Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core

This is just not it. Really, what I'm seeing in this title is a disconnect between the development team's vision, and what the actual audience wants. And I'm not going to lie, I saw it coming, and still bought in under the hope a few updates would make it better, and with 1.1 things did get a bit better, if not to the point of being almost enjoyable, and now with 1.2, it's another fumble. Let me explain this a little. Let's take the whole, possibly overdone subject of "timing". This was probably one of the most universally hated aspects of the game. It made the design philosophy this disoriented mess, and further deviated from what the consumer audience of the first game expected. Deep Rock is about exploring caves. How about punishing the player for that? See a ledge slightly too high? Nah, the event isn't worth it. Run by, ignore the in-game mechanics, repeat. Are we designed around rewarding or punishing speedplay? And the solution: allow players to choose slow, normal, or fast pacing. This was... acceptable, by its lonesome. But with everything else, it shows a certain stubbornness I've seen since Deep Rock's later seasons. Pacing was absolutely despised for the aforementioned reasons and more. So they just allow you to tweak it, to the point where "slow" basically removes it from relevancy, and there's no real time crunch. Yet it still exists. The bad thing is still there, normal mode is just the same thing, and fast is worse (perhaps just for the challenge it could be fun). What did they do with the Stingtail? They released a horribly unfun, buggy as utter hell, stat-bloated abomination. Do we remove it? Rework it? No, we tune the numbers down until it's essentially a non-factor. My brain processes this like having a sick engine that overheats in an automobile, and the mechanic just caps the engine at twenty miles an hour and calls it good. At this point, Ghost Ship just says that this is the car they want, it will have jank and broken parts, and if they run at 15% and you can tolerate it, then it's acceptable. And that seems to be their design philosophy now. It's why Deep Rock has felt like, despite each season being smaller, the actual content and quality is just worse. It is. This is an unsustainable methodology. And now with 1.2 we see this "players are more powerful! But we want bosses to not die so fast! Bosses are supposed to be walking/flying slabs of meat with six digit health!" And then my friends with this game say it's not a good change, I go in, and yeah. Your boss fights aren't good enough to warrant ten minutes. It's a slog, and feels completely disconnected from the fact that everything else melts and blows up. People didn't seem to want this, but the devs did, and their solution is once more to crank numbers. Look, I'm not taking the position that you can never tweak something. But if it's your response to every problem to either crank the dial or make a new dial to crank, and you do little else about the problem, you're not going to solve the problem. And new guns, unrelated biome work, all of that- it doesn't solve it, either. I don't need to rehash what everyone else has said. I'm just deciding where I stand on this, finally. I don't like this game, my friends that got it don't like it, and that's counting the one who wouldn't shut up about this game's release since it got announced. It's missing what made the OG Deep Rock good, doesn't improve much of anything, makes everything from movement to gunplay just worse, and the devs have a vision and will stubbornly stick to it, it seems. If your studio's first game was lightning in a bottle, consider this one a fart in a jar.

Should've just been a new season

I Played Deep Rock Galactic for over 700h and i still love it. This game is Annoying after 5h. Would not Recomend.

If DRG OG was a 5/5, which by all my standards it was. This is at best a 3/5. I get the idea they were going for, the growing popular ‘rogue lite’ and ‘hardcore’. But unfortunately, it just doesn’t translate as well. The things that make this title unique, are also the things that may it annoying and frustrating (Monsters, Map Design, Match Length). This feels like it should have been a "Mode" add on for the original, like Deep Dives, instead of a standalone title. The monsters are more annoying than unique. The characters seem to be lopsided in terms of effectiveness, and everyone tends to blur as the match progresses due to random perks etc. The "Omega" is a lifeless robot leader with no humor or soul. It just feels flat, and replay ability in a title like this should be the main selling point but I find myself bored already, rise and repeat cycle just doesn’t have the same comradery as the prior version. Player base is pretty low as well, maybe 4-5 servers running "D4" whenever I look. I cant image future releases or content will fix the fundamental flaws. It doesn’t take but ~20 hours or so to max out skill tree’s and unlock what’s available (Skins in this one are a joke). Maybe another 10-15 to experiment with the different characters more but the stuff in the ship/lobby are lame, beers don’t provide perks. Done with this one, and hopefully for DRG #2 they expand the universe and mesh these titles.

