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:
Early Access Post-Mortem
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.
Moving Forward
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!
Modding
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.
Stadia & Sundered Grove
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.
Ok
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
