I have a short attention span, and I’m easily distracted by shiny new toys. This means I have games in my Steam library with total play times of only an hour or two. I’ll even confess to owning a couple of games that I’ve played for 8-10 minutes and never touched again. (To be fair, those games are REALLY bad, and I regret wasting those few minutes of my life.)
Many of my friends in the industry prefer to dig into single titles for a long time – putting five hundred hours into Civilization V, or a thousand hours in Crusader Kings. And I do have a fair number of games in the 100-200 hour range: Elden Ring, Grim Dawn, XCom 2, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Skyrim, among others.
Outside of the games I’ve worked on (I have well over a thousand hours in Creativerse, the legacy of several years of development on a live service game), I have only one game in my library that has over 300 hours played: the brilliant co-op FPS Deep Rock Galactic, developed by Ghost Ship Games.
In Deep Rock Galactic (DRG), you play a dwarf miner in a science-fiction setting working for a typically nefarious megacorporation that’s busily strip-mining the surface of the planet Hoxxes IV. Hoxxes IV is a complex planet with a variety of colorful biomes and a pervasive infestation of aggressive buglike glyphids that would not look out of place in the Starship Troopers universe.
The core gameplay of DRG is similar to Left 4 Dead, Valve’s groundbreaking cooperative mission-based zombie shooter. But Deep Rock represents an evolution of that gameplay far beyond those roots. While some of my hours in the game can be attributed to DRG being my 13-year-old son’s favorite, I keep returning to Hoxxes IV because every aspect of the design is calibrated to ensure I have a good time whenever I play.
Everything is Fun
Deep Rock Galactic sessions begin in a space station hub high above Hoxxes IV, a virtual playground where the dwarves sleep, eat, and drink (heavily). The space station has the typical upgrade stations for weapons and gear, resource exchanges, and mission selection menus that a game’s hub needs, but it’s also chock-full of toys and gadgets and ways to entertain yourself while the slower members of your group are agonizing over which gun to take.
There’s a jukebox at the bar, stocked with music to encourage your dwarves to goofily dance. There’s a bar game where you kick barrels into a moving hoop. There’s a secret lever hidden on a high catwalk that disables the station’s gravity for a few seconds. There are specimen tanks containing dead bugs, a tip jar for the robot bartender, and barrels to cheerfully boot into the station’s reactor (prompting pained chiding over the radio from your ever-present Mission Control supervisor).
DRG also features a staggering collection of cosmetic options for the dwarves. Preparing for a mission while your friends stand around sporting ridiculous outfits and (always) extensive facial hair never gets old.
Next Generation Procedural Generation
None of the silly cosmetics or space station minigames would matter if the core gameplay wasn’t so solid. Polished progression systems have been honed to perfection since the game’s launch. Four unique classes – each one a blast to play, and each with multiple weapon options – offer every style of player a dwarf to call their own. Weapon “overclocks” that further modify the guns provide a long-term collection element, letting players gradually tweak and improve a dwarf’s build to suit any style of play. And a robust perk system provides further customization options alongside core class abilities.
The moment-to-moment gameplay in the missions themselves is a perfect example of my favorite procedural design approach – many shallow vectors that interweave to create near-endless gameplay variety. Hoxxes IV has ten distinct biomes, eight mission types, and over fifteen distinct enemies (not including biome variations), resulting in endlessly varied procedural missions. On top of these vectors are layered special events, lost packs, rich mineral veins, and other random goodies to distract the dwarves from their mission.
The procedural cave layouts are worth a special callout. It’s a powerful random generation system where the caves are built from rooms connected by tunnels, with layouts driven by both the biome and the mission type. A mining mission in Magma Core is going to feel entirely different from a refining mission in the Radioactive Exclusion Zone. Even after 300 hours, I still find every map layout fresh and unpredictable. (And, this being a game about dwarf miners, you can always dig your own tunnel if you don’t like the ones provided.)
A Meaty Stew of Seasonal Content (Hold the Monetization)
Since the game’s launch in May 2020, Ghost Ship Games has delivered a series of robust post-ship updates and releases. Overall, the roadmap’s model mirrors the traditional “live service” approaches of modern games, with seasons and a massive tree of new cosmetics – but with no monetization attached. Everything in the seasons is earned through gameplay and missions. The season’s tree of cosmetic unlocks is folded into the fiction; in true DRG fashion (and a bit of unsubtle game industry commentary) it feels like the corporation running the space station is offering cosmetic rewards as yet another way to bilk the dwarves out of their company store earnings.
In parallel with the seasonal releases, reasonably-priced cosmetic DLCs have been a part of DRG’s post-ship strategy. However, with so many cosmetics earned through gameplay, the DLCs feel optional – extra ways to support the developer while making your dwarf extra beautiful. Ghost Ship Games has also delivered a steady stream of compelling seasonal content – holiday and spring events, complete with extensive redecorations of the space station and special mission chains, anniversary celebrations, and “free beer” days. Deep Rock Galactic demonstrates how a game with a solid core vision and gameplay, that embraces player joy at every opportunity and is designed to promote teamwork and cooperation, can succeed in a landscape littered with higher-budget titles that have more aggressive monetization strategies.
Ghost Ship Games’ strategy has paid off. As of this writing – over five years after the early access launch – the game is still hitting 17,000 daily peak concurrent players on Steam. That’s a lot of drunk space dwarves with ridiculous beards, all exterminating the bugs on Hoxxes IV, one winding cave complex at a time.
There’s so much more I could say about DRG – how there’s a bottomless well of comical voice lines for the dwarves (to the point where I’m still hearing new ones after 300 hours of play), or how multiplayer is designed in a fundamental way to promote cooperation and good teamwork (PC Gamer covered that last point in some detail.)
But a new season’s just started and if you’ve never played DRG, I don’t want to delay you any longer. Go hammer that Steam purchase button. A cold beer awaits you at the station’s Abyss Bar and thousands of yucky glyphids need squishing. I’ll end with the traditional Deep Rock Galactic cheer – so important that the game binds a hotkey to it.
ROCK AND STONE!
Deep Rock Galactic’s fourth season, Critical Corruption, kicked off on June 14.