Hey!

Believe it or not - we’re still here, and we haven’t fled the country with all our earnings. At least, not yet.

All of us at Hopoo Games have been keeping ourselves very busy these past few months - and we’re excited to catch everyone up on what we’ve been doing.


After the success of RoR2, we knew that we’d eventually expand Hopoo Games to better support RoR2 long term. During Early Access, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to find, hire, and onboard new members to our team.

Now that we hit 1.0 - and got a bit of a breather - we’re happy to announce that we have expanded the core Hopoo Games Team from 3 to 6.


My name is Ben, and I’m here to say
I’m the newest programmer at Hopoo Ga... (mes)

In my eight years in the game industry, I've worked on pretty much everything, from UI to servers to tools, but my player-first mentality has kept my focus on gameplay. I love gameplay programming so much that I spin up side projects in my spare time just to get more of it, so I'm thrilled to dedicate my time to gameplay for Risk of Rain 2. Beyond that, I'm super excited to support this community. There's nothing better than building a game for an enthusiastic audience, so I look forward to seeing your reactions to the stuff we're cooking up!


Hiya, I’m super excited to join the team - I am a huge fan of Risk of Rain 2 myself. A little about me: I started my 3d career doing mods of Project M, and I also made Strafe! Some of my favorite games include Quake, Team Fortress, Super Mario 64, and Super Smash Bros Melee. My favorite things in games are slipping and sliding around and rocket jumping : ) I will be doing my best to keep Risk of Rain 2 an engaging and visually slick experience! (╯ ͡❛ ⏥ ͡❛)╯┻━┻ 💪( ͡❛ ⏥͡❛ ҂) <( 行くぞ! )


Greetings! I'm Javid (Jah-vid, if you were curious). Both Risk of Rain 1 and 2 are games I've highly enjoyed and I'm absolutely ecstatic at this opportunity to contribute to the future of Risk of Rain 2!

Previously, I worked at Airship Syndicate for a few years where I handled a wide variety of animations for Battle Chasers: Nightwar and some additional work on Darksiders: Genesis. Additionally, I've worked on a couple of Source Engine based projects such as the Civil Protection Machinima, the No More Room in Hell mod and workshop items for Team Fortress 2 such as the Box Trot taunt.

I grew up playing a lot of JRPGs, some of my favorites being Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 9 and the early Paper Mario games. When I'm not playing Risk of Rain 2, I can be found playing Final Fantasy 14, Slay the Spire or Team Fortress 2.

--

We’re excited to work with our newest members, and we hope that you’ll treat them as kindly as you have me, Paul, and Ghor :^)


As we leave 2020 (god finally) and enter into 2021, we wanted a way for fans to know how RoR2 was going to be supported going forward.

So, more roadmaps.



This roadmap is intentionally different from our Early Access Roadmap in both cadence and detail. As we explained in our last Dev Thoughts, we want players to know the game is still being supported, but we also don’t want to sacrifice our internal goals to hit the deadlines on a public roadmap. We’re keeping things flexible - so please note that the details may change over time.


March 2021 marks the 2nd year anniversary since the release of Risk of Rain 2 in Early Access. To celebrate this milestone, we’re doing a free content update!

This update is aimed towards upgrading and rounding out the game as a whole. This means that the Anniversary Update will be smaller in content compared to other CUs. Internally, we’ve already made great progress towards lore entries, quality-of-life improvements, and other meaningful changes to existing RoR2 content. We’re also revisiting some assets - like the Grandparent boss, for example - that were cut during development.

We’re also keeping an eye on our ever growing modding community, and are making some internal changes (like moving away from fixed enum indices for content and more towards scriptable objects, investigating an engine upgrade) to work toward an easier and more sustainable modding environment for RoR2.


Near the end of 2021, we will also be releasing our first ever paid expansion. The hope for this expansion is that it’s big - we’re aiming at around 2-3 content updates in size, and it will easily be the biggest infusion of new content that RoR2 has received. We believe that we need a truly meaningful update to give RoR2 fans a reason to come back and support the game - and we’re sure that this expansion will hit that mark.

Doing an expansion of this size is new territory for us - and we’ll be keeping very busy - but we will still update players on our progress as we work on the expansion. While we still plan to ship the Anniversary Update on consoles at the same cadence as previous updates, we also have an internal goal of shipping Expansion #1 on all platforms at the same time - we’ll keep you up to date on that as well.


The continued enthusiasm and support from the community makes hiring an easy choice - and we are excited that we can match our growing community with a growing team. As always - thank you for making working on RoR2 fun.

Catch you next year!
-Hopoo Games

The goal of this minor patch is to fix bugs.



• Fixed Sundered Grove’s outer bounds being inconsistent and super far
• Fixed Sundered Grove's geometry having a hole
• Fixed Sundered Grove’s floating pink mushrooms
• Fixed Sundered Grove boss spawns being extra far for Titans and Vagrants
• Fixed Sundered Grove having locations where the map disappears if you move the camera into nooks and crannies
• Fixed the Environmental Log of Sundered Grove not spawning if you had Abyssal Depths' Environmental Log unlocked
• Mitigated additional causes of Brass Contraption corpses still causing endless hitstop on melee attacks
• Properly synchronize open-and-closed doors and other permutations on Abyssal Depths, Distant Roost, and Rallypoint Delta

Hey everyone, 2020's been a tough year for many of us as we all navigated the global pandemic, but also an amazing year for games and we are proud that Risk of Rain 2 continued on its journey of delivering robust content to players with our official launch of 1.0! If Risk of Rain 2 has been a source of fun, challenge, and joy for you and your friends, please consider nominating us for a Steam Award. We'd be truly grateful.

