Dwarven co-op caper Deep Rock Galactic has spent years raising the stakes. Where its offworld mining concern once dealt merely with steep drops and irate bugs, it’s since had to face down the robotic army of a rival mineral corp and an omnicidal alien plague. If the subsequent question is "It used to be about the rocks, y'know?" then DRG’s imminent Season 5 update, Drilling Deeper, is the answer.
]]>We learned a bit about Deep Rock Galactic's upcoming Season 5 update a few weeks ago, and now we know a bit more thanks to a Ghost Ship dev stream. Not only has it gifted us details on the new mission type and the new season event, it's also given us an idea of when we might see Season 6 emerge. I suppose you could liken the stream to a bushy Dwarven beard, from which the devs pluck out announcements like it's show and tell. And the show and tell is set in a dingy mine. And there are multiple pints involved.
]]>Deep Rock Galactic's Season 5 update - which launches in June 2024 - will allow you to reactivate and replay old seasons of Ghost Ship's celebrated dwarven asteroid mining sim. Here's how that works, direct from the bellowing bearded faces of the developers themselves. By which I mean, a new Steam blog. I'm not sure it's possible to get a good dwarven bellow going when you're talking about cosmetic unlock progression, but by all means reorganise this article into some kind of drinking song. Keep it clean, though - there may be elves reading.
]]>Co-op dwarf FPS game Deep Rock Galactic dropped a teaser of what's arriving with Season 5, which is to say, a fair amount of things that'll go well with a pickaxe and a pint of beer. The new season will be a prelude to roguelite spin-off Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, it'll have a new mission type, enemies, new overclocks, and the devs are looking into letting players activate past seasons.
]]>Ore-poaching co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic was updated today, primarily to address a series of longstanding technical issues but also to encourage you to get sozzled and turn into a filing cabinet. The patch adds a new Hidden Dwarf Double IPA bevvy to the space rig hub's bar, and duly necking it will initiate a prop hunt minigame among your squad of dwarven miners.
]]>Surprise, miners. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, the Vampire Survivors-like spinoff that puts a bullet heaven twist on one of the PC's best co-op games, is launching into early access just a couple of weeks from now. It’ll be out on Steam from February 14th, incidentially gifting the possibility for all kinds of cheap Valentine’s Day slogan gags. You are my Rock and Stone? My Ommoran Heartstone belongs to you? Drill you be Mine? Hilarious. Also, there’s a trailer.
]]>Having hollowed out the Asteroid of Co-Op (Resource) Extraction FPS, Ghost Ship are sinking their drills into the Planet of Roguelite. The just-announced Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core is a crafty feat of genre-splicing in which one to four dwarven miners investigate an alien world whose "core has gone rogue". As in the original Deep Rock Galactic, which we loved, you'll be tunnelling down and fighting critters (exact species TBA) while harvesting precious ores. But this time, there's no returning to the ship once you've loaded up enough. The only way out is down.
]]>Ahead of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Ghost Ship Games continue to update the original co-op, space dwarf FPS game. Deep Rock Galactic went live with its season 4 content yesterday. Titled Critical Corruption, the update has added a new event with plenty of new enemies, and fulfilled some community requests.
]]>To celebrate Deep Rock Galactic’s fifth anniversary, developer Ghost Ship took us back in time to the mystical land of 2018 and let us play Deep Rock Galactic Legacy, a version of the co-op shooter as it was back in 2018, before all of the updates. It was a fun, nostalgic way to let fans reminisce on the game’s infantile days. Ghost Ship had planned to remove Legacy today - March 23rd - but after fan feedback, they’ve decided to keep Legacy edition around indefinitely.
]]>Earlier this month, the studio behind Deep Rock Galactic announced that they were branching out (or digging in) to publishing with their new initiative Ghost Ship Publishing. Today, the team held a fifth-anniversary livestream for their hit co-op shooter, and they also announced the first three games they’ll be releasing as a publisher, including a Deep Rock Galactic spin-off, a top-down shooter, and a spell-slinging roguelike - all coming from indie teams based in Denmark.
