Ghost Ship abandoned Deep Rock Galactic for this shit?!
If you’re a relatively small indie game development studio that just so happened to have struck virtual gold with your first game release garnering infamy and fame as being one of the best cooperative hoard shooters of all time?
Do you continue onwards with the development of your lightning in a bottle, pleasing the millions of players who’ve purchased your game or do you instead take your newfound fame and fortune for granted and instead attempt to transition your golden goose into some sort of universal franchise?
Ghost Ship Games, developers of Deep Rock Galactic have done fairly well in terms of customer satisfaction with frequent and substantial post launch additions to the core game, they were an oddity in the game space as they focused on the former, producing additional content (for free) to make players (myself included) happy.
But sadly Deep Rock Galactic has seemingly fallen into disarray, with its most recent “season 4” leaving much to be desired from long term dwarf enthusiasts, the content added felt lackluster and anemic.
And now there’s a perfectly good explanation as to how Ghost Ship Games dropped the ball with Deep Rock Galactic, they’ve not instead opted to go with the latter option, to milk the Deep Rock Galactic franchise, their one hit wonder for all that it’s worth.
Allow me to set the tone for you, how would you like to play a glorified expansion pack of everyone’s favorite dwarf mining hoard shooter, sold as a stand alone title?
But the good thing about this standalone DLC “game” is that it’s unique, how unique you ask? Well the class system of which DRG is notorious for has been removed entirely, weapon customization will be gone as well and there’s now a “card” slash perk system.
Ghost Ship Games already offer “Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor” an isometric top down single player rendition of the hoard shooter, developed by Funday Games and currently is in “early access“.
No gameplay footage has been shown, more rather the announcement stream did showcase concept “in-game” screenshots of what players can expect of Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core.
Which just so happens to be a 1-4 cooperative first person shooter that takes place in procedurally generated caves with destructible environments, remind you of anything?
Best of all? Not even five minutes into the reveal event and Ghost Ship Games already confirmed that Rogue Core was initially developed as a standalone expansion pack for Deep Rock Galactic, but obviously they wouldn’t be able to justify selling it full price had they done that so the decision was made to develop Rogue Core as a separate, full-fledged roguelike game.
Because the main differences between Rogue Core and traditional Deep Rock Galactic is in the name, Rogue Core. The game is a roguelike meaning that players will start each mission from the beginning with bare necessities, such as your trusty pickaxe and a mundane weapon as you work your way up through stages, earning “cards” which will more than likely earn you buffs, debuffs, new weapons making your build become stronger as you progress as in-game difficulty increases with each stage.
So essentially it’s a Risk of Rain clone.
And once again, there is NO CLASS SYSTEM. No Gunner, no Scout, no Engineer, no Driller no nothing, no diverse classes rather you’re all the fucking same starting off and it’s up to you in how you “build” your character for which specific playstyle you want as you progress through the game.
Ghost Ship mentions that they use the term “roguelite” rather than “roguelike” because Rogue Core will offer “meta gameplay with permanent progression between missions.”
So basically you’re going to earn some sort of currency as you play through the game which can be redeemed to buy permanent character buffs, nothing out of the ordinary, it’s like they think we’re retarded or something.
According to Ghost Ship Games’ current plan, Rogue Core is not anticipated to enter early access until November 2024 at the earliest, but never mind that, the development of this roguelike spinoff is obviously bound to hinder the continued support of Deep Rock Galactic which has already begun to see a decline in reception and player count following a lackluster “season 4”.
Season 5 is now touted as being a “prelude” to the release of Rogue Core and won’t make its way to Deep Rock Galactic until at least June 2024 easily making it the longest overall gap between seasonal content as Season 4 started in July of this year whereas traditional gaps between seasons is six months, the wait until season 5 will be just short of double that.
As with most games that offer seasonal content, Deep Rock Galactic sees a boost in players when a new season is unleashed, with daily player counts jumping from ~17,000 on average to around 30,000 daily players upon the release of Season 4 however as time went on more and more players have abandoned the game following a fairly lackluster seasonal package as the game once again hovers below 20,000 daily players and it wont be for another nine long months until the next seasonal content drop.
All the while Warhammer 40K: Darktide has seemingly surged in popularity with its most recent update, essentially filling a void that’s bound to not be filled in Deep Rock Galactic for the foreseeable future, though surging from 4,000 daily players to over 30,000 over the past week but who really knows how much longer it’ll maintain this surge in trend.
What we do know is that Deep Rock Galactic is losing its continued priority support, Season 5 is going to be a tie in addition for Rogue Core with Season 6 being entirely up in the air regarding the success of Deep Rock’s roguelike stablemate.
Deep Rock Galactic isn’t just dying, it’s being murdered by its own developers due to Ghost Ship’s asinine corporate greed.