It's been an incredible year for the game and we're genuinely thankful for your support, feedback, ideas, and precious game time. We look forward to sharing more with you in the future!

-Hopoo Games

The goal of this minor patch is to add Sundered Grove into the game, and fix a few bugs.



• New Stage: Sundered Grove



• Fixed Eclipse 3 modifiers applying to enemies
• Fixed the final boss’ shockwaves being fired an extra time for each remote client in the game
• Fixed some floating nodes in Sundered Grove
• Restored the cursor for gamepad users while in the info/scoreboard menu
• Updated all music tracks to be more similar to the OST version
• Updated a lot of localization strings
• Fixed throwing Forgive Me Please off a cliff causing it to not release its deployable slot until the next stage
• Fixed monsters revived via Dio’s Best Friend potentially respawning into out-of-bounds kill zones that make them miss the trigger, never die again, and potentially cause a softlock in this way if they are a boss
• Added temporary safety mechanism that forces client bodies to reinitialize into valid states if they are still in an invalid state one second after spawning
• Fixed ragdolling causing the hurtboxes of dead characters to become re-enabled (yes, the brass contraption ragdoll + melee bug is finally dead!)

Hey! Since we released 1.0 on PC (and continue on-going efforts to get 1.0 on consoles), our team at Hopoo Games has finally had time to evaluate our development over the last year-and-a-bit. It has given us insight on how RoR2 has gone so far - and where we want to take it going forward.

Here’s the plan:

Since we’ve officially left Early Access, we thought some players may be curious as to how the whole thing went. RoR2 was our first ever Early Access project, and so there were many lessons to learn.

Overall, Early Access was a fantastic way to get feedback, spread news of the game, and engage with players. However, it came at a cost of creativity and quality to meet deadlines.

The Early Access Roadmap kept us honest and on track - and as a result, we created a game that was way more ambitious than a small team should really make. It kept fans engaged for over a year, hitting over 70,000 concurrent players at the 1.0 launch. We also received thousands of hours of feedback, and as a result have improved the quality of the game as a whole.



However, the same Roadmap also impacted other aspects of the game in a more negative way. Ideas that were cool but challenging had to be cut to hit release dates - for example, the Grandparent boss couldn’t be completed in time for Sky Meadows, leaving it with no unique boss. We also fell behind on internal roadmaps for lore entries, leaving them uncompleted for 1.0. There’s a few bugs that have been issues since Early Access’ release that we haven’t had the time to fix. Not all survivors have the same number of skill variants. We have a passionate modding community that has no official mod support.

These are all things that we plan to address.

Our goals moving forward is to have sustainable, creative development on RoR2. We want to expand our team, and we want to see how far we can really take the game.

We plan on releasing one more Content Update to all platforms, as a final thank you to all players - and also to ourselves. We’re incredibly passionate about the game, and there’s so much we wanted to do during Early Access that we haven’t had the time to do yet. Our goal for this content update is to complete internal content we had to cut, and to do another pass on feedback from players. We have no timeline or release date on this CU, and will most likely look a bit different than the other CU’s we’ve had during Early Access. Please let us know if there’s something you’d want to be included in this CU.

During this time, we’re planning on hiring a few more members for our team. We don’t have job listings ready yet, but we’ll let you know when they’re available.

Afterwards, we plan on creating and selling “Expansions” for the game. The goal for Expansions is that they would be multiple Content Updates in size, and would occur only 1-2 times a year. These Expansions will most likely be themed - for example, we could have a “Void Expansion” or an “Imp Expansion” - with new content built around that theme. Quality of life, bug fixes, and balance changes will still be free as patches to the base game.

The reasons we’re planning on large, expansion DLCs are:

• The additional income will help pay for the new developers we’re going to hire, and help pay for porting costs to consoles

• A large expansion pack will be much more likely to engage players back into RoR2. The reality is that RoR2 is competing with every other game on the planet for your time and focus - and as the game ages, and new cool games come out, we want to make sure that if we’re compelling you to come back to RoR2, it’s with something more exciting than 1 new survivor and 8 new items.

We think Expansions will be a good way to continue on-going development on RoR2. Please let us know if this sounds exciting!

We have always been excited by our growing mod community for RoR2. We love seeing your creative work, thoughts on the game, and really out-of-the-box designs. Mod support is something that we really wanted to be able to do officially, and each content update we would sneak in a few changes to support that community. One of our other goals moving forward is to let modders have an easier time with RoR2. We don’t know the exact shape of that yet, especially since there are many moving parts, but we’re hopeful to support the mod community.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Risk of Rain 2 will soon be available on Stadia! Thanks to support from Google, you will be able to play Risk of Rain 2 anywhere through Stadia. The Stadia version of RoR2 will also contain a new bonus map, ‘Sundered Grove.’

‘Sundered Grove’ is a new alternate fourth-stage map created by our partners, Ghostpunch. They have been instrumental to our success during Early Access, and we’re glad to have formed our partnership with them! We hope that Stadia players enjoy the game, and can’t wait to get this map to more fans as soon as we can.



