“It sounds weird but we try to keep our innovation as low as possible,” the director explained. “We’ll say ‘it’s this game but with that.’ It takes so much time to innovate. Sometimes you find the hidden holy Grail of game design, but often indie developers sit for five years trying out stuff. We’re a studio of 50 people with bills to pay. So we can’t do that.”
DRG Survivors is innovative enough for what it is. More importantly it’s well-made and a fun addition to the world of DRG. Does it reinvent the genre? No, but it does some interesting things with its different challenges so it stays fresh for longer than most bullet heavens.
Would you recommend DRG? I’ve heard some good things, but never tried it.
It’s extremely fun with friends. I’ve got probably 100+ hours in it
I personally would not recommend it. I’ve played ~20 hours with friends. Despite being a simple co-op game, it has these seasonal battle passes and multiple currencies that I would expect from something like Fortnite / Call of Duty / pay-to-win mobile games. That’s mostly an aesthetic gripe because it doesn’t directly effect the gameplay, but I’m not a huge fan of the gameplay either. Combat is really imprecise/messy, which I’m sure is the point but I can’t get behind it. May be worth to play with friends, but I would not recommend it solo at all. What I can say I really like though is the 3D map tool for the randomly generated caves 🤤 beautiful 3D map
All of those “currencies” are free. There is no paid way to get them. You just have to change which season you are playing to get that season’s scrip. There is no pay to win. There is merely paid skin packs
Yes I know. I just mean that the multiple currencies is something I didn’t like and is a downside of the game for me. Not only because I think they are not fun to collect, but because they aesthetically remind me of pay-to-win currencies and it’s a slight ick. As they say in the article, they deliberately copy elements from other games to add to their own. That’s cool, but I don’t like the specific things they copied: battle passes and multiple-currency upgrade trees.
Ok but your objection is based on vibes then and run counter to the actual facts at hand so why misrepresent what Ghost Ship is doing? Their passes and scrip have nothing in common with paid for battle passes (which aren’t examples of pay to win either)
To be fair, a game giving you bad vibes is a valid reason not to play it. It’s not a piece of software developed with a practical task in mind.
I don’t believe I misrepresented anything, I never said that the currencies or battle passes were paid. OC asked if people would recommend, and I think I wouldn’t recommend because I didn’t enjoy it and I described the reasons I didn’t enjoy it, which as I said in my comment were aesthetic complaints (rather than monetary or gameplay or anything).
My objection is based on vibes because I think vibes and aesthetics and artistic direction are important to me, and those are the grounds on which I don’t like Deep Rock Galactic
I asked a friend who plays it and he says its good with randoms, but great if you have a crew you regularly game with.
It’s great either way. It has a good community.
I’d say try it out to see if you like the gun mechanics and movement/different classes. If you do then you’ll love the game even more when you get to the higher difficulties. If it’s not your thing, you can refund on steam if still under 2 hours of playtime.
Deep Rock Galactic is owned by Embracer Group.
What’s your point? What makes Embracer different than any other gaming conglomerate?
Because Embracer especially has a bad case of bag chasing and layoffs right after. If Ghost Ship downsizes, don’t act surprised.
It would be the same if they were owned by Activision or Ubisoft or EA. That’s just the industry right now.
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I guess I know not to buy more from then in that case. I’m tired of playing same slop from different companies that dont want to try anything new. DRG is good game but it also feels like its not living up to its fullest potential, now i know why.
This isn’t DRG, this is DRG survivors
Honestly “it’s this game but with that.” could be a pretty good way to innovate unless you’re totally phoning it in IMO.
Metroid was created when people at Nintendo wanted to combine the skill-based platforming of Super Mario Bros with the exploration of a Zelda game. That ended up being one of the two founding games in the Metroidvania genre.
System Shock was created by people who wanted to make a game with the same “emergent gameplay systems as a puzzle/playground” aspect of dungeon crawling RPGs like Ultima, but in a SciFi rather than fantasy setting. What we ended up with was something that combined fast paced shooter gameplay and a tight narrative presentation on the one hand, with letting the player make their own solutions to levels by manipulating open-ended gameplay systems on the other. This is very similar to the situation with metroid IMO, in how it tried to combine two very differnt styles of gameplay. Today we have an entire genre of games inspired by System Shock called immersive sims (though its more of a design ethos than a genre IMO).
The famous level design and exploration of Dark Souls was inspired by the 3D Zelda games, and while I don’t have a source for this its hard for me to believe that the lock-on mechanics and basic idea for the movement weren’t at least a little inspired by Zelda too. Or, in other words, Dark Souls is basically a 3D Zelda game but with the tone and difficulty of their earlier King’s Field series.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that combing two good things is a guaranteed way to get something good. Or even that, if you do hit upon a good combination, that that’s the only thing you need to put into your work. The games I’ve just talked about are all absolute classics and obviously a lot went into that. For example, the genesis of the iconic multiplayer aspect of Fromsoft’s games came about during the development of Demon’s Souls, when Miyazaki was trying to drive up hill in a bad snow storm. There was a line of cars, and when one began to spin it’s tires then ones behind it would intentionly push on it to help it up. This all happened without the drivers being able to talk to each other, and, seeing this, Miyazaki wondered what became of the last car in the line, but knew he would never get an answer since he would never see these people again. It was this experience that inspired the creation of phantoms.
However, what I am trying to say is that taking something you like and understanding what makes it tick, then making it work in a new context, can end up creating something that then seems wildly innovative in that context.
As an aside, both Zelda and King’s Field were inspired by a dungeon crawling game called “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord”. Both Wizardry and Ultima were derived from earlier games that were basically “Dungeons and Dragons, but on a computer”. Some of them were even named “DND” on the early computer systems they ran on.
DnD itself was created when people wanted to do wargames with a greater emphasis on unconventional warfare (such as spying, diplomacy/intrigue, propaganda, etc) that by necessity required roleplay. After one of these kinds of games was set in a half Conan the Barbarian half Gothic horror medieval fantasy setting with a spooky underground labyrinth beneath a town we got the trope of dungeon delving and returning with treasure to a (relatively) safe town just outside the dungeon entrance.
If space dwarves drinking, burping, and dancing isn’t innovation then who needs innovation?
For Karl!
Damn, there’s a pebble in my boot.
Similar to the early Blizzard approach in some ways. A focus on delivering a vibe done to a very high level of quality and visual coolness, while leaving risky innovation in game mechanics to others.
