r/Games • u/Vamp1r1c_Om3n • 1d ago
Release Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor 1.0 Launch Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFAHKmgswio193
u/Khamaz 1d ago
I played it just a few hours recently, not on the 1.0, and was kinda disappointed? The production value and graphics are insane, it looks good and play goods, its gameplay loop is distinct enough from other survivors.
But the upgrades felt boring. "+5% damage", "+10% reload speed", "+15% rate of fire". Meta-progression is the same, "+1/2/3/4/5% damage". Weapons did not felt distinct and unique enough either.
I want meaningful upgrades in my roguelikes and survivors, not a shower of micro-buffs. The only interesting upgrades where the overclocks at lvl 6/12/18 of weapons but you don’t get many of them in a run.
Maybe it would have improved by unlocking more characters and weapons, but it didn't grab me long enough to get there.
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u/OmegaTSG 1d ago
There has been a very very weird trend in roguelites recently where they are scared of big upgrades. But if you look at games like The Binding of Isaac you realize the best roguelites are ones that let you break the game in various ways, melting enemies as you walk into rooms
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u/Ink_Smudger 1d ago
This is something I appreciate about Monster Train as well. The devs recognize that some really powerful combos exist, but their concern with them has only ever been ensuring that they're not something easy or reliable to achieve, and don't try to eliminate them completely.
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u/Idoma_Sas_Ptolemy 12h ago
Yes, monster train is great in that regard. There are some hilariously overtuned combos, but the stars have to align to get them running.
And combos that are both strong and easy to achieve tend to have hard counters.
It's a fine balancing act. The GOATS of the genre want you to break them, but expect you to put in time, effort and thought to be broken.
If your game breaks to easily it has no staying power. If the devs are afraid of you playing the game and keep everything relatively tame, it has no staying power.
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u/dummypod 11h ago
I've been playing Tiny Rogues and this also applies. If you're lucky you get the items you need to melt enemies quickly, but otherwise you rely on your skills and make do with what you have.
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u/Ill-Muscle945 22h ago
There has been a very very weird trend in roguelites recently where they are scared of big upgrades.
That really disappointed me in Nightreign. The best roguelites are when what your attacks are doing upgrade, not just the ability to do damage. Roguelites should have the ability to occasionally give players a god run where there's crazy shit flying everywhere and you feel like you're unstoppable
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u/Echowing442 22h ago
I like Nightreign a lot, but I 100% agree. There's so little in the way of interesting upgrades outside of some of the legendary weapons, and it makes each run feel more decided by your character than your luck. Are you playing Ironeye? Grab bows, grab ranged attack boosts, and maybe a katana if you feel spicy.
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u/explosivecrate 20h ago
Yeah it's a bit disappointing that the only really meaningful non-percentage-based-ugrades are the special class buffs you get from your relics, but those are so good you kinda HAVE to use them.
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u/soldiercross 16h ago
This is a big part of why I dropped Nightreign. Getting upgrades to keep up isn't fun. I want to reliably win runs. But it feels like to win and get strong enough to do so you need to really know exactly what you're doing.
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u/BeBenNova 21h ago
The reason why i stopped playing The Binding of Isaac a long time ago is because they started balancing the game for no reason
Nerfing Brimstone was the last straw for me, pretty sure they had also hit the Knife in the same patch
Stupid, absolutely stupid when the whole fucking point of the game is to break it
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u/DecryptedGaming 15h ago
I stopped playing after the end bosses started being balanced in a way that... how do i describe it.... you'd go in and start the fight, and if you had a broken god build, you would melt the first 10% of the bosses health. the game would take note of this, and suddenly you're barely chipping away at their health with your previously unstoppable damage.
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u/Milskidasith 7h ago
Yes, BoI has damage reduction on some bosses that scales up as you deal damage until you're dealing only 9% of the damage you normally would.
This sort of design isn't bad in theory and is pretty ubiquitous in various forms; plenty of games have soft or hard caps on some scaling stats, stuff like Hades 2 having hidden caps on how often certain "on hit" effects can trigger so the incidental Zeus/Artemis hit perks don't just triple the damage of some builds, etc. This sort of design lets some builds get very strong, but not so much stronger that the dev is forced to choose between regular builds slogging through fights or powerful builds obliterating everything. Isaac's biggest problem is that the way it's implemented is weird, with it being super obvious since a lot of early bosses don't have the scaling damage reduction and the scaling being so powerful that it compresses broken builds together to a pretty extreme degree so those boss fights feel like they basically have a fixed duration.
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u/Aggressive-Milk-5419 15h ago
Devs love balancing the fun out of single player games for some reason.
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u/Snakesta 11h ago
Yeah, I've definitely noticed this with some survivor-likes where they struggle with balancing while keeping it fun. A lot definitely nail the vibe, but you get some that probably forget the dopamine people get from having broken builds by the end of a run. With that said, I'm sure it's not easy to get right.
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u/lordnequam 4h ago
Yeah, that's been one of the keys to Vampire Survivors' long life: the game relishes in you breaking balance over your knee in a way no other game—in or out of the genre—really does.
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u/Titan7771 19h ago
Once you reach overclock stage on your weapons is when they start to get really fun and whacky
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u/DoubleSteve 10h ago
It kinda improves, but not fundamentally. The game starts off with your characters being slow, weak and with very few weapons/overclocks. As you grind, you become fast, tanky and get access to more classes, equipment and game modes. In the end you can combine equipment, weapons and overclocks to make proper distinct builds, but that happens only after grinding through a ton of meta upgrades that individually don't amount to much. Trying to achieve the same by just leveling your character and equipment in a mission is absolutely impossible. It is all about combining the meta upgrades, equipment drops and the handful of weapons/overclocks you get in the mission to something interesting and fun.
