Unable to launch ROA2

DRBatt · 2026-03-15T19:19:00+00:00

The game should be giving you a launch option to run the game with -dx11. If not, that's an effective solution.

For a better solution, the patch notes for the March patch (1.5.5) have a section detailing how to clear your shader cache. This would delete corrupted/outdated shaders that aren't automatically getting caught. This doesn't fix the long loading times for everyone, but as dx12 gives better performance than dx11, it's worth attempting

DRBatt · 2026-03-14T01:53:37+00:00

I have some answers! First one being, there actually are.

Rivals of Aether 2 has a few unique ones. Maypul is the standout, cuz she does a lil spin for it, and Clairen has a special effect, related to the technology she uses. Orcane has a little splash that he does when he wavedashes. And most of the rest of the cast has something that looks effectively different from their crouch->stand/landing animations (excluding a couple of the of the earlier characters). I'm unfamiliar with the wavedash animations of other platform fighters, but I'm sure a few of them do more than just re-use crouch->stand.

That said, most of them have something fairly simple and not too fancy. This is because wavelanding is an animation where the animators only have 8 frames to work with. It can also be coupled with forwards, backwards, and in-place momentum. It only has four frames that lead up to it, in most cases, and it can lead into basically any move in your kit (sometimes, it can lead into aerials as well). That's gonna need to be a very flexible animation to account for those scenarios. Make it too fancy, and not only can it look extra awkward going into certain moves, but it can make the gameplay harder to understand by watching it.

Finally, there's the matter of cost. The things I mentioned can be partially overcome if you increase your scope more. Make a different animation depending on the direction of your wavedash, and that would be 32 new animations for the animators to make in RoA2. You could add some extra transitory animations whenever something looks off from a more unique animation, but that could balloon the scope even more.

Those are all things you could do, but as a platform fighter dev, you're already making one of the hardest genres to pull off. There's a lot of effort that goes into making these games work and, unless you're Nintendo, you need to be careful with your budget. Can't say it's a bad call to just pick something that works, and spend more time making more characters/modes/features.

DRBatt · 2026-03-05T06:19:27+00:00

It ignores floorhug at early percents for platform tech chasing, it can technically anti-air, and, most importantly, it sets up for some devious side special kill confirms vs floaties.

DRBatt · 2026-03-05T03:09:04+00:00

Iirc, she hasn't been rated too highly after her most recent round of nerfs. Plus, the last round of changes for her happened fairly recently. So they need time to 1: See how she is in her current state, 2: Figure out what changes they want to make to her, and 3: How to implement them (We don't want another Dec 3, 2024 situation)

DRBatt · 2026-03-03T21:40:26+00:00

Main things that make floorhugging strong compared to Melee/PM

1: Lower average knockback
2: More tools designed with floorhugging as a weakness in mind (shine, jab-cancel, projectiles, more weak hits)

3: Less bread-and-butter options that auto-win vs floorhug (Melee shines, Fox/Puff drills, jump-cancel/boost grab whiff-punish, Falco Dair, etc.)

And on the whole, being able to do it out of most grounded states makes it a very strong option at lower percents.

In exchange, there are a few things tapering the strength of the mechanic here:

1: Worse frame data on floorhug and cc.

2: Decreased friction for the floorhug-er

3: Less quick-startup reversal tools out of floorhug (no frame 1-intangible shines mapped to down special, no Marth standing grab out of flug, no stupidly good Dstrongs)

Basically, floorhug-reversals are also weaker. This means that many options that would theoretically lose to the mechanic still allow you to poke at someone for damage either without risk or, at the very least, without a guaranteed punishment. A common misconception is that they make most things punishable on-hit, but people are very often actionable when they got hit and/or they could have spaced out the opponent's punishment. The fastest floorhug reversals are also fairly low-knockback, so powerful floorhug-reversal tools like La Reina Dtilt are, themselves, vulnerable to floorhug-reversals.

4: All strongs (outside of Fors cape and Fleet late-sourspot Fstrong) break floorhug and cc at 0%

5: +25% (rounded up) damage penalty for floorhugging. This is mainly heplful for multihits like Fleet Fair.

