Deep Rock Galactic News

Next week, on February 28th, it will be exactly 1 year since Deep Rock Galactic launched into Early Access (and Game Preview on Xbox). It’s been a fantastic year for us at Ghost Ship Games - and more than half a million of you have supported us by buying and playing the game! You have provided us with invaluable feedback, hilarious memes, and helped foster the best community imaginable. We remain both humbled and extremely proud of this.

As for the anniversary, we want to make a party of it. Update 21.5 will release on Monday, as outlined in our Roadmap. It’s got a bunch of celebration-related content in it, but also grew beyond our initial scope in several ways - so much so that we made an executive decision and upgraded the name of it from 21.5 to a full 22 instead! It deserves it!

While the update lands Monday (including the celebratory content), we’ll do a proper celebration outside the game as well next Thursday, the 28th of February. Most of this will be in the form of us, the devs at Ghost Ship Games, streaming from the office, and announcing various unannounced things! This will include proclaiming the winners of our Shout-Like-A-Dwarf competition, which you can still participate in here.

We are working with our friends and publishers at Coffee Stain to create buzz around the celebration, and we feel confident that it will not go unnoticed. That said - the more you, our dwarf-ambassadors, can help spread the word, the better the chance it’ll be a success.

This is roughly the plan:

Monday, February 25

• Update 22: “One Year In Orbit” goes live at 11am (CET)
  

Thursday, February 28

• Dev Stream playing Deep Rock Galactic during day (our time, so CET)
  
• Reddit AMA (in r/deeprockgalactic)
  
• Streams directly from the office of Ghost Ship
  
• New Keyart and Biome wallpapers for download
  
• Dev Streams during evening/night (our time, so CET)
  
• Devs join random player-run games
  
• Updated Roadmap
  
• Shout Competition winners
  
• plus lots more dwarven shenanigans
  

First of all, just do what you always do: help us with feedback when we release on Monday. Then we can hotfix so everything is perfect for Thursday.
On Thursday, simply join in by watching the streams participate in the social channels, and of course, play the game!
And finally, do what you can to spread the word, so we can celebrate this with as many fellow dwarves as possible!


From the Crew of Ghost Ship Games,
ROCK AND STONE!

UPDATE: Hot Fix 2 released! (patch notes at the bottom of this post)

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Upon releasing Update 21 we quickly realized a couple of significant bugs had crept in. The Cryo Cannon wouldn’t freeze enemies as intended (freezing a Praetorian was almost impossible - yikes), and after watching various streams from players, we also saw a need to tone down the frequency of random enemy wave spawns. Please try it out again and let us know what you think. That and multiple other things should also be fixed with Hotfix 1 for Update 21 - check the Patch Notes below for a full overview. Lethal is still Lethal though :-)

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One of our more ambitious gameplay reworks to date landed with Update 21 - a full rework of how we calculate Difficulty in the game. For a long time, we’ve used a relatively simple system for this, and it was simply not living up to our demands any longer. Now we have a bigger and much better system under the hood - we have way more knobs to turn, but it also means that the Difficulty settings currently in the game all have changed - and perhaps in ways we have not yet fixed, tweaked, or even realized.

Some of you have taken to Reddit, Steam, and Discord to write about this. As always, we appreciate your candid and honest feedback about these things, both the positive and the negative. Right now we are hard at work on the first Hotfix for Update 21, and there will be much more balancing, tweaking, and reworking of the numbers coming in the next Hotfixes and Updates.

As usual, do not take anything in the game as final. Numbers will continue to be tweaked on pretty much everything as we go forward. And in that regard, we cannot emphasize enough how much we value the feedback we are getting from you guys. We may not answer every post, but we do our hardest to read all of them.

In short: Constructive criticism is good, and we want all of it, on any aspect of the game. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, what you feel is awesome or lacking. Do so in as much or as little detail as you want, just remember that more detail means we have more to work with - for instance, when commenting on Difficulty, please state which Difficulty you are playing.

The point of it all is this: We want this game to be awesome. And you Early Access adopters are a key ingredient in making that happen.

Happy digging!
The Ghost Ship Team

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Overall Difficulty tweaks

• Longer time between random enemy spawns for all difficulties (Lethal not so much)
  
• Difficulty rating of Mactera Grabber and Bomber increased, so the spawn system spawns them less often.
  