]]>Ghost Ship Games have found major success with their co-op space-mining sim Deep Rock Galactic, and now they’re expanding into indie games publishing with Ghost Ship Publishing. The team have described the initiative as a launchpad for indies in the “rapidly growing Danish games industry and beyond.” Ghost Ship Publishing haven’t announced any games yet, but we’ll get to see their upcoming projects on March 2nd as part of Deep Rock Galactic’s fifth-anniversary livestream.
]]>It's great that games are now regularly updated post-release, but it's also common for me to long for those halcyon days when I first fell in love with a game. It's good news then that Deep Rock Galactic is celebrating its fifth anniversary by making it possible to play it exactly as it was at release in early 2018.
Of course, that's just one way they're celebrating the milestone, alongside an anniversary event and new DLC.
]]>Don't you just love Christmas? The music, the food, the laughter, the screams of elves getting shoved into boxes in a cold dark space mine. It's the most magical time of the year, especially now that charming co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic has launched its annual Yuletide Elf Hunt. It's time to dress up your dwarves, grab your pickaxes, and get back to hauling rocks for an oppressive corporation. There's double XP in it for you.
]]>After the past three years, I’d have happily never heard the word "plague" again, let alone in the context of one of my favourite co-op games. Yet after an early play around with Deep Rock Galactic Season 3, I’m already sold that this update – which centers around a corrupting, planet-wide infection – could be its best one yet.
After repelling a robot-spamming rival corp across Seasons 1 and 2, your reward in Season 3 – which launches on November 3rd – is to find your mining operating pelted by a meteorite storm. And they’re carrying a nasty payload: Rockpox, a contagion that quickly infects both the caves of Hoxxes IV and the many, many giant bugs living within them. These sickly Glyphids and contaminated caverns will present you and your fellow space dwarves with some new perils, but also new opportunities to turn a management-pleasing profit. And isn’t providing value to shareholders why we’re all here to begin with?
]]>Deep Rock Galactic is a game about going to work, assuming your job is to extract space minerals from a shattered planet occupied by trillions of giant, murderous bugs. If it isn’t, it’s not too hard to pretend, and DRG’s another-day-at-the-office wit lends it a likeable levity that’s partly why I’ve played it almost every week for a year and a half.
]]>Nvidia DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing) is more of a niche prospect than its upscaler cousin DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), though it shares the same ultimate goal of making your PC games look sharper. Like DLSS, DLAA uses a dash of AI brainpower to stitch together frames with more detail than conventional anti-aliasing techniques like TAA and MSAA – only with DLAA, there’s no upscaling involved. That means no performance gains, but for those with sufficiently powerful Nvidia RTX GPUs, potentially superior image quality at all resolutions. Even better than DLSS, mayhaps.
]]>Miners, how are we? Good, I hope. Soon you'll be even better, as Deep Rock Galactic Season 2 is set to line the caverns with new materials. And robots! Killer robots that resemble glowing chunks of Toblerone. That's the less good part. Still, survive the mechanical menace and you'll earn plenty of new goodies for your dwarven bod. Trust me, I've checked it out ahead of time and have come back pleased, and scratched... and burned.
]]>If you're looking for a spot of jolly cooperation this weekend, other than Elden Ring, round up the crew and get rowdy in Deep Rock Galactic. The excellent cooperative FPS, where we play as spaceDwarves gathering spacegems and battling spacebugs in destructible spacemines, is holding a free trial weekend on Steam to celebrate its fourth birthday. It is a (rock) cracking game.
]]>Updated over a long enough timeline, all games seemingly become the same - at least structurally. Deep Rock Galactic got its biggest ever update last week, for example, which adds a battle pass with 100 levels to advance through and new items and cosmetics to unlock.
There is a twist, at least: the battle pass is 100% free, and there's a new robot-battling mode included in the update, too.
]]>Mods are amazing and can never get enough love, so I'm glad to see that co-operative cave-diving FPS Deep Rock Galactic now has official mod support. It includes mod.io integration for browsing and installing mods, an in-game mod manager, and clearer communication for players joining modded servers, among a lot of other changes.