We’ve always enjoyed the transparency we’ve had with the community, and so we hope this Dev Thoughts is insightful to how we think about development going forward. Please let us know your thoughts and ideas. As always, thank you for making this possible.

-Hopoo Games

The goal of this quality of life + bugfix patch is to address a variety of bugs, fix a few unintended changes to Merc, and to make the final fight a bit more engaging and a bit less cheesy.

• Captain
  • Captain’s Supply Drop now presses the buttons on Abandoned Aqueduct

• Equipment Drone
  • Now recharges equipment much faster, approximately 5x as often. We don’t expect Equipment Drones to suddenly become super strong, but there may be a few cases where it is now worthwhile.

• SPOILERS! Final Boss, Last Phase. SPOILERS!
  • Developer Notes: The goal with these changes is to make the final phase of the fight more consistent, fix a few softlock scenarios, and to remove a few cheeses. The expectation is that with these changes, the final phase (and only the final phase) will be much easier. We want this to be a fun phase, not a frustrating conclusion
  • Remove “unique” scaling on health and damage. This has a significant reduction on the way his health and damage scales over time, especially later into the run. Expect him to have less than half of the current live build, depending on time.
  • Lunar Shard Attack
    • Projectile Cone: 20° ⇒ 0.5°
    • Developer Notes: The intent for this change is to reduce the cone that the attacks come out of, reducing the chance you randomly get hit by a stray shot.
  • Energy Ball Attack
    • Damage Coefficient: 1000% ⇒ 700%
    •  Knockback Force: 400 ⇒ 4000%
    • Projectile Radius: 3m ⇒ 2m
    • Now glows with a stronger effect to make it more visually noticeable, especially when swinging around corners
  • Item Steal
    • Add immunity while channeling.
    • Can no longer use Mired Urn and Crowbars. He will take them, but will be unable to use them. This is a mechanic we already have in place for a few key items (Razorwire, Tougher Times) that can cause softlocks or impossible scenarios.
    • Now steals items from minions, like Engineer Turrets. He won’t use the items he takes from minions.
    • Minions can now retrieve items for their owner.
  • Add visual effect to Tesla Coil being active

 



• Fix certain network prediction projectiles appearing to bounce off targets instead of disappearing as intended
• Fix Mercenary’s Blinding Assault duration scaling from attack speed
• Fix Mercenary’s Blinding Assault having missing iframes on startup
• Reduce Mercenary’s Blinding Assault hitpause duration to 0.1 from 0.15 to match pre-1.0 hitpause values
• Fix Gorag’s Opus not working on Captain, Engi, or Equipment Drones
• Fix the fog on the last stage being entirely opaque if soft particles are disabled
• Fix Captain’s airstrike dealing 1500%/500%/500% damage into dealing 1000%/1000%/1000% damage
• Fix Wandering Vagrant’s portrait having a double red outline
• Fix Forgive Me Please not triggering Frost Relic
• Fix Forgive Me Please not triggering Berzerker’s Pauldrons
• Fix Loader Thunder Gauntlet not bouncing
• Remove luck from Artifact Key drop calculation since it can cause soft-locks with Purity
• Consumed Dio’s is now considered unremovable, and the scrapper no longer gets clogged if somehow there is an untiered item inserted
• Update some missing people in special thanks
• Fix dedicated servers not showing in game browser
• Fix game browser trying to connect to dedicated servers via steam p2p instead of ip
• Fix incorrect boss track on Sky Meadows
• Fix Titan eye glow and foliage missing
• Fix Captain’s shocking beacon missing name when pinged
• Fix unchecking "Show Started Games" in the Games Browser still showing started games
• Fix scrap interaction with cauldrons
• Fix Visions of Heresy interacting with Captain's orbital drop
• Fix Captain getting a new defense drone every time he scraps
• Fix REX being executed by freezes
• Fix Prismatic Trials counting your run in leaderboards when you die
• Fix Meat Hook causing a cascade of issues, preventing certain on-hit effects from working when it would trigger
• Fix Shadowfade not being usable by Captain in hidden realms
• Fix “Killed by: The Planet” for players who weren’t dead at the end of the run
• Fix Merc expose mechanic not awarding cooldown reduction to non-host players over the network
• Fix Captain umbra only spawning one Captain with Swarms
• Fix Captain showing up in logbook before commando
• Fix Final Boss health bar not showing for clients (including phase 2)
• Fix final boss fight sometimes not triggering
• Fix Little Disciple always triggering once as soon as it’s picked up, regardless of sprint state
• Fix Imp Overlord void spike fan firing sound not playing on non-host machines
• Fix Imp Overlord void spike fan chosen animation not being the same over the network
• Fix missing out-of-bound floor under the starting room for the final stage
• Fix Lunar Chimera (Wisp) sound loop still playing after death
• Fix a floating node in Sky Meadows
• Fix a gap in the final boss arena causing you to get stuck
• Fix the ceiling in the final boss arena not being solid for projectiles and Lunar Chimera (Wisp)
• Fix Void Fields safe zones on Eclipse 2 being larger than the actual charging radius
• Fix Server Browser not refreshing by default, only shows 1 person when you click it for the first time
• Fix custom languages from appearing in the main menu dropdown if they are missing essential files
• Fix MUL-T’s Rebar Puncher effect leaving behind objects that aren’t cleaned up until scene exit
• Fix Milky Chrysalis flight not being refreshed if used while in exhaustion descent
• Fix Void Reaver death chain reactions
• Fix Forgive Me Please not animating or playing effects on non-host machines
• Healing numbers are properly green

Hi. First and foremost, thank you all so much for jumping into the 1.0 Update. It has been a ton of fun for the team to watch streams, read reviews, hang out in the Discord, and even hop in some multiplayer games with the community.

