Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core – Ghost Ship Games’ attempt to plunge the co-op FPS Deep Rock Galactic into an even deeper, darker chasm of roguelike tension – is available today in Early Access. I tried it last year, during one of the first alpha playtests, and was it ok? Yeah ? Already a functional multi-dwarf shooter, as you’d expect from something built on the excellent DRG, but also close enough to the original that it feels more like an ambitious side mode than a standalone game.
These days, however, Rogue Core seems to be doing a better job of creating its own underground space. Last week, I played an updated version with lead game designer Mike Akopyan and game director Mikkel Martin Pederson, and enjoyed a much more distinct dive – even if its increased brutality made our run one of the bloodiest Danish-English efforts since the Viking Age.
Much of Rogue Core, of course, occupies familiar DRG territory. Your day starts with getting shit on a space station and choosing your favorite beard style, before a rocket-powered ride through the crust of Hoxxes IV. Here, however, you’re not one of the basic miners who star in the original: you’re a Reclaimer, a better-equipped crisis specialist. To investigate the company’s lost mining facilities, you would travel five hundred miles, and to rid them of encroaching interdimensional horrors, you would travel another five hundred miles.
Well, I say “better equipped”. Naturally, for a roguelike, you prepare as you go, except for the class abilities used by each Reclaimer. As Falconer, I took out an Avian Attack Drone to electrocute the attacking Core Spawn, while Pederson’s Guardian launched crippling AoE defensive attacks and Akopyan’s Spotter marked the bigger baddies with crit-boosting darts. I regret not going for the Retcon, certainly – its Tracer-style time rewinding power could have negated a plot claw lacerations.
Other roguelike staples have also been Deep Rockified, if – like proc-gen cave networks – they weren’t already. Instead of intangible XP, for example, you mine and collect a mineral called Expenite, which is only added to your tally once manually loaded into the accompanying mule drone. Going down a mine level can also prompt a team to vote between one or two “risk vectors”, which are essentially mutators that strengthen the enemy – but will reward stubbornness with opportunities to seize new weapons and mining technologies.
Be careful, not all changes made by DRG are as easy to adopt. Mobility tools – the Engineer’s Platform Gun, the Driller’s Handheld Rock Erasers – are still available as class-independent upgrades, but they feel less vital. Where DRG’s caves often feature deep pits and steep walls that would be impassable without the right tools, Rogue Core’s caverns are relatively walkable. Simultaneously, they are also much more likely to serve as mass graves for dwarves. Rogue Core is, by design, severely punishing inattention, its enemies largely comparable to DRG’s Glyphids in terms of grunt/tank/disable composition, but faster, tougher, and more aggressive. There’s also a threat level indicator that constantly increases, unlike how 90% of DRG dives can be done at your own pace, and filling which almost immediately resulted in me and two senior developers eating alien dirt.
This increase in intensity serves at least two purposes. The first is that it wakes up people like me, who are so accustomed to the gentle ebb and flow of original-flavored Deep Rock that I can (and often still do) play it mindlessly, focusing instead on my friends’ weekly Discord chat about how The Boys have become garbage. More importantly, it helps fill the teamwork void that the lesser emphasis on traversal tools had carved out: stay together, move together, and fight together, or you’ll perish far more surely than in vanilla DRG.
Team play is also integrated into the leveling system. Some perks are only unlocked through abandoned machines that require coordinated play to repair, and while there’s a trickle of purely individual upgrades, the most important ones – those earned through hoarded Expenite – are presented to everyone simultaneously. Thus begins a brief period of contemplation and/or argumentation, during which scavengers can claim one of the offers via chat or movements of the pointed cursor. It is only after this deliberation phase that everyone takes turns choosing their upgrade, with the search continuing once everyone is equipped.
This sharing of potential improvements creates a sense of common responsibility, including the need to accept that sometimes a desired advantage would be better deployed by a teammate. This is another change from DRG, where aside from a general preference for balanced class choices, there is minimal downside to individual loadouts lacking synergy. Pederson describes Rouge Core’s approach as an extension of the single-player roguelike convention: instead of creating a build for yourself, everyone collaboratively creates a build for the team. Four beer-drunk combat engineers, working in harmony.
Not that it saved the three of us from waking up in the station’s medbay, although there are other small improvements and adjustments here too. Gone is the boring cosmetic store from the main game – instead, Ghost Ship took the pick-and-mix unlock system from DRG’s seasonal battle passes and simply made it permanent. These passes have always been free themselves, but the change means a constant supply of microtransaction-free dwarven drops throughout Early Access and beyond, whether or not BPs also come to Rogue Core.
The station bar also puts a cute twist on DRG’s traditional pre-mission drinks. Before the frothy nectar goes on sale, players must pump iron in the adjoining gym, collectively burning enough calories to offset the impending hits. I should hate it – it’s an extra step, delaying one of the most charming rituals in FPS games – and yet, with willing allies, it only further cements the camaraderie, everyone cheering each other on like a gang of furriers. Mister Motivators. And, as anyone who’s cracked even a Diet Coke after a walk knows, the tastiest drinks are the ones you’ve earned.
I don’t know if Rogue Core will supplant its forebear as the cooperative game of choice for my friends and I on Thursday night – it will probably depend on how we adapt to its intensified difficulty. I TO DO be aware that in its current state, it’s much more than Deep Rock Galactic in a fake roguelike beard, and deserves to be tackled as a separate challenge. For an early access game, this isn’t a bad place to start.
