Deep Rock Galactic News

[h2]Hello, Miners![/h2]
We are nearing the end of the hotfix phase for Update 34. We still have some minor issues that didn’t make it for this hotfix and as always a hotfix comes with the risk of needing a hotfix! Anyways, we got a bunch of stuff to talk about!

NEW WEAPON TEASING
With the Hotfix phase for Update 34 drawing to an end, it’s time to look towards Update 35. We are already moving full speed ahead on the new mission type, the new weapons and a lot of other stuff. And speaking of the new weapons - On our thursday stream we will show you a small teaser of one of the new weapons and which dwarf will get it, so stay tuned!

UPDATE 34 ON XBOX
We are also hard at work on bringing Update 34 to Xbox and expect it to go live on Xbox on this friday - May 7th.

MODDING SUPPORT
Work on making a solid solution for supporting mods in the game is also moving ahead, but we have no release date yet.

THE ELITES
We’ve reached a tough decision regarding the new Elite enemies:

Elites will no longer spawn during ordinary missions, and will only be encountered during missions with the Elite Threat Warning.

This actually goes right back to our initial design for the damn critters - they were originally designed just for the new Elite Threat Warning. However, on testing, we liked fighting them and we felt they made combat more interesting, so we figured we’d make them part of the main game.

We have now chosen to pivot on that. We’ve decided that they’re not up to snuff in regards to the content we usually produce, and therefore feel a bit out of place. Without anything tying the Elites to the meta, such as story and a natural presence, we feel that they are not suited for the main game in their current state.

Therefore: No more spawning of random Elites during the main game, and only during Elite Threat Warnings, as originally planned.

However, to that effect, we’ve been hard at work on improving and balancing the Elites - this should make them a more enjoyable experience across different skill levels, hazards, builds and classes. You can try all these changes out for yourself with this new Hotfix.

So will random spawning of Elites in all missions ever be a thing? Well maybe, maybe not! However, we will make more enemies and more variations to the existing enemies like we have done when we introduced the Glyphid Guard and the Glyhid Slasher as a variation to spice up the waves of Grunts. And the really good thing that has come out of us playing around with the Elites is that we have gotten a lot of new ideas for new enemies. So don’t start feeling too safe in the mines - more horrors will come your way in the future!

As always: All the feedback we get from you guys is super appreciated, and we cannot overstate our pride in having fans this dedicated.

Rock and Stone, Miners!

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew


[h2]--- PATCH NOTES ---[/h2]

- Fixed a bug that caused the music to be extremely loud on the endscreen
- Fixed a bug that caused the grabber to go into the wrong state when a dwarf was freed from its grab by another dwarf (DRG-3290)
- Optimized handling of physics objects like flares, to no longer mess with prioritization and relevance and take up too much network traffic.

- ELITE CHANGES -

- Changed temperature values of elites.
- Reduced elemental resistance buffs.
- Made Elite Praetorian turn rate faster, made armor more durable and gave attacks impact force.
- Made Elite Grunt Guard armor more durable and added impulse to its attacks.
- Made Elite Mactera Spawn move more evasively and increased fire range and rate and added an additional projectile, increased damage and speed of projectiles.
- Made Elite Mactera Brundle move closer to players and made its armor more durable.
- Gave Elite Mactera Tri Jaw increased fire range and rate.
- Increased spawn rate for Elite Guard, Elite Slasher and Mactera Spawn by 50%.
- Decreased Elite spawn cooldown.
- Changed stun values of elites.
- Made Elites exclusive to missions with Elite Threat Warning.
- Made Elites less likely to fear.

[h3]Hello Miners!
[/h3]
We hope that you have had a chance to play the last hotfix (Hotfix 3) that included the first changes we did to the elite enemies. For that hotfix we focused on tweaking the health of the elites. We also let you know that we are not done balancing and tweaking the elites, and that is what we have been hard at work with since the launch of Update 34.

The next hotfix, planned for Wednesday May 5th this week, is going to include the next round of tweaks to the elite, this time for the elemental and temperature resistance of these deadly bugs. The goal for the elite enemies is still for them to run with the pack while presenting an immediate and un-ignorable threat. And these changes should bring them closer to this goal.

We appreciate all the feedback that has been provided by you, the community. It really helps us gauge if the new features we have made take the game in the direction we want. And it helps us rapidly iterate. We are very focused on elite enemies right now and testing them a lot ourselves. So expect more changes to come.

Thanks again to everyone for providing feedback. Keep it coming


With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

[h3]Hello Miners![/h3]

With Update 34 we introduced a new enemy modification system that allows us to change some of the base properties of an enemy such as movement speed, health and damage resistances. With this we created the Elite variants of many of the foes you can encounter in the caves of Hoxxes. These Elite enemies are mainly encountered when playing missions with the Elite Threat warning but can also occasionally appear in the base game as well.

Since their introduction we have received a lot of feedback from you and we are continuously working on the system and tweaking the Elite enemies based on your feedback and our own playtests. As always, this is an ongoing and iterative process and we will continue working on this until it feels good. Your constructive feedback is an integral part of this process so thanks, and keep it up!

One of the things we have realised is that we need to more clearly communicate what we are trying to achieve with the Elite Enemies. The intention is not to create new enemy variants such as the Oppressor or the Glyphid Slasher and Guard but to instead modify the existing enemies in a way that can occasionally disrupt the flow of combat. Rest assured that we will continue to make new enemy types and variants, the elites are not intended to replace that.

