Risk of Rain 2 creators weigh in on Gearbox's first DLC without them: 'It's great to see new content for the game, but it's hard to see growing pains of the new team in real time'
It hasn't been a good week to be a Risk of Rain fan. Gearbox released Seekers of the Storm, Risk of Rain 2's first DLC since the publisher bought the series from original developers Hopoo Games, and it's currently sitting at just 21% positive reviews on Steam.
More than the content of the DLC, the backlash has been in response to a regional pricing quirk that doubled its price in some markets, as well as PC performance issues and bugs from an accompanying update—so everyone, not just DLC purchasers, were negatively affected. Now some of the game's original developers have commented on the release.
On August 30, Risk of Rain co-creator Duncan Drummond wrote about Seekers of the Storm on X, "The Everything App," expressing understanding for the backlash but also sympathy for the development team at Gearbox.
"It sucks for the fans, who lost functionality for the game they love," Drummond wrote. "It also sucks for the developers at GBX, who are probably under a ton of stress and can't really celebrate the win of launching a new DLC.
"We still believe that Gearbox is heading in the right direction, and that they have every intention of fixing issues & listening to feedback. I know the people on the GBX team—and they care deeply about Risk of Rain. Definitely a hard situation for everyone involved."
Speaking to PCGamesN, Risk of Rain 2 programmer Jeffrey Hunt offered a similar perspective, sympathetic to the developers working on the game at Gearbox. "I think that the team working on the DLC did the best they could with what time and resources they were given, which isn't a stretch to guess wasn't enough," Hunt said. "I remember the team at Gearbox we worked with on the Survivors of the Void DLC was doing really well, particularly on the new stages."
Whatever Risk of Rain's long-term future under Gearbox, the company is currently working on addressing players' biggest complaints about Seekers of the Storm. An August 30 dev diary said that fixing the new bugs and performance issues on the PC version are the top priority, and included a long list of the issues Gearbox has identified.