Risk of Rain 2's new DLC suffers from a serious bug problem, as co-creator morns state of game post Gearbox takeover
The actual content of the Seekers of the Storm DLC is good! It just seems hella rushed is all.
Risk of Rain 2 has just recently recieved its Seekers of the Storm DLC update, which you can buy right now. However, it may be in your best interest to hold off on doing so, as the major update has brought a plague of quite serious bugs and flaws to the game. A game that, until recently, was in tip-top shape.
Bugs include but are not limited to random deaths, framerate issues, clipping textures, missing textures, missing teleporters, missing highlights on items, the speed of certain moves being tied to frame rate (a classic), sphere attacks from vagrants being invulnerable... It's a whole thing!
Why has this happened? Well, the buck appears to stop with Gearbox. This industry giant bought the rights of Risk of Rain from the original development team Hopoo Games roughly a year ago, and this Seekers of the Storm DLC is the first content update for the game that has been entirely developed by Gearbox staff. Don't take my word for it - Gearbox CEO and magic enthusiast Randy Pitchford stated "The DLC is entirely a Gearbox effort" on Twitter a few days ago.
This would be bad enough for Gearbox, but you've also got original co-creator of Risk of Rain 2 mourning the state of the game on Discord following this DLC's release. What's worse is that, as they weren't an owner of Hopoo Games, they didn't see a payout from the sale. But the vast majority of the code in Risk of Rain 2 is theirs - code that is now being tweaked and occasionally messed up with the new DLC.
Some players have even tried creating fixes themselves, using mods that attempt to remedy what problems they can. However, regardless of how much fans decide to patch up, the state of the DLC leaves much to be desired.
Gearbox laid off a subsantial number of staff following the companies' departure from Embracer Group, though the full scope of what positions and the exact number of impacted staff remain unclear even to this day. Did this have an impact on the Seekers of the Storm DLC? Who can say, but it's yet another bad look for Gearbox in a year that's proving especially testing for the company.
Here's hoping the Seekers of the Storm DLC gets fixed soon.