• Enemy encounters in caves reduced in size
  
• Less enemy spawning during Salvage and Point Extraction (Please remember that we still want these two missions to be the most hectic missions)
  
• More Nitra spawning in Egghunt missions
  

Weapons, Upgrades & Mods

• Naming and Descriptions of Upgradeable Armor Suits updated
  
• Optimization of Skin Thumbnail material
  
• Breach Cutter should no longer be framerate dependent
  
• Tweaks to Breach Cutter damage to match the frame rate dependency fixes
  
• Fix stat view of all armors
  
• Fixed issue with health mastery not applying correctly
  
• Fixed Bosco’s stats for its Upgrades in the APD-Terminal - they will now show different stats depending on what rocket is active and other stats have been fixed to look nicer
  
• Cryo Cannon and Flamethrower no longer stops after hitting the first enemy
  
• Charge Blaster hold button functionality
  
• Driller Armor - Fixed shield mod value
  
• Driller changes: Double Drills, Lowered initial Mining Rate slightly, Increased base fuel,
• Increased fuel mod values, Drills can now hit multiple targets at once, Drill Speed tweaked
  
• Fixed drills not being able to hit enemies at point blank
  
• Velocity modifier for the cryo cannon firing audio is now set up correctly
  
• Cryo Cannon - The spray goes through enemies so multiple targets can be damaged at once (this change applies to CRSPR Flamethrower too).
  
• Cryo Cannon - Base pressure drops at a slower pace allowing to hold fire for longer.
  
• Cryo Cannon - Base direct damage increased
  
• Cryo Cannon - Base direct cold effect increase (enemies freeze faster)
  
• Cryo Cannon - Tweaks to some enemies' temperature resistance.
  
• Plasma Charger - Total ammo increased
  
• Fix Scout Dual SMG Skins only applied to one weapon
  

Enemies

• Fixed cave leeches so they no longer spawn during waves when Cave leech mutator is active
  
• Fanfare not playing double
  
• BET-C grenade particles significantly optimized
  
• You can no longer pick flowers and take a leisure ride on the zipline while getting grabbed by a Cave leech
  
• Crash fix for Shellback
  

Misc

• Moved Skins icon down a bit
  
• Layout and font tweaks on a lot of Popup windows
  
• Mission Bar layout tweaks
  
• Fixed a bug where downed players would get stuck in the air if the terrain under them gets removed, they will now fall down to the nearest floor instead.
  
• A lot of difficulty tweaks
  
• Serverlist ClassLock icon updated
  
• Mouse Icons added for several missing buttons
  
• Tweaks to Salvage difficulty
  
• Potential Fix for a crash related to the intro movie
  

• Fixed spiders exploding after having been frozen and then unfrozen now work correctly
  
• Serverlist tweaks
  
• Increased Ammo amount in Minehead Sentries
  
• Increased cost for Mactera and Grabber - they are a bit rarer
  
• Tweaked Point Extraction a bit easier - longer between big waves and bit smaller end wave
  
• Minor overall tweak on the difficulty
  
• Fixed up some grammar issues on the Motivational Quote monitors
  
• Small tweaks on various enemies sight
  
• Minor tweaks on overall Haz 4 and 5
  
• More mission names added
  
• Poison resistance upgrade icon updated
  
• Fixed several bugs related to players dying from Iron Will after the droppod leaves, entering and beginning to leave in the droppod with Iron Will active will now block the player from dying.
  
• Fixed wrong values for Gunner and Driller revive invulnerability mod
  
• Increased Ammo amount in Minehead Sentries
  
• Increased cost for Mactera and Grabber - they are a bit rarer
  
• Tweaked Point Extraction a bit easier - longer between big waves and a bit smaller end wave
  
• Try to fix Bet-c sound issue where shooting sound gets stuck
  
• Fixed a bug where the beers would get removed when picked up in the spacerig
  
• Fix Cave Leech den not spawning more cave leeches.
  
• Fix bug that could cause slightly more cases of single type waves in low difficulty circumstances
  
• Fixed a bug where the deposit-bucket would get stuck on the player character
  

With this update, we are introducing more insane challenges - a new LETHAL difficulty level for you to master, multiple new enemies, Mastery and Skins for weapons, and a gazillion other fixes and improvements.

Lunch Break is over! It’s time to go to work!

- The Ghost Ship Team


https://youtu.be/XOFrxQlYlek




Deep Rock Galactic didn’t invest much in the safety system of their BET-C series of combat M.U.L.E.’s. It only takes a few Xynarch Charge-Sucker parasites licking the robot’s circuits to turn them against the dwarves. In that situation, BET-C’s fast-tracking auto-turret and grenade launcher could become a major threat for any expedition. If you find an infected model, aim for the attached organisms and, once they are eradicated, carefully hammer BET-C until it turns into a trustworthy companion for the rest of the mission.


