Risk of Rain 2: Dynamic Updates & Releases Video Games in China: Beyond the Firewall Rogue-like Shooter Risk of Rain 2 on Consoles Nintendo’s Indie World: Game Announcements
Last month witnessed Hopoo Games’ cooperative rogue-like shooter sequel, Risk of Rain 2, achieving its full version 1.0 release on Steam after an 18-month early access period. Now, with that accomplished and a full console release slated for this autumn, the developer has elaborated on its initial post-launch content plans, including potential paid expansions.
Risk of Rain 2 entered Steam’s early access in March last year and made its way to Xbox One, PS4, and Switch in the subsequent months. It has proven to be a success for Hopoo Games – version 1.0 attracted 70,000 concurrent Steam players – and the developer has now focused on maintaining the game’s momentum after its launch, starting with a free content update for all.
In a new blog post that offers a sort of post-mortem of the early access period, Hopoo explained that while its development roadmap helped it stay on course, it also meant that “ideas that were cool but challenging had to be omitted to meet the release dates”. Consequently, certain features – including the Grandparent (a unique boss for Sky Meadows) and lore entries – did not make it to the launch.
Hopoo states that after the release, it plans to adopt a strategy of “sustainable, creative development” for Risk of Rain 2, commencing with one final, free content update for players on all platforms. Hopoo mentions that there is no specific timeline or release date for the update yet, but its objective “is to complete the internal content that we had to cut, and to conduct another review based on player feedback”.
Once this free update is completed, Hopoo intends to shift to a model of paid expansions for Risk of Rain 2, with the aim of releasing either one or two per year. These, it claims, will be comparable to multiple content updates in terms of size, and each is likely to follow a particular theme, such as a Void or Imp expansion.
Hopoo says the paid expansion model will “assist in covering the costs of hiring new developers and the expenses of porting to consoles”, and it hopes that it will “be much more likely to draw players back into RoR2”.
“The truth is,” it elaborates, “that RoR2 is competing with every other game in the world for your time and attention – and as the game gets older and new exciting games are released, we want to ensure that if we’re persuading you to return to RoR2, it’s with something more thrilling than 1 new survivor and 8 new items.”
“We believe that Expansions will be an excellent way to continue the ongoing development of RoR2,” Hopoo concludes, “Please let us know if this sounds thrilling!”. It emphasizes that quality of life improvements, bug fixes, and balance adjustments will continue to be provided as free updates.