They've made changes since launch to alleviate the issues with the draft/negotiations system & lack of instancing, but after playing both in public matches and over comms, [b]it just simply is a dealbreaker[/b] - it needs to go now. It is fundamentally & objectively bad, sucking fun out of the game and fostering conflict between players instead of encouraging social interactions. Multiplayer rogue-lites have had this figured out for almost a decade now, instancing is [b]not[/b] optional and the choice to abstain from it is a major pain point that will never not drag this game down so long as it is present. There are also major issues with pacing & navigability. Between the mission timer, the amount of objectives in missions, the length, layouts, & mission complexity, it's all too easy to get lost and lose track of space, time, and where your squad is. It is significantly less linear compared to even the more open missions in DRG and includes lots of backtracking that makes things very confusing. It is extremely difficult to tell where you are since the terrain generation has a strong lack of landmarks compared to DRG. The pacing issues are made even worse by the constant stop & start nature of the upgrade system. It just simply [u]is not[/u] fun to be constantly stopped in the middle of the action to decide on which upgrade to pick. This wouldn't be a huge issue if it did not take long but it is egregious how long it takes for everyone to pick something one at a time. I understand the purpose of the timer is to encourage players to continue moving, and is in fact, actually there to improve upon the issue that DRG had with missions dragging out & taking too long, but this does not actually work when the amount of things to mine, objectives to complete, & enemies to fight does not change between assault paces. If you leave no stone unturned, every mission regardless of circumstance will always take just as long, the only thing the timer actually does is just allow you to choose if you'd want the worms to show up in the middle of the mission to be annoying and ruin your fun, or if you'd rather they show up too late to make a meaningful difference. In other words, the timer doesn't really make things quicker when you still have the same amount of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to deal with. The upgrades suck. They all just suck. This is such a common phenomenon in rogue lites that friends of mine have christened this illness as [i]"+5 percent Schmingus"[/i] in reference to upgrades that are all unexplained, negligible in amount, and completely & utterly unhelpful in effect. This game has a terminal case of +5 Percent Schmingus. Ammo & health economy are both as frustrating as ever. I don't feel the need to comment on it too much because I am often reminded when playing this game [i]"Yep, this sure Deep Rock."[/i] Hope you enjoy constantly being out of health & ammo, completely helpless constantly all of the time. I must admit that there are a few things that this game does do better than DRG, which are enemy variety and performance. The Corespawn are not only a more interesting antagonist compared to the Glyphids from a thematic & aesthetic standpoint, I also just find them more fun to fight than the bugs, damage sponge-ey-ness aside. The game also runs very smoothly and at a high framerate compared to DRG, has a stronger art direction and just generally looks very pretty. Bring back the grappling hook.

"Whenever an electrocuted enemy within 15m dies, you trigger an explosion of +30 electrocution damage in a 7m radius around you" "Melee hits deal an extra 0.5% damage as electrocution while Suit power charge is below 100%" Pick one, you have 0 seconds to decide. Someone at GSG really likes these nerdy conditional stat buffs, but if you've played DRG:Survivor with its quirky "BLT Sandwich" upgrades, those in DRG:RC come across as spectacularly unfun. I do get there's a demographic that enjoys it. All power to you. However, I'm very afraid this level of die-hard nerdiness, in a multiplayer game, with what may easily be one of the highest production values in the history of roguelikes, won't be a successful combination for the studio. The overall hostile atmosphere of the game, from the bar to Omega, is the cherry on top of it all. I haven't uninstalled yet because I'm hoping for eventual improvements to the atmosphere and a more forgiving gameplay loop. If all else fails, my hope is that RC lays the foundation for an actual successor to OG DRG.

The game is a dissapointment to me, the performance is bad the game itself is ok i like the Roguelite stuff but overall i say the game is an overprice copy of Deep Rock with a sprinkle of new weapons characters and abilities its not what i expected for sure for now refunding. You did not brew well Ghost ship.