The Q’ronar Shellback is a deadly creature that you might bump into in the Radioactive and Salty regions of Hoxxes. Their tough shells and fast movement speed make them quite hard to kill - try to dodge its rolling attack and kill the Shellback when it stops to spray poison venom at you.


The Naedocyte Shocker is a strange alien flying jellyfish-like creature. They often appear in large swarms and is preferably dealt with before they get close enough to zap you with electrical shocks. So far they’ve been spotted in the regions of Dense Biozone and the Glacial Strata.



By popular demand, we’ve added a LETHAL new difficulty setting only for the most masochistic and badass dwarves out there! We hope you have “fun”... :D



GENERAL SPAWN LOGIC:
The general logic behind how we handle spawns has gotten a big overhaul - balancing waves is now a much more exact and controllable thing for us. This is actually the biggest of all changes we’ve done to the difficulty system, but also the hardest to explain in detail - maybe we’ll do a blog post on this in the future :-)

MISSION SPECIFIC ENEMY TYPES:
The Mission Generator now also pre-selects the specific mix of enemies players will encounter in a given mission. Instead of randomly selecting from every enemy type available in the game, players will now face themed swarms of enemies. This change won’t be particularly visible right now, but will serve to improve the overall feel and flow of the enemy swarms as we add more enemy types to the game.

The goal here is to make each mission feel a lot more unique, as well as making it more attractive for players to pursue a more strategic approach - if you have a rough idea of what awful things you might face down in the depths, you stand a better chance of going in as prepared as you can be.

TIME: As a rule, lowering the time between spawning enemy waves means more enemies in general, which results in an overall higher difficulty. Knowing this, we’ve made a few changes to how we time waves:

• Time elapsed before the first wave appears is based on Difficulty - so higher Difficulty means the first wave arrives faster.
  
• Subsequent waves will also spawn faster depending on difficulty level.
  

SPEED: Attack speed, projectile speed, and movement speed of enemies are increased for the highest difficulties.

ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS: You now take more damage from environmental dangers on higher difficulties.

YOU GET THE WAVES YOU DESERVE: Multiple waves are now allowed to spawn at the same time and do not cancel each other out.

• Example 1: Digging two eggs out in Egg hunt will generate two small waves instead of only one.
  
• Example 2: You can not cancel a wave in progress by calling in the drop pod
  

IMPORTANT BUGFIX! It turned out Difficulty scaling from 3 to 4 players was not working before - meaning that a 4 player game was as easy as a 3 player game. That is fixed now - so you should feel an overall increase in difficulty for 4 player games on all difficulties. We’ll, of course, continue to monitor and tweak as needed.




We’ve completely revamped the way we put health bars on enemies. Now it will show when the player is aiming at an enemy and it will do it on top of that enemy (instead of in the center of the screen). Additionally, it displays the damage applied to the enemy with every shot.


The Mission Readout Bar visible on the Space Rig has been updated with more information about the mission in progress, as well as gotten a graphical overhaul.


In The Salt Pits Region, you’ll now start seeing fragile Salt Platforms - stand on them, but be careful. They’re not tested for dwarf girth.


You want a diverse team? You don't like teams with three Engineers? The Host now has the option to select “PREVENT LATE JOIN DUPLICATION” from the Escape menu and Options menu. Selecting this option means players LATE JOINING your game will need to select a character class not currently in play.

Please note: This option does NOT restrict character selection on the Space Rig - we leave that up to you guys to figure out among yourselves.


The new Modification System has now been implemented for the traversal tools. That means more customization for the Power Drills, the Platform Gun, the Zipline Gun, and the Grappling Gun. Furthermore, your armor modding opportunities also got some tender, loving care...



A Weapon Mastery Bar has been added to all gear - as you unlock mods for a given piece of gear, your Mastery with it increases. At certain levels of Mastery, you’ll gain free bonuses. For now the bonuses are restricted to Skins, and only for the primary and secondary weapon slots. Each weapon has three unlockable skins to get.

The majority of our time with this has been spent on getting the system up and running, but we definitely intend to expand on the Skins System as we move a bit further ahead - you can expect other ways than just through the weapon masteries to earn skins in the future.


Yes, we have been both buffing and nerfing a lot of the weapons and here is a compiled list of changes!

• Flying Nightmare damage no longer stacks on top of direct hit damage.
  
• Bouncy Projectiles also bounce on enemies.
  
• Charged Shot base area of effect reduced.
  
• Normal shot damage increased.
  
• Plasma Charger and other projectile weapons no longer ignore armor. Now they have to break it.
  

• Base total ammunition increased.
  
• Oversized Drum mod value increased.
  
