Seekers of the Storm, the first Risk of Rain 2 expansion to come out since Gearbox’s acquisition of the indie roguelike, is at the receiving end of a barrage of criticism—and to no one’s surprise, players are furious at Gearbox’s role in the whole fiasco.
The Seekers of the Storm DLC was blasted by Risk of Rain 2 players initially for questionable pricing, which Gearbox has since course-corrected. But it’s the patch that came with the DLC that’s causing serious issues, and its victims are not only DLC owners, but the base game as well.
The most bizarre of the patch is the decision to tie the game’s physics systems to its frame rate. I remember having the same predicament with Skyrim more than a decade back, where uncapped framerate would cause the physics system to go haywire. Quite similar to the solution in Bethesda’s 2011 RPG, capping the framerate to 60 has emerged as the stopgap measure for Risk of Rain 2 now.
In the Risk of Rain 2 Discord, Gearbox developer GBX-Preston claimed FPS issues alongside “all the ramifications on balance/physics/attack speed/movement/etc. were not intentional. This is in our top handful of issues we’re investigating.”
While the team works on cleaning up the mess, the Steam review rating for the once-beloved indie gem has plummeted. The base game is down from its pre-Seekers of the Storm “overwhelmingly positive” to a “very positive” rating now—with recent reviews down to “mixed” and only 55 percent positive reviews. The Seekers of the Storm expansion, unsurprisingly, is at “mostly negative” with only 28 percent of players recommending it.
The Risk of Rain subreddit meanwhile has been flooded with memes—most of them, of course, throwing shade at Gearbox. Tweets from the official handle of base game developer Hopoo Games and an ex-programmer have only fanned the flames.
As for Gearbox, it seems they can’t catch a break with the Borderlands movie bombing after a disastrous opening weekend earlier this month.
