Hey!
It's been a while, so we wanted to share more details and update everyone on the team’s progress. To dive right in: we are still working to lock-in a precise launch date. The team’s been making solid progress to eliminate the remaining bugs so that we will be delivering the experience we’re all looking forward to.
Thanks to EVERYONE who submitted bugs over the last few years! Every single report on Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or through the support website gets investigated by our fearless QA team (seriously, they are wonderful). This week, we wanted to highlight changes to movement on console, Drone AI, and effect proccing! Bonus shoutouts to a few of the folks that continue to make the game better by reporting issues!
Side note: We were blown away by the support everyone showed us with the last update. The development team keeps a close eye on chatter from the community and they thought it was very sweet. Those folks are working extremely hard to make something we’re all proud of so we know your notes went a long way.
The below videos were captured on console versions of Risk of Rain 2.
Going, Going, Gone? (Movement)
Huge thanks to @goldenfoxy23 (Discord) for capturing this video and sending in a report.
In going through the various reports we’ve seen during development, movement came up multiple times as feeling a bit different from the PC version. The reason many things felt so different is because the existing console build used a separate physics model to calculate player movement/ collision. With our overhaul of the code, consoles are receiving the same model as PC, and behaviors like this should be nearly identical between platforms. Now both the Survivors focused on mobility, and the items that enhance them, should perform and feel right.
Overly Attached Drones (Physics + Drone AI Logic)
Shoutout to @omegacalvin (Discord) for capturing this and sending in a report!
These drones were hung just a bit too close to the survivor and found themselves occasionally rolling on the ground, which wasn’t the intended design. The physics change mentioned above will also impact drone movement, which will help keep them in the air where they can have the greatest impact!
The team wanted to make sure that the drones were able to effectively take down enemies without crowding the Survivor. With the movement changes, we found that an unintended consequence was that they would seek out the player and stay closer than they should to them! As a result, we made some adjustments to the drone AI to encourage them to give the Survivor a little more space.
While you might see them trying to nudge up to Survivors sometimes, these changes are intended to have them focused on staying in the air and taking down enemies to keep you in the stage longer.
Here’s a video of Railgunner and Voidfiend peacefully interacting with their friendly drones.
PROCS!!
Alright, if you made it this far it probably means you’re down for some more bizarre, complicated, math stuff. Let’s talk about procs or “Programmed Random Occurrences”. Procs and proc chains are like the team’s love of pineapple pizza. Extremely challenging to explain to others, yet also vital to all of our continued existence. Put simply, a proc happens whenever items, Survivors, or monsters trigger something else to occur. A proc chain is when a proc, like an AtG Missile, triggers another proc, like a Ukulele. These chains can go on for a long time with enough luck and items.
Proc chains deliver the sense of glorious havoc that folks have come to love Risk of Rain for. However, right now on consoles they have a few strange behaviors brought about from an old method of calculating damage/proc chance. After we brought consoles back in line with PC, these were no longer present and all was right with the world (and procs).
In this fascinating video, provided & reported by @qwp18 (Discord), we can see a late game Commando with a somewhat dubious number of Clovers🤔. Instead of a proc happening a single time you can see the same proc fire over and over until the world implodes. Thanks for letting us witness your world devolve into a runaway cascade of procs. While this is a great show to behold, we’re glad proc implosions won’t be as big a part of our lives any longer.
So, we saw what happens when your procs run away from you, now let’s look at this video provided by @xanthoconite to see the other end of the spectrum. Previously, if a sufficient amount of procs/load was occurring, it was possible for the game to give up on procs altogether. Without procs, you’re left with essentially just flat damage and crit, which represents a tiny fraction of your total damage when you’re this late in the game. Gotta admire @xanthoconite’s persistence though. Some say that they are still fighting Mithrix to this day.
Until Next Time!
This is just the start of this journey. When players care enough to send in bug reports they make the game better for everyone else. We’re all extremely excited to get the build in your hands but want to make sure we’re giving you the best possible version of it we can make. The countless number of you that have reported issues to us have already played a huge role in the future of the game. Once we get this build up to the standard you expect, we hope you’ll still keep going on this journey with us to make the game even better.
We’ll leave you with some capture of the most recent builds for PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.
Until next time,
The Risk of Rain Team