• Hot Bullets mod activates earlier.
  
• Cold As The Grave mod no longer goes to a set value every time. As originally intended, it will now reduce the heat of the gun a certain amount per kill.
  
• Aggressive Venting mod now works as intended.
  

• Default effectiveness against armor reduced.
  

• Armor Penetration mod value increased.
  
• High Capacity Magazine value increased.
  
• Stun Hit mod renamed. Chances increased.
  

• Rate of fire mod renamed to "Double Trigger".
  

• Armor Breaking mod damage increased.
  
• Stun Chance mod increased.
  
• Turret Whip damage increased.
  

• Electrocution Bonus mod value reduced.
  

• Incendiary Compound mod decreases the direct damage taken by enemies, but it will set them on fire.
  
• Pressure Wave value fixed.
  

• Extra Ammo mod value reduced.
  
• Damage tweaks to compensate for the frame rate dependency fix.
  
• Adjustments to the projectile to make it framerate independent.
  

• Sticky Ice cold effect reduced.
  
• Base freezing power reduced.
  
• Total ammo increased.
  

• Increased base damage.
  
• Decreased base Rate of Fire.
  
• Decreased base tank capacity.
  
• Decreased tank capacity upgrade.
  
• Decreased base sticky flames duration.
  
• Decreased sticky flames duration upgrades.
  
• Increased direct damage upgrade.
  
• Increased direct burn upgrade.
  
• Increased targets explode upgrade chance.
  

• Mactera Neurotoxin mod effect increased.
  

For quite some time, we have been stuck with Unreal Engine 4.19, but we finally managed to update the engine to 4.21. It seems to have fixed a lot of GPU crashes. Happy days!

• Alien Egg Collection mission should now properly distribute the eggs in the mission area.
  
• Assignment missions can now include Mission Modifiers. For difficult assignments, higher complexity missions will be preferred.
  
• Fixed Restore Save pop-up showing up unnecessarily for ultrawide monitors.
  
• Small adjustment to Steam warning message.
  
• Fixed a LOT of spelling errors (Yes, we know. Keep sending ‘em our way if you spot any :D).
  
• Attempt to fix voice chat issues.
  
• A maximum of 2 voice lines for waking up in Medibay will now be played.
  
• Umanite and Inert Uranium materials now look a lot more distinct from each other.
  
• Landing in Sticky Goo reduces fall damage.
  
• Fixed a bug with area damage falloff.
  
• Friendly fire modification added to Bosco.
  
• Glyphid Warriors, Spitters, and Web Spitters now don't always run away from explosions. It is chance based on different resistances depending on the enemy.
  
• Mactera should no longer die just from being frozen.
  
• Spitballers weak points now correctly take additional damage from weapons that do extra damage to weak points.
  
• Fix hanging grunt scream.
  
• Doubled the number of enemies that are able to target one player.
  
• Acid Spitters now properly do Poison Damage. (Yes we know - expect a name change here later… :D )
  
• Management has approved fixing critical mesh clipping of gantries near Abyss Bar.
  
• More random mission names.
  
• Many spelling errors fixed.
  
• New fanfare when getting promoted.
  
• Added Slovenian Language
  

• Breach Cutter is still FPS dependant - but now in inverse. Enjoy this on your potato machine until it's hot-fixed!
  
• Server list is kind of broken! It overflows and can't be scrolled. We'll hot fix this one ASAP!

• Build 23134: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1743358239830333240/
  
• Build 23212: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1743358239833934831/
  
• Build 23294: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1743358239837923725/
  
• Build 23371: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1743358239848958377/
  
• Build 23439: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1743358239852715303/
  
• Build 23520: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1780513570969462131/
  
• Build 23591: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1780513643846245732/
  
• Build 23669: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1780513643849958333/
  
• Build 23722: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1779388024828686069/
  
• Build 23811: https://steamcommunity.com/app/548430/discussions/9/1779388024832723672/
  

It’s time for another Roadmap update, as well as more detailed info on Update 21!

We’ve redesigned the Roadmap to better reflect the reality we are working in - which is that, generally, the only thing we’ve planned in detail is the next Update (in this case Update 21). To illustrate this, we decided to jumble the future updates we know we want into one big box rather than attempt to lock down specifics. The way we look at the Roadmap internally is more like a weather forecast than a solid plan - we have some inkling of what’s going to happen next, but the further ahead, the more uncertain the specifics become. We also chose to remove the “And then maybe…” box, since it muddied the discussion. Those features are in no way gone from our minds or our backlog, but they are not part of the immediate update schedule. We’ll continue to keep a watchful eye out for wants and dreams voiced in the community, of course.

