[2019] Hopoo Games Development Thoughts #1

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Uh, ok. First, I just wanted to say from the whole team how absolutely floored we are with the reception so far. I was personally hoping for something to match at least half of the original game: apparently we’re doing a LOT better. It’s absolutely surreal - thank you all again.

We want to make sure the community is aware we are listening and in touch, so for the format of this post and subsequent ones in the future I want to try something new. Consider Development Thoughts to be an honest brain dump of the team. Excuse us if it’s a bit scattered in formatting.

===Major Points===

Overall, we’re ecstatic with the gameplay of Risk of Rain 2. There are some crashes we are trying our best to address, especially on game boot-up.

A goal we are currently trying to figure out is the most appropriate Customer Support path going forward. We’ve been helping players manually, but a lot of players are falling through the cracks. DMing people through Discord isn’t the most efficient. Will update everyone with info once it comes.

Another goal is a general roadmap for the game: what does the future of Risk of Rain 2 look like? How frequent are patches, compared to Content Updates? Will they be major chunks of content or trickling in over time? What would the community feel would keep the game the most enjoyable throughout Early Access?

We have internally finished a patch to address a lot of initial feedback and critical bugs - it is in QA and hopefully available to everyone early next week.

===Minor Points===
• Happy with progression rate for classes - a touch faster than intended but still OK
• Happy with Rainstorm difficulty - haven’t seen much of Monsoon content to know. Drizzle is very easy but also fine.
• Pleasantly surprised with people saying performance is good - have to narrow down why it runs poorly on some high-end machines
• Happy with in-run decision making (3D Printers, Mountain Shrine, Order Shrine, etc). Should try to brainstorm more big decision points like this..
• Happy that new teleporter event rules don’t seem upsetting to RoR1 players
• Curious about content distribution - are players progressing through unlocks too fast? How long do the more difficult item unlocks take?
• Very happy with secret progressions - players are finding it at the ideal rate
• Noting lots of feedback about 4+ player lobbies. Have to consider best way forward - most likely would be a private game only option with a disclaimer.
• Noting sometimes monsters get stuck behind a closed door on Wetland Aspect
• Noting people like going fast
• Noting a lot of Quickplay Lobbies have an insane time to launch of 4000+ seconds
• Noting people like ruining their build with Shrine of Order or 3D printer
• Noting people want to be able to automatically continue sprinting after rolling
• Noting people don’t enjoy getting blasted as soon as they enter a stage

===Stuff we are working on===
• Corrupted save file preventing people from playing is very high priority to fix - this is addressed in the Monday patch.
• Happy with (mostly) class balance outside of MUL-T being a tad too strong. I think it’s worth noting here that we have a stat per attack called it’s “proc coefficient”, and it essentially defines how strong or frequent procs happen on an on-hit basis. MUL-T’s nailgun has a low proc coefficient per nail of 0.4 compared to most character’s 1.0, so he isn’t proccing stuff a ton faster than other characters.
• Very happy with Discord community aspect, but may need management help as it grows.
• Imp Boss is a bit grindy, same with Worm
• Some concerns about cheaters in Prismatic Trial. Excited for when seed rolls over.
• Hearing loud & clear about Teleporter being hard to see - want to make it still an aspect of the game without it feeling like a mistake. Players are not really noticing the passive particles - will start with a soft approach first.

Please let us know if we missed anything - our brains are a little frazzled right now. Again, thank you all SO much for the amazing launch day, and an enormous shout out to Gearbox for their absolutely great support and efforts. Crazy.

-Hopoo Games Team