Risk of Rain 2 has just released the Storm Seekers DLC update, which you can buy right now. However, it’s probably best not to buy it, as this major update has introduced a number of pretty serious bugs and flaws to a game that, until recently, was in top form.
Bugs include but are not limited to random deaths, frame rate issues, clipped textures, missing textures, missing teleporters, missing item highlights, the speed of certain actions is tied to the frame rate (classic), the wanderer’s orb attack is invulnerable… it’s a whole lotta!
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Why did this happen? Well, the blame seems to have finally fallen on Gearbox. The industry giant purchased the rights to Risk of Rain from original developer Hopoo Games about a year ago, and this Seekers of the Storm DLC is the first content update for the game to be developed entirely by Gearbox employees. Don’t take my word for it – Gearbox CEO and magic enthusiast Randy Pitchford said on Twitter a few days ago that the “DLC is a complete Gearbox effort.”
That’s bad enough for Gearbox, but Risk of Rain 2’s original co-founders also took to Discord to lament the state of the game following the release of the DLC. Worse still, since they’re not the owners of Hopoo Games, they’re not getting any money back from sales. But the vast majority of the code in Risk of Rain 2 is theirs – code that’s now being tweaked and occasionally messed with by the new DLC.
Some players have even attempted to fix it themselves, using mods to try and fix what they can. However, no matter how much fans decide to fix, the state of the DLC is disappointing.
Gearbox laid off a large number of employees after the two companies separated from Embracer Group, but to this day, the specific positions and number of employees affected remain unclear. Will this have an impact on the Storm Seekers DLC? No one can say for sure, but it has been another bad year for Gearbox, which has been particularly challenging for the company.
Hopefully the Storm Seekers DLC will fix that soon.