I Had No Idea That You Could Have More than Four Players in Risk of Rain 2

I’m not very good at Risk of Rain 2, but it is definitely a game I play sometimes, often with friends. However, I was always of the impression that you could only have 4 players at most in a single run. That was until I sat in on voice chat in Kaiga’s Discord server. A nice fellow by the name of Cheezbeargur explained that, in fact, you can actually play with more than four players. All it took was a handful of console commands, and we’d be able to play with five people. Without using any mods or anything like that.

Honestly, it’s pretty impressive. Two commands and Risk of Rain 2 changes from 4-player coop to, well, x-player coop. We set ours to 5 players, meaning I could squeeze into the game as well.

What’s even more impressive though is that Risk of Rain 2 doesn’t care that there’s more players. It just sees the number of players and scales up the difficulty to match. Sure, you can’t see every player on the character select screen (just the original 4), but that’s just a cosmetic thing and you can still pick your character with ease. There’s nothing stopping you from playing as 8 Engineers and having the turrets do all the work, or all play Loader and fly across each map.

Everything scales up without a problem. More chests spawn but they are more expensive. We get way more enemies to counteract the number of players. And those enemies get more difficult more quickly. The problem is making sure that everyone gets a roughly equal amount of resources. There’s just about enough chests, but if you die, catching up again is pretty hard. In our five-player game, we sacrificed items to the scrappers, so that our fallen team mates could get some items for themselves while in the lunar shops.

The enemies scale up really quickly. Because we were going to the lunar shops every other round and we went to the void fields, we had Malachite enemies spawning on earlier levels. Normally they don’t spawn unless you loop. Getting to the moon was also tricky because we had Malachite and Celestial enemies spawning on top of the escape ship. In fact, the enemies actually reached the maximum level of 99, while we were far, far behind. Didn’t help though that we had the artifact that spawns random enemies regardless of what level you are on.

What really surprises me is that Risk of Rain 2 did all of this without a single problem. Even with a couple of players using QoL mods, people who didn’t have the DLC and the few of us who are pretty new to the game. We made it all the way to Mithix and the rescue ship without any issues. Well, technical issues. A couple of us died while fighting Mithrix, and everything could really easily kill us. But we finished our run and got a victory screen, which was totally worth it.

But yeah, I had no idea that having more players would be so easy to do! If only other games were as easy to add more players as Risk of Rain 2.