]]>Embracer Group, named for the wonderful hugs they give, have announced the acquisition of several development studios under their various subsidiaries. They now own 3D Realms, who, despite operating largely as a publisher nowadays, will forever be linked to Duke Nukem. This means that Embracer now owns both 3D Realms and Duke Nukem’s owners, Gearbox, who they acquired earlier this year. Can you see where this is heading?
]]>Like the moons and worlds you have to drill down into to get to Deep Rock Galactic’s alien goodies, its modding system will have multiple levels. Developers Ghost Ship Games have spent a while pondering how to best create a modding setup that won’t mess up progression for players joining hosted games, and have come up with a tiered system of mods that’ll let players know what they’re getting into.
]]>Futuristic dwarven mining simulator Deep Rock Galactic has tons of new stuff arriving this year. Developers Ghost Ship Games revealed a 2021 roadmap over the weekend, detailing some of things to look forward to in the game's next couple of updates. In April they'll be addings things like modding support, then later in the year Deep Rock will get new weapons, a new mission type, and more.
]]>If you're one of those people who enjoys playing games with other people well, I've got some news for you about people you can play games with. Community members over on the RPS Discord server pick a game each month to play together. They've chosen co-op dwarf FPS Deep Rock Galactic this month and have managed to rope in a member of Ghost Ship Games to play along too. You can check in on the server this month to join them for cooperative shooty mining combat.
]]>Oh dear, is it that time already? Yes indeed, the Steam Autumn Sale has arrived, bringing the seasonal discounts on thousands of games. Awards season is upon as as well, so they've opened up nominations for the yearly Steam Awards. You can vote and reap the discounts from now until December 1st at 10am PST / 6pm GMT.
]]>Down it, down it, dowwwn it, yeeaahhh! Nice one, you skulled that pint of fizzy water and lemon like an absolute legend, mate, well done. I always knew you were a top enjoyer of a wild night on the tiles, on the rip, on the slosh, on the tear, on the floor, on the bathroom floor, no listen you’re on the bathroom floor mate, for real, get up. I think that San Pelegrino went straight to your head. Maybe just go home, lie down, and play some RPGs. You can always simulate the reckless abandon of a big night in one of these, the 9 best nights out in PC games.
]]>As is Dwarven tradition, the intersteller halflings at Deep Rock Galactic just won't stop digging. Alien bugs or no, there's gold down there - so grab a shovel and get in the hole. This week, developers Ghost Ship Games revealed their plans for the next few months of mining n' shooting, bringing new biomes, classes, jobs and objectives to the beardiest blokes in deep space.
]]>I have seven seconds to bypass twenty feet of sheer rock face to reach a subterranean escape pod before it propels itself back up through the planet’s surface, leaving my dwarven engineer trapped in a network of dark tunnels teeming with screeching alien insects. After a seeming eternity of desperate scrambling, I’ve made it to the cavern containing the escape pod, my heart sinking as I see how high up it is. My platform-creating gun has a single shot left, and I’ve nowhere near enough time to dig my way up. It’s then I spot it: A geyser venting trails of steam that can propel my dwarf into the air. I take the punt. It lifts me halfway up. My final, desperate platform shot does the rest. I leave with a shiny haul of gems, and roughly two seconds to spare.
The high level concept for this game is Left 4 Dead meets Minecraft, both undeniably influential games that, personally, I don’t have much enthusiasm for. Let me tell you why Deep Rock Galactic - a game that the phrase ‘more than the sum of its parts’ could have been invented for - is an absolute gem.
]]>After quite a good run in Early Access, Deep Rock Galactic is emerging from the depths in just a couple weeks. The co-op dwarf FPS will move to version 1.0 on May 13th with new tunes, ranks, and quality of life improvements. If you've already been playing in Early Access, you can try out the release candidate by opting in to the experimental branch through Steam.
]]>That squeaking noise is 2019 slowly deflating in the corner. You’re done now, noble year. Thanks for trying. Uh-oh, I’m getting introspective and thinky. I’d better distract myself. With the holidays all but over, how did you manage to survive them? Tell me what you played and what sort of fun you had. I'll go first! I survived with Portal 2.
