"My poor baby": As Risk of Rain 2's first Gearbox-made DLC takes a hammer to the beloved roguelike, the game's original programmer fears it "must have been rushed out"

Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm, the hit roguelike's first Gearbox Software-developed DLC as well as the first major update since the house of Borderlands acquired the IP almost two years ago, has done the opposite of what everyone hoped. This was Gearbox's chance to prove itself after an axed mobile game made a bad first impression for Risk of Rain's new shepherd, but Seekers of the Storm has not only fallen short of expectations, it's also saddled the core game with technical issues that can make it virtually unplayable. Gearbox representatives have been vocal and candid about the state of the game and plans to fix it, but the damage is done and the optics are undeniable: a big company, which has put out plenty of good games before and should know better, acquired a beloved indie game and now it's busted. 

Jeffrey "Ghor" Hunt, the ex-Hopoo programmer behind "something like 90%" of Risk of Rain 2's original codebase, was understandably not pleased to see the game stumble like this. "My poor baby," Hunt said in the Risk of Rain 2 modding Discord as this DLC's problems were unearthed. In an interview with 12DOVE, Hunt says he's waiting to actually play the DLC since he'd like "to see what the new team has come up with without the game’s erratic behavior coloring my perception." 

"That behavior at a broad level, however, is a shaky start, and makes me feel that it must have been rushed out before the devs were done with it for one reason or another," he continues. "Working on Risk of Rain 2 was a very rewarding experience for me; I want the new team to also succeed and feel good about what they’ve made, for players to get the best of that, and for the team to have what they need to do that." In his responses, Hunt stresses that he "wanted to make sure I was fair to the devs that were getting their hands dirty and doing the work."

What went wrong

Let's pop the hood for a second. What's gone wrong with Seekers of the Storm? Well, a lot, that's why we're here, but one massive problem stands out. To boil it down like a pan sauce, a bunch of important stuff that would normally operate separately has been stapled to frame rate. This can cause game-breaking things to happen, and these only get worse at very high or very low frame rates, which is why Gearbox told players to cap their FPS at 60 as a temporary workaround. 

"This manifests in several ways," Hunt explains. "Characters go flying when using abilities that move them, AI starts trying to jump over obstacles that aren’t there because they check if they’ve moved more often than they’re actually moving so they think they’re stuck, beam attacks tick much less often than they’re supposed to, etc." 

To go into more depth, Hunt reasons that this stems from a snag in the way Risk of Rain 2 is tracking and handling time and simulation. To the horror of many programmers, two approaches have seemingly been criss-crossed: "Update," which "is suitable for things like polling for input and setting up for rendering," and "FixedUpdate," which "happens at a fixed rate and is suitable for things like physics and game logic." 

"This setup lets gameplay be consistent, without locking your rendering frame rate to the logic rate, or making you lose out on frames because they’re bogged down by game logic every time. Unity handles these for you, but you can also do it yourself - which is one place where you can get some performance gains, since letting the engine tell your object to update has a very small amount of overhead each time, which can add up. 

"Some behaviors of the game code have been moved over to being updated manually, but there are issues with the implementation. Primarily, the new system does run the FixedUpdate logic, but it does it during the Update simulation step. This results in these objects executing more or less logic steps than they should depending on frame rate, and also puts them out of sync with the other game behaviors that weren’t moved over." 

The good news is, based purely on "just the decompiled code," Hunt reckons it "doesn't look too bad" to roll back these changes. And while Risk of Rain 2 mods have been well and truly borked by this update, and many modders are waiting to fix those mods since the incoming patches to the game itself would surely break them again, that can also be remedied. 

Risk of Rain without Hopoo

Hopoo selling the Risk of Rain IP to Gearbox was the first domino in this unfortunate sequence, so some Risk of Rain 2 players have criticized Hunt for selling his "baby" in the first place. He was quick to point out that Hopoo sold the IP, not him. It was "not my decision and I also didn't see a cent," he said in a tweet, as he wasn't an owner at Hopoo and left the studio partly because it would no longer be working on Risk of Rain. 

Older comments from Hopoo co-founders Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond have resurfaced after Seekers of the Storm's flop. Hopoo had worked with Gearbox Publishing for years at the time of the sale, and in November 2022 Discord comments from the studio's official account, said Gearbox has "the highest chance of continued success with the IP" and "I don't think we would've done a good job with a [Risk of Rain 3] if we got around to that." We don't yet know what the Hopoo team is cooking up with its Gearbox bucks. 

"I've never seen [Risk of Rain] stuff made without me seeing it so it'll be an interesting experience," one particularly prescient message from the company reads. Cut to today's DLC fallout and the only apparent response from the Hopoo co-founders has been a timely frowny face tweeted by Drummond. I've reached out to Drummond and Morse for comment.  

The Gearbox mothership seems all-in on Borderlands 4, which is in "active development" but is also just one of "numerous projects" Take-Two plans to release with the studio.