Devblog #11 - Moving Forward
With a very heavy heart, I’m sad to announce that RoR2 has been officially discontinued.
Today marks Risk of Rain’s 5th Birthday (+1 day)! In celebration, we have a few fun announcements lined up along with a large devblog! Also, Risk of Rain is off 80% today - if anyone doesn’t happen to have the game already, come check it out here!
It’s been quite a while since the last blogpost, and we’ve progressed quite a lot since then. A question we get very frequently is “are melee classes in the game? How will they work?”
Melee classes will be in RoR2. The major challenges that each melee character faces is that in RoR2, there are a lot of flying monsters. While most bosses are on the ground, there are also still flying bosses. We want to absolutely make sure that we avoid any scenario where a melee class is softlocked from completing the stage because the boss is too high in the air.
Our first venture into melee is a classic from RoR1 - the Mercenary. He was an easy fit because his mobility and dashes are:
Guarantee that he can always reach air monsters.
His kit has been also updated a small bit, with 3-hit combos for his basic ability and conditional behaviors depending on whether or not he executes his skill on the ground or in the air.
Every melee character will require a bit more love in RoR2 to make sure that they can function in this new environment, but we are very excited to have them in the game :)
We have also been (obviously) working on a ton of new stages, monsters, items, etc. An exciting NEW addition to RoR2 is a brand new tier of items, called Lunar items. These items come not from this planet, but somewhere much stranger…
Lunar items are different from standard items because they have extremely powerful positives at the cost of drawbacks. Classic RoR1 items were always net positive - and therefore items with considerable downsides open s up a ton of design space for us to explore. Some lunar items may be situational, some may be playstyle dependent, and some may be much more synergy dependent than classic RoR1 items.
The Lunar concept is something that is unique to Risk of Rain 2 - and these strange Lunar creations may also extend to more than just items…
Another frequent question we received while presenting PAX was “when can I buy this game?”.
We are planning on launching in Early Access in Q1 next year. We’ve spent a lot of time researching recent EA successes, and as a multiplayer roguelite title, we think RoR2 would be the perfect candidate for Early Access.
However, we want to make sure that we have a plan going into EA - and that we stick to it. Specifically, we are focusing on 3 goals for EA:
Building a community - We want to support Risk of Rain 2 for as long as possible. Having a solid community of players that we can actively communicate with would be critical for feedback.
Being able to stay on top of development and avoiding content drought. We have experience as developers for supporting Betas, so regular patches is an expectation we understand. We also hope that as a multiplayer roguelite title, the time between content updates feel less painful compared to other EA titles.
Gathering feedback from the players and making sure the game continues to shape into the game we want to develop. While we always have a vision for the game, a lot of times players have fantastic ideas that can help propel the game from being good to fantastic. This is also our first ever 3D title, so we really need to collect feedback to make sure it matches everyone’s expectations of the game.
As of right now, we have made our Steam Page public for people interested in wishlisting, available here. As we get closer to the EA date, we will update everyone with an expected development timeline.
We want to be as transparent as possible with what we’re working on and what we will work on - and if you have concerns about our venture into Early Access, please let us know!
Fans who saw us at PAX may have seen some of these bois available for purchase. We have teamed up with IndieBox to create a limited set of Rock Plushies, and the reception at was fantastic! In fact, it was so good that we made another set of them - available online now.!
Thank you again to all our fans who have been interested in the development of this game - we have a very exciting future ahead of us, and I hope that everything turns out like everyone hoped.
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