Since the update on Tuesday, we’ve been working and compiling the first targeted hotfix patch. There will also be another more comprehensive patch to follow, as with all of our previous Content Updates. Apparently, the game is not perfect. This is a collection of community responses and feedback from a variety of channels - keep 'em coming!

=== What We’re Workin On ===

Some of the things we’re checking out right now are:

• Players are getting marooned on a remote island on the final stage. This has been addressed in a hotfix today.
• Players can create infinite loops with Forgive Me Please and Soulbound Catalyst. This has been addressed in a hotfix today.
• The Server Browser has some issues with filters not filtering
• The Loader’s Thunder Gauntlet and Merc’s Blinding Assault is behaving a bit different than before the patch
• Scrap and Lunar Cauldrons have a weird interaction, where it takes more scrap than you have

Some things we’re keeping an eye on:

• LAST BOSS SPOILERS: We’re really happy with the difficulty of the final boss, but some players are feeling frustrated with the last phase. Our intent was for that phase to be a bit of an “oh crap” moment, and to have some unique edge cases from item interactions Our intent was not for players to avoid good items, destroy their own build, or to feel bad for picking up powerful items. If that seems to be the best strategy, we will be changing the last phase appropriately. It is not intended to be the most challenging phase of the fight.
• Merc players feel that the base stat hits were a bit too harsh. We want to give the community enough time to learn the changes - and potentially to change item priorities - but we’re watching this as well.
• Keeping an eye on overall balance for some of the changes we made to survivors and items, and make sure everything is still fun to play.
• Players wished for more skill variants and lore entries - and felt bamboozled when they weren’t there for 1.0. We wanted to highlight that feedback here, since it’s totally legitimate and we’re listening.
• Players want to know what’s coming after 1.0! While we’re totally exhausted getting 1.0 up and done, we still have plans for RoR2 in the future. We will absolutely be supporting RoR2 after 1.0, and we’ll have some big blog posts about it once we’re ready to share.

If there are things you feel we missed or should be looked at, please leave us a comment here and we will check them out. As always, thanks again for your support and patience as we work out the kinks!

-Hopoo Games

This is the fifth major content update for Risk of Rain 2 on PC, marking the 1.0 version of the game. With this update we are focusing on the ending sequence of the game and promoting player agency + build diversity.

This Content Update will be coming to consoles in the near future - for details on how our Content Updates get ported to console versions, check out our previous Development Thoughts here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/632360/announcements/detail/1588003708938246571

Changes with the ‘🌧’ icon in front of them are changes or additions suggested by the community. As always, if you want to stay up to date on the game feel free to join the discord at https://discord.gg/riskofrain2

• Added System: Game Ending
  • The game now includes a proper ending, with credits and cutscene.
• Added System: Server Browser
  • Quickplay served an important function at launch - but the QP featureset is barebones. Not only that, but the game has evolved past needing to just find a match - you need to find the right match. We think a built-in Server Browser (and hosting) will still allow you to connect and find other players easily while also providing a lot of the features and choices you want to make before connecting to a game.
• Added System: Intro Cutscene
  • The game now includes an intro cutscene!
• Added New Survivor
  • New Survivor: Captain
• Added New Stage

[/h3]

• New Final Stage: ???

Added 4 New Music Tracks

[/h3]

• New Track: Through a Cloud, Darkly
  
• New Track: ...con lentitud poderosa
  
• New Track: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Ukulele
  
• New Track: Lacrimosum

Added New Survivor Skin

[/h3]

• New Survivor Skin: Captain Skin

Added 2 New Monsters

[/h3]

• New Monster: ???
  
• New Monster: ???

Added New Boss

[/h3]

• New Final Boss: ???

Added New Interactable

[/h3]

• New Interactable: Scrapper

Added 7 Items and 3 Equipment to the game

[/h3]

• New Item: Item Scrap (White, Green, Red, Yellow)
  
• New Boss Item: Molten Perforator
  
• New Boss Item: Shatterspleen
  
• New Boss Item: Mired Urn
  
• New Lunar Item: Defiant Gouge
  
• New Lunar Item: Mercurial Rachis
  
• New Lunar Item: Purity
  
• New Equipment: Super Massive Leech
  
• New Equipment: Gorag’s Opus
  
• New Equipment: Forgive Me Please

Added 3 Character Challenges to the game

[/h3]

• New Captain Challenge: Captain Mastery
  
• New Captain Challenge: Wanderlust
  
• New Captain Challenge: Worth Every Penny

Added 3 Challenges to the game

[/h3]

• New Challenge: I Love Dying!
  
