Risk Of Rain 2 slaps a patch on the bug-ridden DLC that accidentally made the final boss invincible

Storm sought, storm got

The Gearbox developers working on Risk Of Rain 2 have released a patch for its poorly received expansion, Seekers Of The Storm. The recent DLC for the action roguelike came out of the oven a little doughy, with enough game-breaking bugs to thoroughly upset some fans. Including one bug that sometimes made the game's final boss accidentally invincible. Ah. Yesterday's patch seems to target the worst of these bugs, and the dev team promise there are more fixes are to come.

"This DLC fell short of your expectations," said the developers in a Steam update post accompanying the patch notes. "That feedback is fair. We’d like to take a moment and walk everyone through our plan to make it right."

A lot of the issues seem to have stemmed from a bug that "occasionally led to behaviors being erroneously tied to FPS." You can see why this might bother players on a slower PC. For example, one weapon, the Crowdfunder, would stop firing if the player's frame rate dipped below 30 frames per second. (This sounds similar to a bug reported in Destiny 2 following its Lightfall expansion, by which any damage the player took from enemies was seemingly tied to the player's frame rate). It's a substantial error. But considering the sheer amount of overlapping and ultra-stacking relics and effects in Risk Of Rain 2, I'm not surprised the code is easy to break.

That particular frame rate bug is now fixed, claim the developers, alongside a long list of other issues, like the cheekily invulnerable final boss, and another bug that prevented players from picking up items (somewhat important in a fast-paced roguelike).

"First, to be clear, we're committed to making the DLC everything that you expected and deserve," the developer continues. "This is a game that countless people love; anything that jeopardizes that experience is something we take very seriously. We hope that in the coming days and weeks, we can earn back your trust, and we know that’s going to take time and action."

The poorly optimised DLC garnered some annoyance but also some sympathy, in particular from Risk Of Rain's original creators at Hopoo Games (they sold the rights to Gearbox in 2022). "Definitely a hard situation for everyone involved," said the roguelike's co-creator Duncan Drummond last week. Since then, Drummond and his co-founder Paul Morse shuttered their studio so they could take jobs at Valve along with other workers at Hopoo. In other words, it's been a dramatic couple of weeks for Risk Of Rain 2.