporters spawning in unreachable spots.
- Enemies spawning in unreachable spots (especially in the new maps).
- Players spawning out of bounds.
These are only few of many. But honestly, even outside the bugs, the new content as a whole feels incredibly underwhelming. Weightless. Meaningless.
I’ve made several allusions to it thus far, but if the DLC’s lackluster and nearly offensive design did not make the truth behind its development apparent, I would hope that its actualization makes that finally clear. The DLC was rushed. Rushed down to its very core.
‘Was’
The astute readers may have noticed the persistent use of the past tense throughout this article, and that was a conscious decision. Indeed, throughout the entire article, I have been describing Seekers of the Storm and its state when it launched on August. But, much to the credit of the people who continued to tirelessly work on the DLC, it has seen plenty of updates from its launch to now as I write this in December of 2024. The changes were not only small, either, they were fundamental. I stated previously, and probably rather controversially, that the Seekers of the Storm DLC is fundamentally bad. As I say this, the developers are likely typing away — artists modeling away — inline with their continued development roadmap.
Seekers of the Storm 2.0 is a complete and comprehensive overhaul of everything in the DLC, and Phase 1 was just released last week, reworking half the new items and adding polish to the rest. The positive reception is immediate, and it’s both ironic and infuriating.
Irony in the sense that the juxtaposition is frankly hilarious. Infuriation in the sense that if it took the team only three months to fix a good chunk of the underlying issues of the content, why couldn’t have they just been given those three months? Why not give them more initial development time that could have aided towards delivering a better end work? Instead, the team was left to scramble for scraps, while the community lay ablaze in fire — fire that Gearbox itself lit. And it’s infuriating, knowing that the reputation of the game did not need to be sacrificed for this.
‘Will be’
Being confronted with all this, I feel fairly afraid for the future of this franchise. Even if the developers are still hard at work fixing the DLC’s many bugs and issues, it seems like there’s a core problem here that can’t be solved. I don’t want to sound like I’m pessimistic. And I understand that this entire article may sound overly critical of all the new, but I do not intend malice, especially not towards those who were or are involved with this game and DLC. My point here is not to point the blame. My point is to ask the questions.
Here’s one question: if Risk of Rain is meant to be a unique, “genre-leading franchise” (which it arguably has been its whole lifespan), is this the right direction to take for its development process? Will it follow the current widespread strategy of “release something unfinished and update it later on and ask for forgiveness” that the rest of the triple-A industry seems to enjoy following? Then how unique would Risk of Rain be really?
Here’s another question: why are we, as an industry, getting more afraid of giving our teams the time that they need to finish products? Why can’t we release content that are complete? That are polished? That are good? Dan Stapleton of IGN argues that big-name companies don’t deserve low scores because “it’s relatively rare that so much time and money is spent on creating something that falls short […].” To be honest, I laugh at that joke, every time.
Forgive me if you disagree, but considering how Gearbox tried to profit off the Risk of Rain name by first creating a cash-grab mobile gacha game, and afterwards releasing an unfinished, undercooked DLC to the masses, it’s become quite clear to me that this company does not give a flying fuck about this IP. That, to me, is the core problem. To be clear, this is not to say that the studios and teams and individuals do not care. They still showed perseverance and willingness to make SotS a good product, seeing their continued hardwork in spite of its horrific launch. There’s certainly individual and some collective care towards the franchise (and, indeed, I do feel that care). But as an entity? Evidence so far has shown otherwise.
The systems that be inhibit the people that do. So here’s my last question: if Gearbox won’t care about Risk of Rain, why should I?
- To be clear, Twisted Elites reflected damage based on your HP, not damage. This still killed you if you’re shooting enemies quickly or if you had plenty AoE. Regardless, it doesn’t excuse the enemy being awfully designed initially.
- I’m discreetly aware that Gearbox — the entity — may not necessarily be the particular “company” this refers to. It may be 2K, it may be Take-Two Interactive. Could be more than one. Point still stands.
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