• New Challenge: Washed Away
  
• New Challenge: The Calm

Added 36 Lore Entries to the game

[/h3]

• New Item Lore Entry: Molten Perforator
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Shatterspleen
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Mired Urn
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Super Massive Leech
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Gorag’s Opus
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Forgive Me Please
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Soulbound Catalyst
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Bandolier
  
• New Item Lore Entry: The Crowdfunder
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Old Guillotine
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Jade Elephant
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Blast Shower
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Lepton Daisy
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Shattering Justice
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Topaz Brooch
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Ocular HUD
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Unstable Tesla Coil
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Milky Chrysalis
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Will-o’-the-wisp
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Gnarled Woodsprite
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Halcyon Seed
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Purity
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Glowing Meteorite
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Preon Accumulator
  
• New Item Lore Entry: Aegis
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: Clay Dunestrider
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: Alloy Vulture
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: Imp
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: Void Reaver
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: ???
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: ???
  
• New Monster Lore Entry: ???
  
• New Stage Lore Entry: ???
  
• New Character Lore Entry: Huntress
  
• New Character Lore Entry: Captain
  
• New Character Lore Entry: MUL-T

[/list]

• General

[/h3]

• Bleeds now refresh all existing bleed durations on that target. This affects both enemies and players, and is a huge change for how bleeds will work.
  
• Increase difficulty rate over time for all difficulties by +10%.
  
  Developer Notes: In this update, we’ve buffed a ton of items - and also given players way more agency over the way a run progresses. Our goal is for players to be more engaged with the game - what we don’t want is for the game to be suddenly much easier. This is a bit of a sanity check, and shouldn’t dramatically change the difficulty.
• Slightly reworked OSP. The goal is to fix inconsistencies and make it actually protect you from one-shots - while also fixing some abuse cases with curse.
  
  • The threshold for OSP is now displayed on the healthbar with a faint graphic.
    
  • Now has a lingering 0.1s duration when activated.
    
  • 🌧 Now is subtracted via Curse (Shaped Glass, Artifact of Glass, etc), i.e a curse of 10% will remove OSP entirely.
    
  • 🌧 Update OSP logic so it still triggers if you receive multiple sources of damage in the same frame that go past OSP values, i.e Malachite Lesser Wisps

Elites

[/h3]

• Blazing, Overloading, Glacial
  
  • 🌧Health Bonus: 470% ⇒ 400%
• Malachite, Celestine
  
  • 🌧Health Bonus: 2350% ⇒ 1800%
    Developer Notes: We’ve had a lot of feedback that elite health has always felt a bit bloated - and that subsequently, it makes the Old Guillotine feel required. Our intent is to make characters less reliant on the Old Guillotine, and to make it feel more like an elite hate item - and less of an overall DPS item.

Survivors

[/h3]

• 🌧🌧🌧 Mobility skills are now considered ‘sprinting’, scaling with sprint speed multipliers and also sprinting after use.
  
• Melee Survivors
  
  • 🌧 Melee skills will now perform more consistently at high attack speeds.
    
  • Melee skills will now scale hitpause duration with attack speed - since the pause when hitting enemies were static, melee characters actually scaled poorly with attack speed.
    
  • Melee skills will now ‘hold’ you in the air better at high attack speeds.
• Added a ‘Keyword’ system. Keywords are just words to describe common repeated behavior without explaining it every time. Added the following keywords:
  • Freezing
    
  • Stunning
    
  • Shocking
    
  • Poisonous
    
  • Regenerative
    
  • Agile
    
  • Percent HP
    
  • Sonic Boom
    
  • Weaken
    
  • Expose
    
  • Heavy
• MUL-T
  Developer Notes: MUL-T has gotten some love from this patch to really push forward the idea that his weapons are strong in specific roles. Faster swap time and more responsive actions for the weapons will (hopefully) make weapon swapping feel better. We’ve also admittedly creeped cooldowns down over time, and MUL-T felt a bit left behind.
  • Base Acceleration: 25 ⇒ 30
    
  • Rebar Puncher
    
    • Now charges after firing, rather than before.
  • Scrap Launcher
    
    • Now behaves like a rocket instead of a grenade
      
    • Lifetime: 3s ⇒ 4s
      
    • Explosion Radius: 5m ⇒ 7m
      
    • Velocity: 70 m/s ⇒ 100 m/s
  • Nail Gun
    
    • No longer has an initial shotgun of 6 nails.
      
    • Now has a final shotgun of 12 nails.
      
    • Now fires in a consistent corkscrew pattern
      
    • Proc Coefficient: 0.4 ⇒ 0.6
      
    • Damage: 60% ⇒ 70%
      
    • Wind-down duration: 0s ⇒ 1.152s
  • Retool
    
    • Swap duration: 0.7s ⇒ 0.4s
  • Transport Mode
    
    • Cooldown: 8s ⇒ 6s
• Mercenary
  Developer Notes: The Mercenary was always supposed to be the highest skill-cap survivor. However, in actual gameplay he became very flow-charty, using abilities directly off cooldown while holding down M1. The intent for all these changes is to allow skill expression, dynamic cooldowns, and higher risk vs reward in fight with the new ‘Exposed’ debuff. The hope is that the character will be stronger for advanced players, but weaker for new players.
  • Base Health: 140 (+42 per level) ⇒ 110 (+33 per level)
    