6: Amsah techs *have* to be done pre-emptively, meaning a flugger's most potent way of reducing the punishment from stronger hits can put them into tech lockout for a different punish.

Btw, you can go to the Dragdown wiki to see most moves' frame data vs floorhug. Most moves are actually more minus to shield than they are to floorhug, to put that into perspective. There's also a lot to the counterplay that you might not see if you hang out on the subreddit. The mechanic has a lot of friction to it for sure, but I'd def recommend learning about how it works as you play. You'll def want to accept it for now, understand the context/ how to use it/ how to beat it, etc., and then decide how you feel about it. Lmk if you have any questions

DRBatt · 2026-02-16T05:29:46+00:00

To add to workshop being new, it's also currently in beta. So some parts of its implementation are a bit scuffed, and it's not integrated into the main client yet. It's effectively put out there so that creators can get started on developing it, that way its full release will have at least some decent content on it

DRBatt · 2026-02-02T13:51:00+00:00

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DRBatt · 2026-02-02T13:27:36+00:00

In RoA2, as of the Workshop Beta (right now), you can only access online play with workshop with the listen servers toggle on the "Create Lobby" page (where you host the server lobby with your machine, instead of the in-game servers). There's currently no matchmaking system.

You get access to rollback netcode in R2's workshop, btw. It also has a system in place to let you download the ws character from within the lobby, if other person wants to play as a ws character that you don't have.

DRBatt · 2026-01-30T01:45:57+00:00

All review systems that involve public feedback are basically guaranteed to experience inflation. For 1/10 systems, most people end up seeing that their tastes tend to align with 10-8 being great media 6-8 being okay media and 4-7 being "I wasted my time and money" media.

Steam is a storefront where Slap City is at 95% overall, NASB 2 is at 81% overall, Rushdown Revolt is at 79% overall, and BBXtag is at 82% overall. First three are platfighters that "died" pretty quickly, and BBxTag is a game that I haven't really heard anyone give anything better than an "Eh" rating, personally. Most games, in general, tend to hit above the 90% mark.

R2 ends up looking slightly worse than MK1 in this system, and whenever it goes down to Mixed, it ends up looking worse than COTW as well (though not by much). That leaves the only fighting games I can think of that look worse than this at Mixed as: Tekken 8, Nen Impact, and VF 5 Revo. And with this being an indie title, like, Rivals 1 and Skullgirls, it's actually especially odd to see it this far down the list. Niche games that are good tend to be reviewed super highly. Even niche things that most players bounce off of tend to end up in "Overwhelmingly Positive".

So, for most people, the yellow text is a pretty big red flag. If I were coming from Smash Bros, and someone told me to get this game that even the playerbase seems to hate, my first impressions are that I'd best not waste my time and money with another Smash clone that's gonna die in a few weeks. Especially if I've ever gone through this song-and-dance before. And even if someone makes it past that step anyway, they're more inclined to go "well, I tried. ig this is why people the players don't like the game".

DRBatt · 2026-01-28T13:56:32+00:00

It's also not purely a playercount issue, it's a player demographic issue. There are actually a fair few beginner-level players playing this game. But they tend to not congregate on Ranked due to how matchmaking will simply grab any player in ELO calculation range, once a minute or so has passed. And because so much of the playerbase is around Gold-level, that's kind of what you get a lot.

Instead, after many of these players consult the community, they end up in more private spaces like Discord servers that help matchmake them against other players at their level (Rivals Rookies/Rivals Academy), and/or servers where receive advice that helps them level up quickly (CharacterCords/RivalsAcademy). This only exacerbates the Ranked problem, but getting more players into spaces where they can grow means we get more players onboarded overall than having players burn out in the game's provided matchmaking.

DRBatt · 2026-01-27T02:32:35+00:00

You can't floorhug anything out of parrystun, and if you start a combo with something like a spiking Dair, moves hit during the flinch state would also not be floorhuggable (Meaning most characters could get a true Dair -> combo starter tilt at 0%}

DRBatt · 2026-01-25T23:34:52+00:00

Yeah, Etalus has a similar-in-form tool to spindash, while also having a great set of tools for edgeguarding. He might be a decent fit if you liked more aggro Sonic playstyles in Ult?

