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(Image credit: Gearbox)
Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm, the hit roguelike’s firstGearboxSoftware-developed DLC as well as the first major update sincethe house of Borderlands acquired the IPalmost two years ago, has done the opposite of what everyone hoped. This was Gearbox’s chance to prove itself afteran axed mobile game made a bad first impressionfor Risk of Rain’s new shepherd, butSeekers of the Storm has not only fallen short of expectations, it’s also saddled the core game with technical issues that can make it virtually unplayable. Gearbox representatives have been vocal and candid about the state of the game and plans to fix it, but the damage is done and the optics are undeniable: a big company, which has put out plenty of good games before and should know better, acquired a beloved indie game and now it’s busted.
“That behavior at a broad level, however, is a shaky start, and makes me feel that it must have been rushed out before the devs were done with it for one reason or another,” he continues. “Working on Risk of Rain 2 was a very rewarding experience for me; I want the new team to also succeed and feel good about what they’ve made, for players to get the best of that, and for the team to have what they need to do that.” In his responses, Hunt stresses that he “wanted to make sure I was fair to the devs that were getting their hands dirty and doing the work.”
What went wrong
(Image credit: Gearbox Publishing)
Let’s pop the hood for a second. What’s gone wrong with Seekers of the Storm? Well, a lot, that’s why we’re here, but one massive problem stands out. To boil it down like a pan sauce, a bunch of important stuff that would normally operate separately has been stapled to frame rate. This can cause game-breaking things to happen, and these only get worse at very high or very low frame rates, which is why Gearbox told players to cap their FPS at 60 as a temporary workaround.
“This manifests in several ways,” Hunt explains. “Characters go flying when using abilities that move them, AI starts trying to jump over obstacles that aren’t there because they check if they’ve moved more often than they’re actually moving so they think they’re stuck, beam attacks tick much less often than they’re supposed to, etc.”
To go into more depth, Hunt reasons that this stems from a snag in the way Risk of Rain 2 is tracking and handling time and simulation.To the horror of many programmers, two approaches have seemingly been criss-crossed: “Update,” which “is suitable for things like polling for input and setting up for rendering,” and “FixedUpdate,” which “happens at a fixed rate and is suitable for things like physics and game logic.”
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“Some behaviors of the game code have been moved over to being updated manually, but there are issues with the implementation. Primarily, the new system does run the FixedUpdate logic, but it does it during the Update simulation step. This results in these objects executing more or less logic steps than they should depending on frame rate, and also puts them out of sync with the other game behaviors that weren’t moved over.”
Risk of Rain without Hopoo
(Image credit: Gearbox Publishing)
The Gearbox mothership seems all-in onBorderlands 4, which is in “active development"but is also just one of “numerous projects” Take-Two plans to release with the studio.
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