  • Base Regeneration: 2.5 health / second ⇒ 1 health / second
    
  • NEW Debuff: Exposed
    
    • Striking an Exposed target reduces all cooldowns by 1 second and deals an additional +350% base damage
  • Laser Sword
    
    • Third Strike Damage: 300% ⇒ 130%
      
    • Third hit now applies ‘Exposed’ debuff
      
    • The second and third hit of the combo can no longer be started in the middle of other attacks
  • Whirlwind
    
    • Ground Speed Multiplier: 6 ⇒ 8
  • Blinding Assault
    
    • Cooldown: 7s ⇒ 8s
      
    • Can now be canceled mid-attack by both Whirlwind and Rising Thunder
  • Slicing Winds
    
    • Last hit now applies ‘Exposed’ debuff
• Acrid
  Developer Notes: Acrid has always been a melee-ranged hybrid. We want greater rewards for engaging in melee and completing your M1 combo for players who enjoy a more aggressive playstyle.
  • NEW Buff: Regenerate
    
    • Regenerate for 10% health over 0.5 seconds.
  • Vicious Wounds
    
    • Third hit of the combo now grants ‘Regenerate’ buff
  • Ravenous Bite
    
    • Now grants ‘Regenerate’ buff
  • Frenzied Leap
    
    • 🌧Now (properly) stuns
• Artificer
  Developer Notes: We want to enforce the Artificer’s role as a high-damage, high AoE character. Nano-Bomb in general was core to the fantasy, but was pretty much inferior to Nano-Spear in every way.
  • Plasma Bolt
    
    • Blast Radius: 4m ⇒ 6m
  • Charged Nano-Bomb
    
    • Now has slight gravity
      
    • Blast Radius: 10m ⇒ 14m
      
    • Blast Damage, Max Charge: 1200% ⇒ 2000%
      
    • Blast Force: 1300 ⇒ 3000
      
    • Lifetime: 5s ⇒ 10s
      
    • Improved FX for clarity
  • Ion Surge
    
    • No longer has -75% damage falloff at the edge of the blast

Items

[/h3]

• Monster Tooth
  
  • Healing: 8 (+8 per stack) ⇒ 8
    
  • 🌧Now also heals for 2% (+2% per stack) of maximum health
• Medkit
  
  • Healing: 24 (+24 per stack) ⇒ 20
    
  • 🌧Now also heals for 5% (+5% per stack) of maximum health
• Repulsion Armor Plate
  
  • Now properly reduces damage from environmental effects
• Warbanner
  
  • 🌧 Now also places a Warbanner when activating the Teleporter
    
  • Improve VFX to be less opaque, since it will always be near the Teleporter
• Death Mark
  
  • Debuff Duration: 7s ⇒ 7s (+7s per stack)
    
  • 🌧Remove text stating that the damage bonus scaled with stacks
• Old Guillotine
  
  • Execute Threshold: ~20% (+20% per stack) ⇒ 13% (+13% per stack)
    Developer Notes: Since we’ve re-tuned the health of elites across the board, the Guillotine should be appropriately re-tuned as well.
• Runald’s/Kjaro’s Band
  Developer Notes: The two rings have undergone a bit of a rework, working off of an internal cooldown rather than a chance on-hit. We’re hoping that this can help diversify one of our “on-hit” items to be more than just attacking enemies and hoping things activate. We’ve also changed the behavior of Kjaro’s to be more of the AoE option, while Runald’s is the single target option.
  
  • Proc Chance: 8% ⇒ 100%
    
  • Now has an internal cooldown of 10 seconds
    
  • Now has a minimum threshold of only triggering on attacks that deal 400% or greater damage
    
  • Runald’s Band
    
    • Ice Blast Damage: 250% (+125% per stack) ⇒ 250% (+250% per stack)
      
    • Ice Debuff Duration: 3s ⇒ 3s (+3s per stack)
  • Kjaro's Band
    
    • Fire Tornado Damage: 500% (+250% per stack) ⇒ 300% (+300% per stack)
      
    • Fire Tornado Hitbox Width: 4.8m ⇒ 13m
      
    • No longer moves
• H3AD-5T v2
  
  • Reworked logic for calculating fall speed so it scales better while falling farther. Now has the following behavior:
    
    • Damage Coefficient: 1000% - 10,000% at maximum speed
      
    • Explosion Radius: 5m - 100m at maximum speed
      
    • Improved FX
• Interstellar Desk Plant
  
  • Healing Radius: 3m (+1.5m per stack) ⇒ 5m (+5m per stack)
    
  • Healing: 5% max health every 1 second ⇒ 5% max health every 0.5 second
• Milky Chrysalis
  
  • Now grants true flight and antigravity instead of jump-to-hover.
    
  • Pressing jump now performs a short dash in the direction of movement with a 0.5s cooldown.
• Strides of Heresy
  
  • No longer puts you in combat
• Helfire Tincture
  
  • Helfire Radius: 10m ⇒ 15m
    
  • Helfire Duration: 8s ⇒ 12s
    
  • Improve VFX and SFX
• Effigy of Grief
  
  • Now placed at where you’re aiming, rather than at your feet
    
  • No longer is consumed on use.
    