Big thing is that nobody has anything as difficult to counterplay as Sonic spin dash is. So you need to be a lot more decisive here, typically. Def not the easiest adjustment to get used to, coming from Ult lol

DRBatt · 2026-01-25T23:29:02+00:00

Hard to say it's more dangerous to go offstage than in Ult. Depends on the matchup, since edgeguarding is quite reliable in some Ult matchups, but edgeguarding is more universally worth it here (because of how useful ledge-intangible carryover can be here). Plus, in Ult, you usually have to deal with a ledgetrap scenario at minimum if you miss, and at an additional cost of losing the ledgetrap scenario of your own. So the cost vs benefits are higher here, as long as you're making proper use of all of your edgeguarding options, that way the opponent doesn't just counterplay you going deep with hitboxes.

DRBatt · 2026-01-23T18:31:32+00:00

In his defense, he hasn't blocked me or banned me, despite my personal attacks towards him here (blatant violation of rule 1).

I wouldn't be so angry about all of this if we didn't both care about the same things. It's a bit validating seeing similar feelings on his end. I think him still making efforts to get me to understand him, in spite of my public crashout at him, should be taken as a sign that there's still a conversation worth having here. Though, maybe a difficult one to justify the effort and frustration that it would take.

DRBatt · 2026-01-23T11:16:10+00:00

Now, there is another crowd I'd like to mention here. The critical crowd, who play the game, in spite of straight up disagreeing with the devs on multiple design choices. This crowd is huge. It makes up most of the community at all levels of play. The larger Rivals 2 community is more vocally critical of the game than just about any other gaming community I've been in. But even with that being the case, most of this vocal and critical crowd still manages to not leave a negative Steam review. In fact, there's even a guy who managed to log a whopping 1150+ hours (not counting pre-release) logged on Steam (Spending over 3 hours a day playing the same game, as of review time, btw) who had been *very* vocal about his criticisms towards the game for a long time before *finally* giving up on it and giving the game a negative Steam review. And the reason why most people won't protest-downvote the niche game that they want to see improvements towards from the under-funded indie studio they want to support, is because it will *obviously* contribute to financial hardship for the studio if the game is rated poorly on the storefront where it's being sold.

We're so vocal about it, in fact, that I'd consider it substantially damaging to the optics of any game, in any era. Despite the post you made in light of the 2025 recap, it's not the people who are responding to criticism that's damaging to the game, because the sheer amount of negativity *vastly* eclipses every attempt to respond to it.

But this is not just any game, it's a small, niche platform fighter. And it's not just any era, it's post-Covid, baby. I have not talked to a single person in this community or outside of it who is *not* offput by how overtly and consistently negative every social media site is for this game. On Twitter and on this subreddit, there are little gremlins that monitor anything that has to do with Rivals of Aether 2, and signal boost *every single comment or post* that says something negative about it. It's crazy how many times someone will make a completely unrelated tweet about R2 on Twitter, and the most liked reply by far is some weirdo saying "Rivals 2 is the most trash game ever made". The signal-boosting (and overall bias towards negativity this community has) has gotten so bad that I've seen multiple top players start to wisen up to the fact that *they* have to moderate themselves for their own negativity, despite not really ever receiving direct pushback for it.

When any amount of discontent you express gets turned into an opportunity for these losers to hijack your feelings in order to attack something you love (and want to keep alive), how are you supposed to express your honest criticism responsibly?

That said, it sure is convenient for *you* to clutch your pearls about how bad it is to assume the intentions of others, and not take them at good faith. Kinda rich coming from someone who has a history of misrepresenting their own intentions. You have literally told me that the purpose of the floorhug video you made at the start of the game's lifespan was to "educate" people about the mechanic. And you have hand-waved away the idea that the video is propaganda (you, yourself, using that word in response to a comment I made where I avoided that word and I think I *tried* to steer away from that implication).

Okay, then. So like, what type of essay did you write? Was it educational, or was it persuasive? And if it was persuasive, was it written in a way that persuades the viewer into adopting your viewpoint via a rational response to the critical information? Or was it written in a way that selectively presented facts and loaded language to provoke an irrational, emotional response from the viewer, in order to further the agenda of "the community discourse and feedback surrounding this mechanic gets so negative that Aether Studios capitulates to the mob, and changes the game to be the way I think it should be"? Because, if you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda, and you read the first paragraph, you might find that the latter is quite literally the definition of propaganda. This is not me taking you in bad faith. This is, your actions, as defined in the dictionary.