Our hope for this Roadmap is two-fold: We want to provide as much insight into the foreseeable future of DRG’s development as we can, while still allowing us to be flexible and agile without breaking too many promises.

As you might be able to see, we’ve also made some changes to our priorities. Most of the recent updates have focused primarily on introducing new systems into the game - upgrades, new weapons, Assignments, etc. While these have done wonders for the game in terms of retention and the overall game loop, we want to focus a bit more on cave content going forward - that is, the things that actually go into the caves and provide the bulk of the game experience.

Adding new enemies is an example of this. But so are new mission types, new types of cave rooms and improvements to our cave generation, random mission events, boss battles, new biomes, and new weird stuff to encounter in general. Our initial hope was to work on these while we developed the essential background- and meta-systems, but as our scope and staff (up from 6 to 20!) has grown, so has our ambitions, and that means two things: We can and want to deliver better and more ambitious stuff, but those things take longer to finish and get right. An example of this is Daily Adventures - a feature we definitely want, but which has been delayed several times now, because we simply did not have the overhead to get it right. And we want to get this right because we want it to be awesome, but that also means we can’t promise precisely when it will be ready.




As of writing, the target date for Update 21 is the 6th of February. If all goes well, the Experimental Branch should go up very soon, perhaps even next week. Watch this space for further information.

Difficulty 2.0
This is the flagpole feature of Update 21 and is more or less a full rework of how we handle Difficulty in the game. Initially, this was supposed to just be a new Difficulty - Hazard 5 - but as we dug deeper, we realized we had a lot of untapped potential here that we could utilize better - as well as some critical bugs to fix! So - in short, this is basically a complete revamp of global difficulty balance, which will likely have a fairly profound impact on the game experience. To this end, we want to mobilize as many of you as we can to give us feedback. If anything sticks out to you as too hard, too easy, or just plain weird or wrong, let us know. This is just a first implementation of the system and will be continuously tweaked as we move along.

New Enemies
We’ve been hard at work at a bunch of new enemies, and the first few will go in with Update 21. The exact number depends on the final testing phases, but expect two, perhaps three new enemy types. These are all new enemies, with their own models, animations, sound, AI behavior, and gameplay impact.

More Modifications
As a follow-up to Update 19, we are working on adding Modifications (upgrades) to the rest of the gear (traversal tools, grenades, armors, pickaxes, etc). We’re aiming to pack most of these into Update 21, with the last few stragglers arriving in Update 21.5 a bit later.

Weapon Mastery
This is a new feature aimed mainly at all the completionists out there, but everyone should be able to get a tasty piece of this pie pretty easily. As you unlock Mods for a given piece of gear, your Weapon Mastery bar for that piece of gear goes up, and at certain intervals, you will be given a prize. This system is not necessarily done and may be expanded on later, but for now, it will get you your first taste of our brand new Skins system - new color schemes for your gear. The Skins system is still pretty early in development, but we have lovely plans to expand on this later.

Finally, Update 21 will also introduce some a few new pieces of headwear to unlock and a few new types of flora for the caves. There’s also a handful of sexy UI enhancements, such as an enhanced mission overview while on the Space Rig, and an all new and more intuitive Health Bar system for enemies.




On February 28th, it has been a full year since Deep Rock Galactic hit Early Access, and we have a lot to celebrate! It’s been a crazy ride, with more than half a million copies sold, and a level of reception for the game we hadn’t even dared to hope for. It’s going to be party time on the Space Rig once more, and we plan to run events in the community, provide developer streams, and do everything we can to make this an event to remember. We’ll also add some new goodies to the Supporter Upgrade, just to show how grateful we are for your continued support of the development. Current owners of the Supporter Upgrade obviously get this for free.




A bit further into the future comes the next Updates - 22 to 24 - and there’s not that much to say about them just yet. The Roadmap should give you some indication of what the planned focus for them is going to be, and we’ll have more to say on it soon.

Until then,

ROCK AND STONE
From Ghost Ship Games

Happy New Year, Miners!

We have had a blast working on Deep Rock Galactic in 2018 and we are far from done yet! Thank you all for being part of what we think is the best community in the Galaxy - You are awesome, and we hope you will continue to follow us and the game’s development in 2019.

All the best wishes,
The Ghost Ship Team




UPDATE 20.1
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The holidays have come and gone and all the seasonal stuff has been put away! We have fixed some crash bugs and you can now rebind controls to ‘P’. Otherwise, it is very much the same as update 20.

Fixed an issue where waves would continually spawn if an Egg was freed while a wave was active in Egg Hunt mission