Hopoo Games DevBlog

Hey!

With our first week of Early Access in the bag we thought we would share some more of our thoughts we have gathered over the week. We also want to thank everyone again for all of the support, emails, tweets, and feedback in such a short amount of time. Thank you all.

Similar to our first Developer Thoughts we wanted to break things down into Major and Minor Points, along with some things we have been working on.

===Major Points===

• We want to get our content roadmap available to users as soon as possible - we will be working on that this week.
• Noting a LOT of people are dying very suddenly to blazing affixes and not enjoying it, and it will be tuned down. We do have concerns that the fire affix is artifically gating the difficulty and the game will be much easier once it’s been normalized, but we will have to address that as it comes.
• Noting people want a legitimate way to actively pursue lunar coins
• Fighting Worm isn’t fun, even though it is one of our higher effort bosses.
• People have gotten far enough into the game that things just… stop spawning. For context, the game skips spawns that it deems is too easy for the number of “spawn credits” it has. If you’ve gotten to that point congrats, the game thinks Overloading Worms are a bit too easy for you. This will naturally be fixed once higher tier monsters and affixes are added to the game. For now… it means that you terrified the whole planet.
• Some players falling through the floor on level startup
• Noting a large amount of players whose primary language isn’t English who we want to support with localized text

===Minor Points===

• No one seems to notice Ice affix explosion on death
• Some users are still getting really low performance, while some are not.
• Prismatic Trials leaderboard change seems to be positive!
• Noting a lot of concerns that characters will continually get nerfed in a PvE game
• Engineer’s weird dependency on Bustling Fungus to be viable has always been a concern for once we add more items - he will have a smaller percentage fungii in the pool. How will we make sure every item patch doesn’t make Engi worse?
• Noting the Mercenary sometimes launching Greater Wisps into space
• MUL-T seems to have issues going up specific slopes with his lower speed
• Noting players want the number of Stages Complete displayed on the HUD
• Noting some Equipment are activating multiple times repeatedly over the network

===Stuff we are working on===

• Content/Early Access roadmap
• Improving the way we save data to further prevent save file corruption or the game not saving at all
• Players falling through the floor on entering a new stage
• Wake of Vultures taking half your health
• Improve MUL-T equipment swapping logic
• Changing burning calculation
• Improve the other elites (Ice, Lightning) to be threatening as well
• Improve Worm fight to be fun
• Changing the way some languages handle specific characters and fonts to make sure they are consistent
• Some inconsistent proc coefficients for certain survivor abilities (Artificer is very very low for no reason)
• Lots of bug fixes and quality of life improvements
• Adding in some Community Suggestions we have gathered from tweets, emails, and the official Discord

Please let us know if we missed anything - there is lots more going on behind the scenes but we wanted to make sure we get some of this information shared with the community. Again, thank you all so much for the amazing first week. We are so excited for the future of RoR 2 and what’s to come!  

-Hopoo Games Team

HOLYMOLY
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Uh, ok. First, I just wanted to say from the whole team how absolutely floored we are with the reception so far. I was personally hoping for something to match at least half of the original game: apparently we’re doing a LOT better. It’s absolutely surreal - thank you all again.

We want to make sure the community is aware we are listening and in touch, so for the format of this post and subsequent ones in the future I want to try something new. Consider Development Thoughts to be an honest brain dump of the team. Excuse us if it’s a bit scattered in formatting.

===Major Points===

Overall, we’re ecstatic with the gameplay of Risk of Rain 2. There are some crashes we are trying our best to address, especially on game boot-up.

A goal we are currently trying to figure out is the most appropriate Customer Support path going forward. We’ve been helping players manually, but a lot of players are falling through the cracks. DMing people through Discord isn’t the most efficient. Will update everyone with info once it comes.

Another goal is a general roadmap for the game: what does the future of Risk of Rain 2 look like? How frequent are patches, compared to Content Updates? Will they be major chunks of content or trickling in over time? What would the community feel would keep the game the most enjoyable throughout Early Access?

We have internally finished a patch to address a lot of initial feedback and critical bugs - it is in QA and hopefully available to everyone early next week.

===Minor Points===
• Happy with progression rate for classes - a touch faster than intended but still OK
• Happy with Rainstorm difficulty - haven’t seen much of Monsoon content to know. Drizzle is very easy but also fine.
• Pleasantly surprised with people saying performance is good - have to narrow down why it runs poorly on some high-end machines
• Happy with in-run decision making (3D Printers, Mountain Shrine, Order Shrine, etc). Should try to brainstorm more big decision points like this..
• Happy that new teleporter event rules don’t seem upsetting to RoR1 players
• Curious about content distribution - are players progressing through unlocks too fast? How long do the more difficult item unlocks take?
• Very happy with secret progressions - players are finding it at the ideal rate
• Noting lots of feedback about 4+ player lobbies. Have to consider best way forward - most likely would be a private game only option with a disclaimer.
• Noting sometimes monsters get stuck behind a closed door on Wetland Aspect
• Noting people like going fast
• Noting a lot of Quickplay Lobbies have an insane time to launch of 4000+ seconds
• Noting people like ruining their build with Shrine of Order or 3D printer
• Noting people want to be able to automatically continue sprinting after rolling
• Noting people don’t enjoy getting blasted as soon as they enter a stage

===Stuff we are working on===
• Corrupted save file preventing people from playing is very high priority to fix - this is addressed in the Monday patch.
• Happy with (mostly) class balance outside of MUL-T being a tad too strong. I think it’s worth noting here that we have a stat per attack called it’s “proc coefficient”, and it essentially defines how strong or frequent procs happen on an on-hit basis. MUL-T’s nailgun has a low proc coefficient per nail of 0.4 compared to most character’s 1.0, so he isn’t proccing stuff a ton faster than other characters.
• Very happy with Discord community aspect, but may need management help as it grows.
• Imp Boss is a bit grindy, same with Worm
• Some concerns about cheaters in Prismatic Trial. Excited for when seed rolls over.
• Hearing loud & clear about Teleporter being hard to see - want to make it still an aspect of the game without it feeling like a mistake. Players are not really noticing the passive particles - will start with a soft approach first.

Please let us know if we missed anything - our brains are a little frazzled right now. Again, thank you all SO much for the amazing launch day, and an enormous shout out to Gearbox for their absolutely great support and efforts. Crazy.

-Hopoo Games Team