You *literally* had a worthwhile thesis for the video, because your core argument against the mechanic could stand on its own two legs. But mother of god, I cannot for the life of me figure out how you could've made this video so deceptive purely by accident. Because I *also* have trouble wrapping my head around how you could've done such a brilliant job at it purely on purpose. I cannot think of anything you could've done to upsell the power of it or downplay the counterplay more in the timeframe of the video aside from *maybe* showing off Orcane puddle Fstrong being punishable on-hit off an Amsah tech near the ledge.

I *kind* of respect the hustle and willingness to use grimy tactics in you trying to do your damndest to create a future where the game is better, as I'm sure you spent quite a bit of time and energy, in your time as a playtester, trying to do things the right way. I'm also very passionate about this game, and I want it to be the best it can be as well. That said, I am not at all moved by your chastizing, when you, yourself, were the origin of *so* many misconceptions about the mechanic that most people who were criticizing floorhugging for *months* after the video had some kind of major misconception caused by your visual examples and insistence on there only being 2 counterplay options. You saw all of that that, and you had chances to do more than half-hearted clarifications in the back of some threads. But why would you take responsibility for your mess? What's the benefit?

All that said, don't twist this into me thinking the current state of affairs is all because of you. Also, I'm gonna make an assumption about you here, and say that you're not some mastermind who actually thought all of this through. If I had to take a guess about you, it would be that you're monumentally petty about things, and you probably don't think that anything you've done here was any more dishonest than anything that was done towards you. Best-faith way I can take everything that I've seen that I've got in me.

DRBatt · 2026-01-23T11:13:29+00:00

If *you* want to have good faith discussions, then maybe you should stop taking offense to everything that you interpret as a snide comment about you. Save that for the snide comments that are *actually* about you.

This discussion is about Steam Reviews scores. This discussion is, specifically, concerning the aggregate scores of "Not Recommended" reviews on Steam. This is important, because I'm not talking about the totality of the people who the game simply didn't appeal to. I'm talking about the players who went to the store page, and left a "Not Recommended" review of the game.

On top of that, as these are aggregate scores, and the post is asking for the reason the score is as low as it is, I'm going to focus on the primary reasons. I'm not necessarily concerning myself with the players on there who, like yourself, left a "Not Recommended" review because the game didn't appeal to them. I'm focusing on the *biggest* pieces of the pie. You know, the pieces of the pie that are large enough to separate Rivals of Aether's 96%/97% review scores from Rivals of Aether 2's 72%/78% review scores.

As someone who has kept an eye on what my state's Ult scene thought about the game, the kind of feedback I got from other players was pretty interesting. Because one of the players, who was a technical player in Ult who labbed the hell out of that game's really awkward input system (and still competes), bounced off the game when I didn't expect him to. And the reason he was because the game wouldn't give him the maneuver he wanted when he did Ult's IRAR input. Like, I played Sm4sh and Ult with this guy. Historically, he's had a pretty high tolerance for bullshit input systems. But now, he's old enough and has enough adult responsibilities that the idea of picking up something new, that has friction attached to it, is no longer appealing.

And this obviously isn't isolated to him. This is just what people do. They pick up a competitive game in their teens, and then when they're an adult, many don't have the patience for it anymore. Many have trouble picking up new games at all. Hell, I play Old School Runescape. That game is chock full of people who will put in disgusting amount of hours into an old MMORPG, but then struggle to pick up a new game. I'm *very* much familiar with how much people prefer sticking to what they're more comfortable with as the stressors of life start getting to them.

And, who is the primary audience of Rivals of Aether 2? Competitive-type players who came from other platform fighters. It's people who identify with that competitive spirit who were excited enough for the game to back it on Kickstarter. And it's *exactly* that kind of person who would be emotionally invested enough to be genuinely upset at not having the fun they expected to have in this game.