  • Now limited to 5 per map per character.
• Little Disciple
  
  • Fire Rate: 0.5s ⇒ 1.6s
    
  • Damage Coefficient: 100% (+100% per stack) ⇒ 300% (+300% per stack)
    
  • 🌧Fire Rate now scales with movement speed

Stages

[/h3]

• 3D Printers will appear more often on all stages, ~50% more
  
• 3D Printers will cost less to spawn on all stages, ~50% less
  
• The new interactable, the Scrapper, can now appear on all stages
  
• Titanic Plains
  
  • 🌧 Update with new visuals to make it depressing
• Sky Meadow
  
  • Update with new visuals and functionality that leads to the final stage
• Bazaar Between Time
  
  • Base Portal Chance: 25% for the first portal ⇒ 37.5% for the first portal
    
  • Lunar Buds: 4 ⇒ 5

Monsters & Bosses

[/h3]

• Mini Mushrum
  
  • 🌧 Base Health: 360 (+108 per level) ⇒ 290 (+87 per level)
• Parent
  
  • 🌧 Base Health: 1200 (+360 per level) ⇒ 900 (+270 per level)
• Lesser Wisp
  
  • Now properly stops charging attack sound when interrupted
• Imp Overlord
  
  • 🌧Maximum Blink Distance: 600m ⇒ 300m
    
  • Now throws Void Spikes in a staggered fashion, rather than all at once
• Magma Worm
  
  • 🌧Maximum “Blink” Distance: 600m ⇒ 300m
    
  • Now considerably more aggressive and better able to hit targets
    Developer Notes: The blink behavior of both the Imp Overlord and the Magma Worm allows it to follow players between platforms, but it leads a lot of the times to the bosses blinking across the map to attack drones and turrets. While they may still do that, it’ll be a bit less pronounced.
• Void Reaver
  
  • Now attempts to lead its Void Bombs in a straight line against its target
    
  • Updated AI to fire more aggressively and backpedal when its target is too close
    
  • AI now has 360° vision
• Bison
  
  • 🌧 Add spawn effect and animation (finally!)

[/list]

• 🌧 Added a language dropdown menu to the Main Menu
  
• Audio has received an overall mix pass
  
• Reduced the audio levels of the Magma Worm, Imp Overlord, and Clay Dunestrider
  
• Updated the Teleporter model
  
• Updated the Ukulele model
  
• Improved Infusion VFX to be more noticeable
  
• Reduced brightness of some Mercenary effects to they are less white and have more color
  
• Fixed dithering for several on-character item displays
  
• Updated the kick system to be able to supply detailed messages and enforce version matching when connecting to a server
  
• Added functionality for servers and lobbies to provide mod info and reject players for mismatches
  
• Servers can now define behavior to run upon entering character select by supplying a "server_pregame.cfg" config file
  
• Updated “MUL-T: Gotcha!” challenge to allow Preon tendrils to count toward completion
  
• A bunch of other stuff we probably forgot!

• Fixed an issue with spread from bloom being applied to both minimum and maximum spread (ie you could never have a bullet travel dead-center when your spread bloom is at maximum) for Commando’s Phase Blast, Huntress’ Ballista, and MUL-T’s Rebar Puncher
  
• Fixed potential physics crash that could occur if a character attempts to use a melee attack after crossfading into a new animation from a paused animation
  
• Fixed immobilization from Void Reavers and REX’s Tangling Growth becoming permanent if using Wax Quail while affected, which would also sometimes lead to a crash upon getting killed
  
• Fixed Repulsion Armor Plate not applying against posthumously dealt damage
  
• Fixed Visions of Heresy allowing Huntress’ Ballista to exceed three shots
  
• All gameplay stats are now forced to update before generating the final run report to make sure all values are up-to-date at the end screen
  
• Fixed MUL-T’s Nailgun not properly animating over the network
  
• Fixed some projectiles not playing their pre-expiration sounds over the network
  
• Fixed several sounds not being played over the network
  
• Fixed a timing issue in which lobby player count would not update immediately after a player leaves the lobby
  
• Fixed a variety of other bugs we also probably forgot!

• There are none, this game is perfect

[/list]

And… scene. This patch is enormous for us, and we really tried hard - I hope you all like it. As always, we’re listening to feedback and tracking any bugs that we find for 1.0 release. We’ll do a Dev Thoughts later this week to compile everyone’s feedback. See you on the planet.

Hey! Being the final Dev Thoughts before 1.0 release, we thought it’d be fun if we got into a bit of the details of how we design stuff. This is a long one, so buckle up.

=== Player Agency===

‘Player Agency’ is a term that we use to describe how much influence a player has over the result of their game. Internally, we refer to player agency, or player choice, to be on a ‘micro’ or ‘macro’ level.

On a micro level (using abilities, dodging enemies, hitting attacks, etc), player agency is high in RoR2. You have many opportunities to land good hits, or to dodge powerful attacks.

On a macro level (what build you’re doing, how quickly you want to progress, etc), RoR2 has always been a little lacking - and we’ve received feedback on that. Although it is a roguelite - and therefore random to a degree - it always felt a bit that you’re along for the ride, and that you pick a similar pool of items every run.

For 1.0, we’ve tackled this issue in two different ways:

1: We’ve touched up a lot of items - and introduced new ones - in hopes that more meaningful build decisions can be made.
2. We’ve introduced new avenues to allow more player agency on a macro level - with the star being the new ‘Scrapper’ interactable, which we will touch later on.

