Hello Miners,
Before we get to the patch notes, let’s talk about Jump Boots and why we are removing them in their current form.
So, why do we remove something that almost all of you regard as a lot of fun and one of the better Perks? Basically, we have a quite specific vision in mind for Deep Rock Galactic. We have always stated that this is a Co-op First game and every design decision has to be with the co-op aspect in mind. But the Jump Boots detracted from the class dependencies unless everybody had them on. From a design point of view, we might as well give everybody Jump Boots as a default movement mechanic. So, let’s talk about why we believe that’s not a good idea for this game.
Apart from the co-op aspect, we have a punchline called “Danger Darkness Dwarves”. This is the very core of Deep Rock Galactic. You play as hardy dwarves working their way through danger and darkness. It’s never easy. It’s slow and hard work. But you have the weapons, tools, and skills to overcome the challenges. You are tough and you never give up. We have used this as guidelines when designing features for the game.
But, while some features can be fun in isolation, they can affect other aspects of the game that are fun. When that happens, we have to decide which features have priority. In this case, altering the terrain and creating paths for yourself and your teammates as you traverse is considered a core principle of DRG and what sets it apart from other titles. Therefore, although a high mobility skill can be apparently fun, it can remove the fun from many other situations - situations that support the fantasy of playing a hard-working, space-mining dwarf.
So, why did we include them in the first place? In short, it was a miscalculation on our part. Our approach to Early Access has always been to release what we have as soon as possible and then fix and tweak based on your feedback. But for Jump Boots, this was the wrong approach. Most of you rightfully fell in love with their easy-fun and general-purpose abilities, both useful in traversal and combat. And individually, there is nothing wrong with that, but seen as a whole (as we must do as Devs), this turned out to be a huge risk to the core of the game. We should have foreseen this and kept Jump Boots in the cooker a bit longer before making a decision on them.
We hope you understand and can forgive us for this mistake
We do expect to bring Jump Boots back later, maybe as a reworked Perk, maybe as Mutator or maybe as part of a power-up system. But for now, they are gone.
Now onto the rest of the patch notes
PATCH NOTES
Firstly, thanks to all of you for the feedback on the Perks. We’ve looked through your discussions, comments, and suggestions, both here on the Steam forum, in the Discord, in Reddit, and everywhere else where you write to us. In many cases, there are arguments both for and against certain changes, so we are mostly focusing on where there seems to be consensus and where we agree that it’s better for the game in the long term.
Rebalancing
We have been doing a major rebalance of the Perk Points and Milestones economy. With the previous implementation, the grind was simply way too long. Our design goal with the new implementation has been to allow you to unlock the majority of the perks within your first promotion of each of the four dwarves (roughly around 40-50 hours of gameplay). Here is what we have tweaked.
We have:
- Reduced the prices of the Perks in the Perk-tree
- Lowered the goals for the individual Milestones, so they should be much easier to complete now.
- Increased the number of excess perk points in the system - meaning you don’t have to complete every Milestone to fully unlock the Perk-tree.
With this rebalance we have had to reset the Milestones. Don’t panic! You haven’t lost anything, but when you open the game the first time after you have updated, you will have to re-reclaim every Milestone you have previously completed. It is a bit of work if you are an experienced miner, but on the other hand, it also gives you the opportunity to see all the progress you have made in the game in a very fast way :-)
Perk Changes
Many of you have pointed out that the removal of Weekend Athlete was too much of a change. Even with the introduction of Second Wind and Dash, it is clear from the mission-success metric that the higher hazard levels increased in difficulty beyond what was intended. Therefore, we are lowering the enemy speed boost on the highest difficulty a little bit and then we’ll check the metric in a few days again.
As written above, we are removing Jump Boots for now. Related to this, we are reworking Active Impact Compensators. They were not as useful as we intended, so we are now merging in a bit of the idea from Jump Boots and turning this into a Perk called Hover Boots. Their main purpose is to halt your flying movement when you activate them. You can use this to avoid falling damage or any environmental effect that pushes you around.
The rest of the Perk changes are smaller improvements and QoL fixes. We’ll keep reading the feedback and monitoring our metrics to see if further tweaks are needed.
CHANGELIST
Perk related changes
- Rebalanced Perk Points and Milestones economy
- Reduced Enemy Speed boost a little bit for Hazard 5 and Elite Deep Dive
- Iron Will: If you heal while on Iron Will, you will be invulnerable until the Iron Will buff wears off
- Fixed an issue with Iron Will if the whole team goes down. The game could stall and not progress to the end-screen.
- Vampire Perk - no longer works on swarmers from brood nexus
- Fixed an old bug that unintentionally caused the old Berzerker effect to still affect the Vampire Perk. We will now monitor this Perk and evaluate it again later.
- Fixed a bug with the sound triggering when using the Vampire Perk. The sound was always playing for the host, not the player actually using the perk.
- Born Ready now also reloads the Flaregun and the Platform Gun
- Born Ready Perk - Added unequipped reload sounds to all weapons
- Steeve will no longer be removed if the enemy cap is hit and new enemies have to spawn in
- Fixed a bug with petting sounds not playing when petting Steeve
- Added a new animation for Steeve when he is petted
- Perks are no longer usable on the Spacerig. Management kindly reminds all employees that the Spacerig is a workspace and not a playground!
- Second Wind Perk - Particles no longer trigger if you jump and land while it is active
- Iron Will Perk - Removed activation time window from Iron Will
- Beast Master Perk - Steeve's friendly fire reduction set to 2% damage (before he received 25% friendly fire damage). Long Live Steeve!
- See You In Hell Perk - Damage and radius increased and is increased more with the ranks
- See You In Hell Perk: increased damage, range, and limited to 3 uses per mission
- Fixed sound for See You In Hell explosion
- Dash Perk - Added slowdown resistance and updated the Perk description to reflect this
- Removed Jump Boots Perk
- Removed Active Impact Compensators Perk and moved See You In Hell Perk up to take its place
- Added a new Perk: Hover Boots
- Relocated Iron Will and See You In Hell in the perk graph
Misc bug-fixes and QoL
- Latejoin pods now avoid Machine Events, Escape Pods and Mineheads when searching for a landing location to prevent players from getting stuck
- Crassus Detonator can no longer spawn in Deep Dives.
- Fixed spelling in Auto Cannon Radius upgrade
- Crassus Detonator Gold is no longer different from regular Gold
- Dwarves now have a shout (only audible for the local player) and sound for when they are out of flares and attempt to throw one
- Fixed a bug with the base Weakpoint Damage bonus of 10% not showing on the Deepcore GK2 Assault Rifle
- Fixed a bug that caused Kursite Infection Praetorians to shoot acid spray without playing the animation. They no longer shoot acid.
- Fixed a bug that caused the first row of perk icons to be unaligned in the Equipment Terminal
- Fixed a crash that occurred when pointing the laser pointer at Explosive Barrels
- Improved the beacons the MULE drops on her way to the Escape Pod to better indicate the direction of the Escape Pod
- Fixed a bug that caused the Satchel Charge to be picked up too late in the pick-up animation
- Improved location of music and dance zone for the Jukebox on the Spacerig
- Fixed a visual issue with the Neurotoxin gas cloud particles
- Added debris to explosion craters
- Fixed Scout falling through the world if killed while using the grappling hook
- Quick-join can no longer join Deep Dives
- Power Attacks now instantly defrosts players if they are frozen.
- Fixed a bug that caused an unbuilt Sentry Gun to block bullets before it was built