On the back of a somewhat complex poll, Hopoo Games has finally announced the winner of the next survivor to be released in the critically received Early Access game, Risk of Rain 2. Hopoo Games announced on March 31 a poll taking place on their Discord for the next playable survivor to join into the fray, and the options available were abundant. The announcement came at the tail-end of rather verbose patch notes, so you’d be excused if you happened to gloss over it; over 124,000 players had their voices heard in the poll that lasted roughly a week.
Among the characters available were playable survivors from Risk of Rain, scrapped characters that never successfully made it into the series first iteration, or players could vote for an entirely new character that Hopoo Games would conceive.
The survivors that could be voted to be included in Risk of Rain 2 were The Enforcer, a standard survivor for the first Risk of Rain. With a massive shield that kept him from taking damage to a shotgun and shield bash, he was very much an up-close-and-personal damage dealer that was a staple of early runs.
The second was the Bandit who was in the title before Early Access, although various pieces of his utility didn’t translate entirely well to the 3D play space. Who doesn’t like space-bandits?
Time is running out to vote on which survivor you would like to see join the Risk of Rain 2 roster!
Vote now: https://t.co/pNl2AFyxfi pic.twitter.com/1cltCk59Z7
— Risk of Rain (@RiskofRain) April 6, 2020
HAN-D was a mech loader with a melee-centric build, which made Hopoo Games a bit concerned as RoR2 has a decent number of airborne enemies that melee classes struggle to successfully engage for obvious reasons. HAN-D has been mostly replaced by Loader in RoR2, so his entire kit would need to experience a rework in order to be a capable survivor, even with a slew of upgrades.
The Miner was another melee-centric character that would be difficult to adapt onto the 3D play space that RoR2 offers; his dual-wielding of pickaxes is unique, and he’s one of the few classes that doesn’t come with a long backstory of general violence, making him an interesting addition; Hopoo Games has commented that they’re considering Isaac from Dead Space as a plausible direction to move this character.
The Sniper is a defacto choice when it comes to shooting games, merely from the absolute sensation that comes with hitting a difficult long-range shot under duress; RoR2 doesn’t have weakpots per se, however, and enemies tend to spawn far closer to you than a sniper character would prefer. Add in the idea that the third-person viewpoint in RoR2, and adding a Sniper comes with its own problems.
The Chef was arguably the most creative offered; with a boomerang cleaver that bridges the gap between melee and ranged, Hopoo Games also were exploring the possibility of the Chef crafting different recipes on the fly that would create different meals, providing various boosts and buffs to the party.
Finally, Hopoo Games offered a random character that they would craft if none of the other heroes seemed interesting enough; this is what the community selected after a bit over a week of the poll being active. This, admittedly, doesn’t tell us much; Hopoo suggested a few various directions they could move in, from a Paladin to a Chemist, although no direction has yet to be officially announced for the mystery character.