=== New & Redesigned Items ===

We’ve carefully combed through items for 1.0, and we have a few fun examples to show our direction going forward when it comes to items.

Example #1 - New Items
For this update, we focused on making sure that all of our new items had interesting synergies with both items and survivors.

Not only that, but all new items in the 1.0 release are Lunar, Equipment, or Boss drops. We found that those item categories struck the right balance between being chase items and being core items. We also didn't want to pollute the standard item pool with a bunch more of synergy-dependent items. Boss drops for higher-level bosses makes some of the most difficult encounters the most exciting as well.



Example #2: Bleeds
Sometimes you can make great changes from small tweaks. For 1.0, we’ve updated bleeds so that when a new stack of bleed is applied, all existing stacks of bleed are refreshed in duration. This means that you can maintain way higher stacks of bleeds than before - and that at high bleed chance and attack speed, bleeds never fall off as long as you keep reapplying fast enough.



For the specific meta details of how bleeds work in RoR2, bleeds:

• Bleeds do not scale from critical strikes
  
• Bleeds do not scale from proc-chains
  
• Bleeds do scale from damage boosts, such as Focus Crystals and Shattering Justice
  
• Bleeds, specifically from Tri-Tip Dagger, do scale with attack speed, because it lets you apply more bleeds quicker.
  
• Bleeds do need maintaining to keep at ludicrous stacks, which we have found is challenging in a fast-paced game like RoR2.

We’ve found that just that one change for bleeds dramatically improved the value of bleed items, attack speed items, and high proc-rate skills, and has added a new way to scale in the game that is also still fun and engaging. Bleeds require a different set of stats to maximize compared to stacked proc-chaining.

Example #3: Kjaro and Runald
A heavier change we made was to Kjaro and Runald’s elemental bands.

For 1.0, they no longer operate with a small chance-on-hit, but are always guaranteed to proc on any attack that deals “large” damage. After proccing, they undergo an internal cooldown before they can proc again. This allows for a bit of strategy for when you consume your rings, especially if you have heavy-hitting attacks like the Rebar Puncher, Frag Grenade, or Nano-Bomb.



Kjaro specifically has also been changed a bit, making the AoE of the tornado much larger but weaker, giving it a more defined niche as the AoE option.

Example #4 - Just ol’ Buffs
There were also some items that we just buffed because they underperformed. A few of these items are Monster Tooth, H3AD-5T v2, Effigy of Grief, and yes, the Interstellar Desk Plant. We don’t expect these items to become top-tier, but the gap should be smaller.

Example #5 - Doing Nothing At All
One of the biggest changes we noticed for 1.0 is that some underperforming items have improved simply because there is a proper final boss to prepare for. We’ve found that all items now have to be viewed through the lens of its viability in the final boss fight - items like Old Guillotine, Ukuleles, and Ceremonial Daggers, incredibly powerful items today, do little in the final boss.

Not all items will be the best, or the most “meta” - and we’re sure that there will still be a best build anyways - but we believe that at 1.0, more items will become more viable to use.

=== Scrapper ===

A small but influential piece of content we’re adding in 1.0 is the Scrapper.



The Scrapper allows you to select any number of items of your choosing, and convert them into Scrap. Scrap is prioritized first when using 3D Printers.

This adds a bunch of strategy to the game - when scrapping items, you become immediately weaker. However, it allows you to get rid of items that you know aren’t important for your build. Scrappers aren’t super common either, so you can’t always rely on being able to convert the scrap immediately. You may have to go through a few stages with scrap in your inventory instead of an item.

The goal of this interactable is for players to be able to identify what items are important to them right now, and to risk being weaker now for being stronger later.

There’s also been a few more supplemental changes aiming towards inventory management - 3D Printers are more common in general, and the Bazaar Between Time now has 5 pods instead of 4 to compensate for the significantly larger lunar item pool since release.

=== Eclipse ===

Well gee, that sounds like a lot of stuff. But I obliterate on Monsoon all the time, being the god gamer I am… so what can I use all these brand-new options for? In comes Eclipse.

Eclipse is a new game mode, similar to Prismatic Trials, that adds stacking challenge modifiers each time you beat the game, up to a maximum of 8. This is tracked separately per survivor.



In the same way that Artifacts are designed towards novel and fun experiences, Eclipse is designed entirely for challenge enthusiasts. Eclipse has no unlockables, achievements, or trophies. It’s purely for the challenge.

Eclipse was a bit of an experimental weekend project - and we’re considering the initial release of Eclipse as a test for whether or not this type of gamemode is any fun. Please let us know!

=== Here we go! ===

Having said all that… we’re very excited to see player reception for 1.0. This has been our most challenging update yet, and for so many reasons. We really hope you like it - and we’ll see you on the planet August 11th!

-Hopoo Games Team

Hello gamers,

It’s finally time -we are super excited to announce that we are launching the 1.0 version of Risk of Rain 2 on Steam on August 11th.

Early Access has felt like a crazy ride through uncharted space, and we can’t thank you all enough for supporting us over the last year and a half. We’ve had great fun steering through Early Access together, and we will always be thankful for the patience and excitement our community has displayed. We will have more information on the Console launch of 1.0 in the future - but it should follow a very similar cadence to the previous console launches.

As always, thanks for the amazing support - and we can’t wait to share the 1.0 update with everyone. See you then!



-Hopoo Games Team