Risk of Rain 2’s Scorched Acres Update Is Going To Bring The Heat | E3 2019

All kinds of new fun will be arriving in Risk of Rain 2 with the new Scorched Acres Update.

On IGN Live, Hopoo Games introduced us to the new Scorched Acres update for Risk of Rain 2. The update will add a new character, a new boss, a new environment, and much more.

The new character, Rex, is entirely new and didn’t appear in Risk of Rain before. Rex is a part plant, part robot, and is quite large when compared to the other characters. We have a full write up on Rex if you would like to read more about him. He sounds very interesting though and will play very differently to any of the other Survivors. There will also be a quest in the game that you need to play through to unlock him. We don’t know much about the quest or what it entails yet.

For the other Survivors, the Artificer will be getting a new passive in order to buff her a little. By holding space, you will be able to hover in place, and it has no cooldown, the devs described it as “kind of unlimited.” They hope this will allow the Artificer to position better in fights, and it can also be used to avoid fall damage. They have also reworked some of the math behind how she dishes out damage, and she will do more damage with large single target attacks, but a little weaker with abilities that put out constant damage.

There will also be a new environment coming to the game, and this one is designed to feel more structure than the others. The stage will have new monsters to fight, a new higher tier monster similar to the Beetle Guards. The devs also talked about bringing host migration to the game. It is something that they would love to bring to the game, but the amount of work involved might just be too much for their three-person team at the moment.

Risk of Rain 2 has been the surprise indie hit of the year. The 3D roguelike action game from developers Hopoo quickly racked up a million units in sales after it launched earlier this year. The game is, for want of a better description, the original game, but the limitation of 2D have been dropped for a 3D, third-person, action game.

Another change that will be coming with the game is a tier of enemies that Hopoo referred to as “elite version of elites,” that will start to show up in the game during longer runs. They have been added to provide a challenge to people who like to do runs of over 30 minutes or so. These enemies will be able to disable your healing for a few seconds if they hit, making situation awareness and positioning important, even for Fungus hungry Engineers.

Skills 2.0 was covered a little as well, but will not be coming in the Scorched Acres update, as it is planned for the game’s second update. Hopoo Games seemed to want to talk about the details, but eventually decided it against it as the update to Skills 2.0 is too far away for them to be able to commit to anything right now which might have to change in the future. They did, however, say that they feel the plans they have to make it a big and exciting feature for the next update. They expect it to revamp the older characters in the game, and make people take a second look at how they all play.

I’m very excited for the update, and they gave just enough information to get me excited about the update after that as well. Unfortunately, no date was given for the update, but I will keep you updating if I learn anything on that front.