Let's talk about Risk of Rain 2

2x speed and toss it on over to the second monitor

[MelodyWarp]

I'm surprised nobody is talking about collapse. My deaths pre DLC were fairly varied, but since playing on DLC I'd say around 40% of my deaths are to a single stack of collapse on stage 4+. A tiny bit of chip damage that nearly guarantees death after a delay. Feels awful. If the damage were roughly halved I think it would be great.

[undead]

My biggest gripe is that the common DLC enemies do crazy amounts of damage compared to non-DLC enemies. For example, both blind pests and vermin, as well as alloy vultures, have the same damage and damage scaling as greater wisps, yet they are common enemies that are often spawned in groups. Things like bighorn bison, beetle guards, and brass contraptions all do LESS damage than these fast-attacking DLC enemies, despite their status as slow attacking, hard hitting enemies.

[orakkeli]

The lemurians stopped in time just shooting fire on the first stage can be really disapointing

[anderengland]

I've had situations where lesser wisps just fly into the sky high enough to the point where I can't hit them. This is especially frustrating when the wisp is void corrupted and i need to clear a void seed

[LunaTulpa]

my favorite AI glitch is when enemies are crossing a bridge or bridge like object like a log, the enemies will constantly bounce as if they were on a trampoline or bouncy house lmao

also collapse, i despise collapse. especially if its a shungite fortress that just blasts 20 stacks on you from its laser

[IMFERMO.]

Yeah, something i felt as soon as some of the newer updates arrived is that lategame became a much different type of combat, i know it was always like "stop moving and you die" thing but the game used to generate way more enemies and they were more active in the battlefield, trying to chase you or just moving, now it feels the game only spawn heavies at later stages and spam them until the director runs out of credits and you have to wait for the next heavy wave to spawn which is boring.

[Golden-ekku]

I can't cite specific instances of me seeing AI breaks or outright unfair deaths, but by far the most infuriating thing for me is just spending the first 45 seconds of stage 1 just waiting for enemies. Of course I don't want to spawn in and be swarmed immediately but I usually spawn by quite a number of chests and it feels very akward with no movement speed items having to just walk away from them because scouting out is more important.

[Fossilized_Nerd]

I have to agree - and quite honestly after attempting the Voidling maybe a handful of times on multiple difficulties, it's so overtuned and powerful that I just don't feel any motivation whatsoever to go out of my way to kill it with multiple survivors. I did it one time, I don't care to do it again, and getting there at all with Xi Constructs that can hit me with that marked status or whatever it's called that drops a billion damage on you at once for landing several hits a few seconds afterwards is a HUMONGOUS pain in the ass.

[jonathonturner]

"the action comes to you" that rock came to you a little fast tho

[elemangell]

I can explain what happened in the grandparent clip because I've seen the same thing happen to me dozens of times, though not to the unfortunate degree of your clip. Basically, not only is the boulder's spawnpoint not properly lined up with the grandparent's attack animation, but angle that the boulder is thrown at is determined by the players position and has no limit to where it can be thrown, so it can be thrown straight down like in your clip, straight up, or even behind the grandparent entirely.

This, alongside much of the other stuff that you mentioned, like enemies not being scaled properly, or xi construct missing collision on its body, or the ai for enemies getting stuck around odd map geometry, all boils down to a poor quality of life experience (or QoL for short). The little odds and ends that, when done well to help convenience the player, are barely taken note off, but if done poorly, can easily hamper what would otherwise be a smooth gameplay experience. To be fair, Hopoo Games is a super small team, and even with the added support of the people at Gearbox, some things will manage to slip through the cracks, but they definitely should've given themselves more time to search for and iron out kinks like these.

Unfortunately, with HG preoccupied with Returns' development and Gearbox all hands on deck with the rebuilding of the console ports, it's not likely that these little issues with the overall feel of the game will be addressed any time soon. In the meantime, I've been playing RoR2 with QoL mods created by the community, like outlining chests and getting rid of them once opened, increased timers for pings, captain gaining all his abilities in hidden realms, added icons for number of hopoo feather jumps, h34d-st v2 and shield cooldowns, etc., and it's honestly near impossible for me to go back to playing vanilla with how much more polished the game feels. I hope that once Gearbox has the available resources, listening to community feedback and patching issues like this will be high on their to-do list alongside any other plans they may have.