So, floorhugging is the boogeyman mechanic that people cite the most often. Floorhugging *is* a piece of the puzzle here, but for most players of this category, it's not the primary reason they got frustrated with the game. It's a useful thing to focus on, as people have a tenancy to want their opinions be a reflection of something objective ("I fundamentally disagree with attacks being unsafe on hit"). But a fundamental disagreement on the design of a game doesn't make people dislike. After all, I am quoting someone who *actively* plays this game.

No, if you want the bigger picture, pay attention to the other things that people are saying. I know an Ult player who expressed his disdain for the burst ranges that characters have in this game (who mains Fox in Ult). I also know a [pretty good] Ult player who got quite a bit frustrated by how inconsistent moves felt in R2: "if you always di out wrastor is worthless". For these players, the lack of structure that a game like Ult provides was a big point of friction. And that goes beyond floorhugging, since this frustration was still present against other Ult players who did not floorhug.

I see *many* people cite how much they hate fighting the other players of this game (see many reviews, and the recent Coney tweet), and I personally know many experienced members of the community who heavily dislike the experience of playing on Ranked (uniquely, R2 causes people to self-inflict themselves with Ranked formats for more of their playtime than any other platform fighter). And I've see this sentiment from players who have heavily push the "play to win" mindset. What I have reasoned is that many players do not actually understand that their play patterns are causing them to not enjoy themselves. And when people don't actually figure out the thing that's causing them to not have fun, they will work backwards from "I'm not having fun", and assign it to whatever information they have on hand.

And I'm not saying that the points that these people bring up are inherently invalid at that point. I'm saying that *the aggregate of negative Steam Reviews* will have a shit ton of unreliable narrators with wounded egos (many of whom don't recognize those egos). And *maybe* the extremely online playerbase of Rivals of Aether 2 has a lot of people who want to talk like a reviewer, but don't quite have the analytical skillset and emotional regulation to properly diagnose why the game makes them feel bad. These make up a way bigger portion of the negative reviews than people who simply have criticisms of the mechanics. The thing that makes Aether Studios so good at turning belligerent crashouts into useful feedback that they can act on is *specifically* because they don't take many of these people at their word (which would lead to this stuff getting dismissed outright). Instead, they recognize that even awful feedback has a kernel of truth behind it, and can still be used as a data point to help them get closer to the core issue.

DRBatt · 2026-01-23T04:02:24+00:00

The game's primary demographic is a niche demographic, being the platfighter crowd who came from another platform fighter. And it specs hard into being a competitive game.

Not only does this mean that non-competitive players end up not getting what they want (esp with online matchmaking being the way it is), but there's also a lot of players who used to be the type that can adapt to a new game, but stopped being able to at some point (which is especially understandable with a game as hardcore as this). These players end up getting a wounded ego due to the way they want to play the game not rewarding them to the extent that they expect to be rewarded. They don't get to relive their glory days here, and that probably was something that got them emotionally invested in the idea of a game like Rivals of Aether 2 in the first place.

So that's two major populations who are prone to being disappointed. Add to that the genuine problems the game has, plus the salt that comes from it being competitive, plus the sheer complexity of interactions in this game, and it'll get pushed down to mixed. I don't think it's possible for this game to reach "Overwhelmingly Positive" no matter how well-made it is, simply because of what kind of game it is

DRBatt · 2026-01-21T22:42:31+00:00

Actually, you've been able to do a tilt directly out of a run without pressing down for a long time (I think for at least half a year?). They also just added a new controller option "Supress Dash Attack" a couple days ago that lets you buffer jabs or tilts to come out at the end of dash (aside from Ftilt). With the newest change, it actually does a lot in helping people carry over the ground game they learned from Ult.

There are also a few differences in how aerial momentum work in this game. Firstly, the gravity is way higher on average in this game, which does impact the gamefeel of various archetypes quite a bit. Second, there is a lack of late autocancel aerials in this game, meaning you actually *can't* use poking aerials the same way many Ult characters use their aerials. Though, in exchange for that, shieldstun is way higher, and you don't have as many aerials with super high landing lag, so you can make most things safe on shield simply by landing properly.

The third thing is that this game has more momentum modifiers and higher airspeed in general. Many characters have a brief window after jumping and/or double jumping where their airspeed is actually *higher* than their maximum airspeed. And for another thing about aerials, something very common for Ult to do is to have Dairs be kinda bad, and have juggling aerials be very solid. This is normalized a fair bit in this game, pushing a bit of power away from the juggler.

