Dwarven co-op caper Deep Rock Galactic has spent years raising the stakes. Where his alien mining concern once dealt only with steep falls and angry bugs, he now has to face a robot army of a rival mineral corps and a murderous alien plague. If the follow-up question is “It used to be about rocksdo you know?” then the answer is the upcoming DRG Series 5 update, Drilling Deeper.
While matching previous seasons in scope and even serving as a tie-in to the upcoming roguelike spinoff Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, Season 5 is also a refocus of sorts. These newer threats are put on hold in favor of a renewed emphasis on the deadly caving and freeform digging that previously established DRG as one of the world’s most unique shooters. That’s why the new mission type, Deep Scan, is all about venturing further into Hoxxes IV’s crusty crust than ever before – even if it means riding down a wildly dangerous ‘drilllevator’ to get there.
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Season 5 will also bring the usual side gubbins, including a free battle pass, cosmetics to fill it, and some new weapon overclocks, but after playing a round of Deep Scan, I can say that the biggest bump from Drilling Deeper is also the pickiest. . Accompanied into the darkness by Ghost Ship Games Lead Game Designer Mike Akopyan and Marketing Manager Aaron Hathaway, our task was to collect Morkite Seeds from a geode hidden deep underground. So deep, in fact, that in order to pinpoint it, we’d first have to find and scan a trio of buried crystals before dragging our tiny asses down into the triangulated geode.
Part of it was classic Deep Rock: slide through a cave to an objective, put some cartoony oversized mech on it, and wait for the bar to fill up while the space bugs tried to nibble on our beards. Still, there were a lot of new cogs in the machine, including the cave itself, the result of a new proc-gen design that turned the usually spacious sandy biome into a rambunctious anthill of winding tunnels. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve gotten lost plenty of times, although five seasons in, an injection of a little navigational uncertainty isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Since Hoxxes IV is an ugly planet – a planet of bugs – the local fauna also evolves. Vartok Scalebramble proved short on extermination thrills, mostly just sitting on cave ceilings waiting for us to blast his weak points, but Glyphid Stalker became a much more formidable opponent. It’s a camouflaged ambush predator, like the Stalkers from Helldivers 2, except it’s much better camouflaged and gives off just the tiniest bit of shimmer that’s easy to miss in the hectic DRG fights. As such, they repeatedly nailed me and dished out additional punishment in the form of a shield-busting EMP effect that opened me up for their weaker brethren to feast on.
They’re sneaky little bastards, although Stalkers aren’t the roughest enemies in Season 5. That would be the Core Spawn Crawlers, an uncomfortably humanoid mixture of human, bug and mineral that swarmed us during the attempted new Core Stone event. Like Korlok Tyrant-Weeds, Core Stones are random, optional side objectives that provide valuable resources at the cost of starting a battle with a potentially draining charge; in this case against a bunch of slinking rock people rather than a sentient plant. They’re fast and tough, and while they ultimately failed to stop us from breaking open the Core Stone monolith to grab the goodies inside, the fact that they barely resembled any other creature in DRG left me both concerned and curious.
Turns out that’s the point. References to Season 5’s Rogue Core are more subtle than overt (there’s no, say, post-match cutscene where the blindfolded mission control tells your dwarf he’s putting together a team), but hints are dropped that you might be digging too deep. good. The Core Spawn Crawlers, which Akopyan told me will also appear in the spinoff, are simply the first sign that the company may soon have a self-inflicted mess on its hands — one that will need to be cleaned up in Rogue Core.
However, we still had a morkite geode to find in the anthill cave, which was soon revealed after the third successful crystal dig. It was too far down to reach by conventional means, but that’s where the Drillevator came in: a circular platform that could bore us for the last few hundred meters in style, if not in comfort.
What followed was a DRG version of every slow-moving cable car defense device you’ve ever played in an FPS, as a horde of battered glyphids swarmed out of freshly drilled rock onto our claustrophobic metal ring. Maybe familiar, but I liked it. The constantly moving platform and lack of escape routes made the descent dramatic and desperate, much more so than the static action sequences the game usually trades in. Especially when the drill gets stuck on a particularly stubborn layer of rock and forces one dwarf to leave. feel free to fix it. I play DRG almost every week and this was the first time in months that I felt on the verge of drowning in a sea of mandibles – deep enough that my body would never be found, buried in a perfectly circular grave next to two. game developers.
We survived, however, and our reward was a surprisingly soft landing inside the promised geode. A few moments of seed-gathering and staring into a (strangely beautiful) crystal cave later, it was time to mine another job-related expense: inflated jet boots that could propel us all the way back to the Drillevator hole. This was fun too, and after a battle that purposely nullified our team’s movement abilities, gaining the power of flight felt like the perfect climactic twist.
Basically, I now want to proceed with many, many more deep scans. It’s just a fun, flowing mining-focused mission that DRG hasn’t gotten since 2020; I know the Industrial Sabotage missions were added in Season 1, but they focus on fighting robots and are therefore not good. Besides, even when we’re on the verge of digging up something really terrible, turning back to smashing rock makes a lot of sense. I mean, look at those bearded guys. They are not hackers or virology experts. They are miners. They to mine.
I assume they are shooting as well, as the 5 series has some promising overclocks for the profession. Judging by the ones I’ve seen in the preview, I’d say the Gunner class is the happiest recipient of an overclock that turns its rocket launcher into an arcing grenade rifle or a lobe of rock-smashing fragmentation bombs. Scouts are wary of splash damage, though it does get some interesting toys, including an M1000 rifle overclock that marks targets for more follow-up damage. Personally, I was hoping for more “motion-assisted” overclocking, along the lines of allowing Scouts to jump shotgun, though Akopyan tells me it’s “a bit tricky” to balance in light of how crucial this shotgun-like upgrade can be. Ah – at least the new 5th series weapon mods keep up the great tradition of making drastic changes to weapon behavior, not just adding or subtracting stats.
As a whole, Series 5 isn’t so much about reworking the basics. In many ways, it actually returns to them after successive high-concept detours from the basic concept of mining. Even so, it looks like another quality update, working within the Rogue Core legacy without turning into an ad, and adding plenty of new things to see, do, and pickaxe. Officially released on June 13th, with the Experimental Branch release on June 4th.