Elites are designed to run with the pack and push through the players defence, or present an immediate and un-ignorable threat, or to displace the players forcing a momentary change in position and tactics. This is not possible without making them harder to kill. We want them to be the last ones standing, the bug heroes going toe to toe with the dwarves (if only for a little while). To do this they need time in which to make their presence felt.

ELITE CHANGES WITH HOTFIX 3
That said we were scaling Elite health a bit too aggressively and we have with hotfix 3 reduced the health scaling with a factor 0.2 for Hazard 4 and 5. Furthermore we have removed the Oppressor as an Elite, since we felt it didn’t really work.

ELITE CHANGES IN UPCOMING HOTFIXES
We are right now developing more ways in which we can improve Elite survivability besides just increasing health. We are looking into enhancing the strength of each Elite enemy such as unbreakable armor for Grunt Guards and Praetorians, and giving Mactera Spawn more evasiveness. Likewise we are expanding the ways in which we can modify their behaviour and attacks so that they bring a bit more to the fight while still being the same enemy at the core, and balancing the elemental resistances and temperature scaling to not break builds focused on elemental weapons and damage.

We’ll have more tweaks and changes in the upcoming hotfixes and look forward to hearing what you think. Together we forge tomorrow. Rock and Stone!

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

[h3]--- PATCH NOTES ---[/h3]

- Fixed a bug that made Platform Gun Platforms carve into terrain, ejecting minerals. (So changed it back to the way it was in U33)
- Fixed a bug that caused Ice Platform Plants in Glacial Strata to carve into terrain.
- Fixed ebonuts being in wrong state if joining a mission after some of them have been collected
- Fixed a bug that caused the impact sound from the Drillers axe to multiply for Clients
- Fixed issue with wave music sometimes not stopping correctly.
- Fixed enemy waves able to trigger while fighting dreadnought in deep dives.
- Reduced Elite Enemies health scaling on Hazard 4 and Hazard 5
- Removed Elite Oppressor.


[WEAPON TWEAKS]
- Moved the Projectile Velocity Transfer mechanic from the base weapon to optional upgrades (Disabled Inertia Inhibitor) on both the PGL and Platform Gun

Hello Miners!
We have been hard at work finding out what direction up, down, left and right is for projectiles, and we have at least figured it out 64%! More to come... Also included are a bunch of misc fixes to everything from enemies to the way minerals are calculated.

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

--- PATCH NOTES ---
- Fixing a bug that caused you to not be able to join the game of someone who has just changed their savegame.
- Fixed Reconnecting in Deep dives revives a downed player
- Changed "X out of X savelots left" to "X out of X saveslots used"
- Increased font size of bar menu prices
- The message saying Crates and lost packs are empty, will now specify which type of items there are no more of.
- Fixed "Hyper Propellant" PGL overclock no longer displays unique particle effects after Update 34.
- Refactoring to the joining, as to fix DRG-1650, where it joins, even though you cancelled joining.
- Fixed UI text strings not marked translatable
- Fix golden loot bug particles and light would turn off after death.
- Attempted to fix a bug related to Loadouts for pickaxes, where the chosen loadout would not be shown in spacerig or mission. (Note: There’s still a bug that causes pickaxe parts not to update in the spacerig after changing loadout (we’re working on it!) - it will show correctly once you are in mission )
- Fix BRT pistol tracers starting too far back.
- Fixed Bulldogs default weak point damage not showing in stats
- Fixed Minehead landingzone using old model
- Fixed Minehead carving area on landing being slightly too small
- Rework Ebonut networking logic to hopefully fix issues for clients.
- Glyphid slasher missing voice line fix
- Tweak Autocannon Impact Explosion sound
- Projectile fix for projectiles fired by server but owned by client.
- Fixed Bosco not being able to mine escort laser crystals
- Fix beer effects lasting forever after swapping character in terminal
- Fixed Spinning Death Particles seem to hang around in wrong spot
- Fixed running text marking active mutator in miners manual, not working in caves (solo only)
- Fixed Goo bomber's goo doesn't fall to the ground
- Fixed endless-audio bug in Deep Dive terminal
- Changed the Hero Enemies milestone text in the terminal to elite threat.
- Hiveguard vulnerable state rock attack replication fix
- Improved Droppod collider
- Resource counters in the space rig menu topbar now round values down rather than up, to avoid confusion when buying items and the resource bar says the player owns 30 Umanite when he/she actually owns 29.3 for example.
- Fixed Spitballer not being able to shoot after being frozen.
- Fixed Spitballer weak points not showing frozen material

[h3]Hello Miners![/h3]

We have fixed some crashes related to joining games, as well as some other nice fixes before the weekend.

Note: Some people are crashing when opening the game, if you are experiencing this, try to run the game with Dx11 instead of Dx12 (which is now default)

Add "-dx11" to the launch options by right-clicking the game in your Steam Library > Properties > Set Launch Options

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

[h3]--- PATCH NOTES ---[/h3]

• Fixed a Bosco related crash.
  
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Magma Core Earthquakes to make spikes not holes.
  
  
• Fixed a bug that caused music to play after it was supposed to stop.
  
  
• Fixed a bug that made music play double in the Mission End Screen.
  
  
• Fixed a bug that made projectiles’ position look wrong for clients.
  
  
• Double Warnings should no longer be part of assignment missions.
  
  
• Enabled Save Slot function under the save menu.
  
  
• Rearranged Yes/Cancel buttons in The Shop buy prompt back to the order it was before the update
  

Edit: Fixed another bug that mad projectiles’ position look wrong for clients.