]]>Those dang Dwarves, they've only gone and dug too deep again. Ghost Ship Games' intergalactic halflings have been steadily mining out treasure and blasting aliens for a solid year and a half now, but it looks like the endgame is upon them. Deep Rock Galactic has expanded once again, bringing new kit, new combs, and a tough new game mode for hardened miners. What do you do when you've hollowed out all there is to dig? Well, I suppose you can always make a Deep Dive into parts unknown.
]]>Co-op space dwarf sim shooter Deep Rock Galactic is free to try out for the weekend, celebrating an eventful full year in early access. Ghost Ship Games have poured a lot of love and effort into this odd blend of Minecraft and Left 4 Dead, adding a new introductory campaign, improving single-player and adding scads of new caverns, monsters and guns since its debut. It's come along so well that they reckon they'll be increasing the price near the end of the month, but players can still get in cheap if they like what they play free now. I recommend giving it a try, even if you play solo.
]]>It's been a while since I've taken a peek at Deep Rock Galactic, a compelling blend of Minecraft and Left 4 Dead starring a gang of surly space-dwarves. I was starting to worry that like so many early access multiplayer games, it had fizzled out - I'm happy Ghost Ship Games have proven me wrong. Today's update brings a new top-tier difficulty setting and some new beasties to battle underground, including grenade-spraying robots. I'm also happy to report that there's plenty of players around; the past few updates have done the game good. Check out the patch video below.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>Despite only debuting a few months ago, it feels like forever since I've played any of Ghost Ship Games' co-op space-dwarf mine n' shooter Deep Rock Galactic. While I've been absent, the developers certainly haven't, as its 14th major update just rolled out. Jokingly named Feature Creep, this new version adds new environment variety, enemy types, gameplay features and - most importantly - accurately modelled beard physics for your dwarven mining crew. The developers also reckon this is a great point for new players to start out.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Deep Rock Galactic [official site].
The moment Deep Rock Galactic took my imagination was when I saw its dwarf miners throwing flares into the inky blackness of a cave in its E3 trailer. Few games do darkness, and here was a game trading in it. As the flares fell they lit up the faceted low-poly walls of the cavern, revealing what lay ahead: ore to mine, pitfalls to fall into, twisting passageways to get lost in, and swarms of alien enemies. It got right to the core of exploration, capturing the mystery and adventure of blundering into spaces where no one has been before. In short, darkness leans right into everyone’s favourite fantasy of being a dwarven miner in space.
]]>Some Monday mornings, as I plonk myself down at my desk at 6.50am and load the RSS feed for the Steam Charts, I think to myself: you know what? There are so many other things I'd like to write about today. Anyway, here are the top ten games on Steam from the last week.
]]>Someone brought up an interesting point in the comments the last time we posted about Deep Rock Galactic: given the lack of any reference points, how do we know these space dwarves are actually dwarves? They could be towering monstrosities that make us humans look like dormice. But then, what does it actually mean to be a dwarf? Rather than being a matter of size, could it be about achieving a certain state of mind? An outlook? A philosophy?
You could spend this evening pondering those important questions, but if you really want you could play the game instead: Deep Rock Galactic's blend of co-op mining and bug blasting is now available to everyone willing to brave the early access rock face. I had a quick go with it a couple of weeks ago, which means I can now bestow the game with a tentative thumbs up.
]]>Whether deep under-mountain or out in the void of space, Dwarves are one of the most stable of fantasy archetypes. They love their drink, they love their gems, and when given the chance they'll always dig too greedily and too deep. You'll get to do all of this in upcoming co-op shooter/mining expedition Deep Rock Galactic, which looks to blend Minecraft-ish spelunking with Left 4 Dead style procedural combat encounters, all wrapped up in a neat semi-low-fi art style.
While the final release of the game is still some ways off, developers Ghost Ship Games will be opening throwing open its doors to brave bearded pioneers later this month, with the first public build available via Steam Early Access on February 28th.
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