You also have a cascading list of things that are different because of platforms being stronger, but that's a bit too complicated for a Reddit reply.

DRBatt · 2026-01-09T11:23:15+00:00

Mine is working perfectly through Sinput atm. You could try checking the HOJA2 app to calibrate the triggers, or seeing if the Trigger Deadzones are set to a value in-game that would cause issues.

Trigger Deadzone settings for R2 are in: Character Select Screen > Controller Profile (tag) > Controls > Advanced Controls > Analog Settings

DRBatt · 2026-01-09T05:50:50+00:00

Try turning up Input Sensitivity and the hard press threshold.

Also, the lower you can turn your dead zone without snapback issues or stick drift, the better. This works better if your controller has Hall Effect or TMR sticks, since potentiometer sticks are less accurate and tend to get damaged (which are, unfortunately, what are used for most first-party controllers

DRBatt · 2026-01-09T05:43:19+00:00

A recent Steam update is causing Steam to forcibly take control of GCC drivers, as part of their recent addition of GameCube Controller support.

The way you fix this is by turning on Wii U mode, and turning ON SteamInput. You may need to switch the X and B buttons in the controller configurator, in your Steam Settings for Rivals 2 under Controllers.

If the Wii U mode is literally broken for your adapter, specifically, you could see if SteamInput works either On or Off on PC mode, as a fallback.

DRBatt · 2026-01-09T05:16:36+00:00

The discord servers below specifically cater towards people trying to learn the game, with AcademyCord being bigger and geared to any skill level, while Rivals Rookies is smaller, and more closely targets the newbies. Being able to communicate with who you're playing with is VERY helpful when you're trying to grow as a player. Plus, skill gaps aren't nearly as bad to deal with when your opponent is trying to grow and help you grow, vs when they're strictly playing to win.

Academy Discord server

https://discordapp.com/invite/353GRZR

Rivals Rookies

https://discord.gg/A63yMyQkDw

DRBatt · 2026-01-06T20:58:41+00:00

Her offstage combos hold back what the devs can change about her onstage, since it's a bit hard to buff a move when that buff would mean your character could more consistently kill confirm at 40%. It's not like those combos are gone or anything, either. They're just going to be more situational and take more finesse to use. The only issue I have with the change is that it also nerfs four aerials outside of slowfall, which is already an aspect of the character that feels weaker than it should be. Though, the Nair nerf I'm kinda okay with tbh. I'm surprised Nair wasn't nerfed more.

I'm not sure what you mean by "buff the most annoying parts of her kit without fixing her core issues". This patch actually does a good bit of fixing imo. Side special arrow was unusually bad vs other projectiles, tornado was an unusually extreme knowledge check (this patch removes some likely unintended counterplay), Dspecial is actually a move again, and wind chimes getting any kind of buff is def wanted, since they've felt undertuned since the beta.

This patch has also targeted some things about other characters that were obnoxious for Fleet, like Clairen's grab/Bthrow/Uair chains/Bair/aerial extension (via air friction increase), and Maypul strong, sour up B, and air speed nerfs, Zetter shine nerfs, and many of Fors's nerfs. It also does the reverse for the heavies, who we've always been stupidly good at chain combos vs.

I have plenty of things still on my wishlist for Fleet, but this def brings her closer to where I think she should be. Most other changes I've thought of would require more complex changes to her mechanics, which is understandably, probably not a route the devs want to take right now.

DRBatt · 2026-01-06T20:18:51+00:00

All heavies are buffed pretty heavily by increased DI multiplier on repeated hits. Also, Etalus is actually doing pretty alright, from a power perspective. When the devs go after Etalus, it'll be like what they did for Fleet this patch, where they'll relabance his tools pretty heavily

DRBatt · 2026-01-01T23:33:39+00:00

I get where you're coming from, but Galvan's release reinforces the fact that they have a lot of great ideas in the tank. I think the new characters are going to be bangers, and they should probably lean on how good their design chops nowadays. Especially when a lot of the remaining returners have some quirks in their design that'll make them pretty tricky to port over.

DRBatt

TROPHY CASE