Gearbox Fumbles With Incomplete Risk Of Rain 2 DLC

Because we’re still in the shadow of the Borderlands movie’s tremendous flop, a recent controversy seems to be kicking Gearbox Software when they’re already down.

But, when it rains, it pours, as the recent $15 Risk Of Rain 2 Seekers Of The Storm DLC has landed as a critical failure.

Gearbox Software acquired the Risk Of Rain franchise in 2022, bringing the indie rogue-lite game, beloved by many, into its catalog of successful franchises.

However, fans were afraid because it took the franchise away from the hands of Hopoo Games, and this also meant new content was soon on its way without them at the helm.

It seems this skepticism was well-placed. As Gearbox’s new DLC is widely regarded as insufficient and incomplete, attracting review bombs from disappointed fans worldwide.

Before the new DLC and updates were even dropped, there was a pricing issue, with the game costing too much in some regions compared to others. Yet, this was only a tiny taste of the problems to come.

The Key Issue And Fan Reception

The main issues plaguing this update are similar to something we’ve seen recently with Fallout 4: a next-gen update that completely changes a game’s content.

When Fallout 4 transitioned to a next-gen update, fans realized that their installed mods for the game were no longer working.

In addition to this issue, the new Risk Of Rain 2 update has added subsequent bugs that make it a much worse experience, whether you’re playing content from the latest DLC or the base game.

One of the technical problems among many in the Risk Of Rain 2: Seekers Of The Storm update is that the game now ties aspects like physics to the FPS.

Gearbox employees and fans on Discord have presented the short-term solution of capping your FPS at 60, but that still doesn’t entirely remove the issues.

A depressing but somewhat sardonically humorous reaction to this whole debacle has been one of the original co-creators of Risk Of Rain 2 grieving over their “poor baby” through Discord messages:

Fans have done the standard routine and gone to Steam to review-bomb the DLC, sharing their disappointed opinions. Some have even gone on to give negative reviews to the original release on Steam.

While we hope that Gearbox can right these wrongs, judging from their recent output, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Is The Embracer Group To Blame?

The timeline starts in 2021, when Embracer Group purchases Gearbox. In 2022, Gearbox buys Risk Of Rain, and recently, in 2024, Embracer sells Gearbox to Take-Two Interactive, leading to a surge of internal layoffs.

Although, once again, the issues with the DLC rely on coding issues and performance, it’s not hard to think that leaders and workers’ main priority within a company constantly being bought and sold is merely arriving at a product to prove their worth.

This leads to an environment where slip-ups like these are possibly more expected than we’d like to think.

Speculation about the industry aside, we want to point out that Gearbox developers are actively investigating the situation. Any bug reports you wish to make are accepted through Discord, and from the looks of it, they’re at least trying their best to fix this mess.

The critical fan reception has been wholly deserved; there’s nothing else to do but hope Risk Of Rain 2 returns to its pre-update status.