[omegacalvin]

Hey woolie, just here is a console Andy wanting to share something about how many days the console players have been waiting.

Days since the last update of console and waiting for the game to be fixed: 665

Days since the DLC was released on PC: 469

[JustSippingTea]

Personally the dlc characters alone are worth it, it just seems like a super fun bundle of characters, the void items can add a lot to the game but i definitely hope the dlc gearbox has basically confirmed to start after the console port is better

[MURDERTIMEX]

late game i dont mind the dlc enemies cause you do get pretty unkillable at times nice to have something to be scared of but early game they can feel oppressive on a few bad starter items

[BluePipe]

I agree with most of your opinions, although I never noticed the AFK enemies bug. What I want to add is that the Simulacrum was a big disappointment for me, I was really looking forward to it being more meaty than just a gimmick to try once or twice, I was expecting a something as fleshed out as eclipse. Also the boss is forgettable at best and "so tanky it's not fun" at worst.

[blastingfire]

I feel the pros of the DLC outweighs the cons when you aren't a player who wishes to take ROR2 to its upmost limit. If you just kick on some ROR2 to play some monsoon or rainstorm, you are gonna be a lot less frustrated than a player who mains Eclipse 8 or a streamer who plays ROR2 even at times they don't want to I enjoyed my time with the DLC because I really enjoyed the new characters and items.

[MrKippers]

One key thing I think Woolie missed was how the Void Locus biome was handled. Void Fields feels like a fair challenge of risk vs reward, you can control when it happens. Void Locus however is either you beat it or die. This is fine stage design for a *core* level, one you have to beat every run, but it’s not. So most players including myself, skip Void Locus when they fight Voidling. It’s such a cool stage, but no one goes there because “What’s the point?”.

[Cap_]

I think the dlc adds a lot of positives. New techs, ways to manage items, equipments, and a lot smoother game play loop than without the dlc. Singularity bands are doodoo though

[alexreel]

Things did get pretty weird towards the ends of Hopoo' development. Being a developer myself, the lack of documentation for the dlc update was crazy to me and probably contributed to the random strange changes that came with said dlc. I didn't play enough post dlc to really catch onto the issues you mentioned but from the get go I saw a major lack of balance that they didn't seem interested in addressing. I'm honestly pretty bummed with how things have turned out for the game but thankfully modding exists.

[tgamagedon]

Playing risk of rain 2 with the DLC often feels like playing Isaac with the damocles item to me. You get a bunch of items and get really powerful, but unless you play perfectly at any point the sword can just fall on your head and you lose the run.

[ihavevisionfearme]

One thing i want to point out about the blind pests, along with the vermin, is that if you were to look at any pre DLC enemy, or even most of the DLC cast, they do NOT have a choreographed attack. Usually most enemies have some sort of "charge up" and sound que that gives you a chance to react to the attack, which is why ROR felt so good pre DLC. Blind pests, their sound que is at the same time as their attack, and that attack is really bloody fast. This is why for me they feel like utter trash, along with the fact they can one shot you pretty early on. Dealing with them as artificer can be a nightmare. I feel like it's pretty clear that the new developers were in charge of making those, as i doubt Hopoo would've ignored that, since it appears to be a significant design concept. And for brass contraptions, they were like the blind pest, pre-blind pests, but they still had sound ques, visible choreographed charge up attacks, and even if they can one shot you, you have a CHANCE to dodge as you KNOW they're about to attack. Blind pests ? Especially when there's a group of them, well, good luck predicting which was is about to attack you next. Oh wait, you won't.

But i do want to mention, i love the big void crabs, the new one with the two arms. I love their design, their attacks, it looks and feels like a interesting and fun fight. Shame you barely ever see them. Also not sure why blind pests can spawn on the first map, a huge reason why i hate the siphoned forest.