Hello, Miners!
Now that we're hopefully done hot-fixing Update 32, it is time to brief you on the upcoming updates for Deep Rock Galactic. In other words: a new revision of our Living Roadmap.
When we launched into 1.0 back in May, we made a promise that we would keep supporting and developing Deep Rock Galactic for as long as it made sense to us. And the conclusion there is that it absolutely still makes a lot of sense to us - the mines of Hoxxes have more hardworking Dwarves in them than ever before. Deep Rock Galactic has turned out to be an almost unstoppable force that slowly grows and grows. We hope it will continue like that for a long time.
UPDATE 33 DELAYED TO JANUARY 2021
While Update 32 ended up taking quite a while longer to get out of the door than we initially projected, we hope you all agree with us that it was worth the wait. But it did end up being delayed almost a full month, and that of course has an impact on Update 33. However, instead of cutting content for U33, we've decided instead to push the delivery date to end-of-January 2021. So, now you might be thinking: what about the in-game Yuletide event? No worries, we will activate an event during the Holiday season...and it might even have a few "cool" surprises for you all.
UPDATE 33: NEW BIOMES, NEW ENEMIES, AND MORE
Now, back to Update 33. The headline for the update is the two new biomes. Since we announced this back in May, we've been drawing concepts and bouncing ideas off of each other, and we've finally settled on a pair of worthy finalists: The enigmatically named CAUSTIC MIRE and AZURE WEALD.
Early concepts for Caustic Mire
To go along with the new biomes, we will also introduce some new enemy variants. A few of these might end up unique to one of the new biomes, but most will be general across the game. Everyone's favorite flying foes, the Mactera, are getting a handful of new genestrains added to their ranks, and new variants for the Dreadnoughts are aiming to spice up the Elimination mission in an effort to make the mission less predictable.
We are finally getting a proper animation for Molly to dock at the end of a mission. It was something we almost got in for 1.0 but sadly had to leave in an unfinished state. As we do in most updates, we will also give a facelift to one or more of the older interfaces. This time it's the Mineral Trade terminal that will receive a small makeover.
As always, Update 33 will probably include a long list of other smaller improvements and additions, but it's too early to speak of anything specific there yet - the content described above is our established headlines, and what we promise to deliver in one shape or another.
UPDATE 34 AND BEYOND
When we sit down to decide what to include in an update, it tends to be healthy mix of reading and analyzing your feedback, as well as listening to our own wishes and desires. Historically, those things tend to pretty much align across the board, which is a very good sign for us. That said, we are careful about announcing things that we haven't yet done some internal concepts or prototypes on, so while we still haven't officially announced something like Female Dwarves or a purpose for Error Cubes in an update, it doesn't mean that we have given up on it. As always, it's our goal to never overpromise on something we can't deliver with our limited manpower, and when we do things we want to do them properly, in the way that fits the game best.
That said, we've still added a few things to the Roadmap that are quite likely to go into the next few updates.
Update 32 delivered two full new mission types, but during development we actually prototyped three. And with the success of U32, we decided to finish up the last mission type and deliver it in one of the next updates. We won't say more about it now, but we'll make sure to give you some teasers after Update 33 is out of the door.
Also, official mod support has always been something we thought would suit the game, and it's been a recurring request from a lot of fans. We're even seeing a small and very dedicated modding community spring to life around Deep Rock Galactic. That means we've decided to properly dedicate some development power to support this. Our first goal would be to get some filters in there, so people can mark their games as modded and make modded games visible in the server list so you have the ability to CHOOSE if you want to play modded games or not. The next step, even further into the future, could potentially be support for Steam Workshop. We are still learning about the needs and wants of you guys, and we will do this one step at a time. Your feedback is of course, as always, extremely valuable to us, so let us know your thoughts and desires and worries on the topic.
Next, we hear you loud and clear: you want more weapons - and you will get more weapons! But, it needs to be said, creating a set of new weapons is now a pretty big task. Beyond just developing the weapons themselves, it involves a complete set of Weapon Mods and Overclocks, tweaking and balancing, as well as updating all the existing Weapon Frameworks with new models. Therefore, the scope will be either four new primary weapons or four new secondary weapons, but not both sets at the same time. We currently aim to deliver the new weapons in Update 35, but we don't have a more specific time frame than this.
Until then, keep an eye on our information channels - we're planning to release our usual drip-feed of tasty teasers as we start having cool new stuff to show off.
Rock and Stone, Miners!
with love
- The Ghost Ship Crew