Risk of Rain 2's roadmap lays out plans for 4 new characters and even more bosses by spring 2020

Risk of Rain 2 is getting bigger in June. And then later this summer. And again in the fall, the winter, and spring 2020, when developers Hopoo Games say it will launch out of Early Access. After a hell of a successful first month, the team posted an update this Friday covering what's coming next and laid out an Early Access roadmap leading up to version 1.0. Expect new items and equipment in every single update, along with three new characters before next spring, more stages, and "Skills 2.0" and "Artifact 2.0" features.

"We are sharing this forecast so players know what to look forward to and what the team is working towards in making Risk of Rain 2 the best game of its kind," Hopoo's Paul Morse said in a press release about the Early Access roadmap.

The June update promises a new character, stage, and boss, while summer promises the first major addition, Skills 2.0, with no breakdown of what that means. Artifacts, meanwhile, aka modifiers that change the difficulty and how the game plays, won't be coming until the winter update.

I'm most curious about Fall's "Hidden Realms" update, which sounds like it'll include some secret levels outside the standard stages. What will they do? How will we reach them? (The likely answer: Play a lot of Risk of Rain 2).

And I'm excited to see which of the characters are wholly new creations, if any, or if they're all returning survivors from the first Risk of Rain. I played a lot of the Enforcer in the first game, a shotgun-and-riot-shield-wielding SWAT dude, and would be happy to see him make a comeback.

Localization is currently in progress for French, German, Italian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Aside from their content updates, the devs have a few major points on their minds, including stamping out a save corruption bug and rooting out a stuttering problem when picking up items for the first time.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).