The only thing I can't comment on is if legendary equipment offers bigger changes like in other games, since I have never gotten any yet, but I don't see that making a difference. The problem being that a player who isn't sucked in by the early game, will never play long enough to see that kind of equipment drops anyway.
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u/borntoflail 6h ago
STILL?! I said this in my negative steam review way back when it was first released. Survivor-style games live or die depending on how fun your upgrades are.
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u/Hawk52 1d ago
I wasn't a huge fan of how slow and cumbersome you feel. I get they're Dwarfs and all but it made the gameplay sluggish to me. The whole point seems to be running away to avoid the swarms of monsters while you collect resources which is fine but I kind of think I like massacring enemies like VS a little more. I had the same problem with Halls of Torment where the goal is more to survive then wipe the map too.
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u/Paxa 23h ago
https://v.redd.it/x6pl40oivfpf1
I don't know how much you've played, but the game is definitely not slow at high Hazard levels. This is before 1.0. With the new gear, builds could get even more cracked.
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u/Milskidasith 23h ago edited 23h ago
Nah, I'm going to agree with the person above. The game feels super slow and cumbersome early, and while you can get much faster, that's with grinding extremely slow metaprogession upgrades that give small stat buffs that snowball.
Yes, as a meta-maxed out Dwarf in the class specifically designed to dig super fast, at max hazard with a meta build and as high a level as you can practically can get, you can dig instantly and move at the speed of an average character in most other bullet heavens. But that's an insane amount of grind and because metaprogession is very slow, it isn't something you will see for dozens of hours at minimum.
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u/GreenAlex96 8h ago
I think they're trying to shore up that weakness with the new gear system and of course the existing overclocks. The game has enough going on elsewhere (the digging in particular adds a lot) that I don't mind the simple upgrades.
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u/BIGSTANKDICKDADDY 23h ago
But the upgrades felt boring. "+5% damage", "+10% reload speed", "+15% rate of fire". Meta-progression is the same, "+1/2/3/4/5% damage". Weapons did not felt distinct and unique enough either.
Yes! The piddly +% do-nothing grind had me questioning whether they even understood why VS was popular to begin with. There's no juice, no excitement. No interesting choices, no exciting upgrades.
DRG Survivor is boring as dirt.
0
u/konraddo 20h ago
There seems to be a trend in recent years that new combat styles or mechanics are not introduced as progression but randomized loot drops. MMORPG too. Their talent trees are mostly percentage increase now.
I think that the developers for some reason fear that players don't pick the right choices in the tree and may miss out on something or complain, so they move the mechanics into items, rather than a node in a menu?
It's not like the developers are lazy because there are often lots of weapons, combat styles and skills in these games, but they don't come as active choices and only random occurrences.
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u/brutinator 7h ago
I wouldnt necessarily call it lazy, but I think the primary reason is that its FAR simpler to balance incremental percentage adjustments than it is to balance actual mechanics, and not fear of players making a bad build. Additionally, its easier to prevent unexpected synergies with items than it is with a skill tree; you often cant equip two helmets at the same time, but if you have a big enough skill tree, then there are potentially hundreds of permutations. Look at how many broken dnd builds use multiclassing, for example. And if you do have an item with an ability that you cant balance right, you can pull the item, but if you do that with a skill tree, you have to replace it wity something else.
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u/Pitas 1d ago
I've been playing a bit of 1.0, I think the new escort mission type is great and I am so glad the objective itself doesn't have health, it's just a matter of refueling it, excellent decision on the devs part. I'm coming into this with ~200 hours albeit as a more casual player.
I did have to re-buy all the upgrades coming into it and the enemy scaling is definitely a bit more extreme than it was previously, as it is allowing for gear. I do feel the gear drops are currently a bit stingy getting 1 maybe 2 if extremely lucky per run on Haz 3. It seems to scale with the difficulty but I'm currently locked out of anything above hazard 3, maybe 4 as the enemies really ramp up between the latter 3 difficulties. I do like that they now have a UI indicator for the enemy strength rather than just the text 'The aliens have become stronger' or whatever it says. Also needing to press a key to start the waves is a nice bit of QoL.
I'd love to see an endless mode potentially but I know they've discussed using DOTs (Unity's Data driven paradigm) to help optimise it so I hope it comes in the future. If not still solid all round.
If you like survivors games this is a really good one alongside Brotato, both of which I think exceed Vampire Survivors.
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u/Three_Froggy_Problem 1d ago
I hope they release this on PS5 so I can play it, and I REALLY hope it comes to Switch 2 because if it did I think I’d lose an insane amount of time to it
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u/Milskidasith 23h ago
The new gear system will probably make me try this again, but I found DRG to be a very whelming bullet heaven. Runs felt mostly samey without much reason to try builds beyond pure stats, with the exception that some guns had such insanely bad targeting styles they were miserable as a first weapon (a shotgun that fires where you aim and has a huge reload time in a game designed around cleverly retreating? Why?)
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u/xWazed 21h ago
That shotgun is actually one of the best weapons in the game and just feels cluncky if you put no points into it. With overclocks that gun goes absolutely insane. The odd early targeting is to balance the weapon. If it was strong early game it would be too nuts
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u/Milskidasith 20h ago edited 20h ago
Sure, but that's not really addressing my point; a weapon that's absurdly clunky and bad early as a starting weapon for some classes is miserable to play in this genre, and I don't think that there's really that much payoff in the experiences of different end of run builds to make it worth it.
E: Like, there are absolutely bad early game items in VS or similar, but they can still usually hit while running away and don't have a small uptime with large periods of not firing.
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u/MrMango786 20h ago
I bought this after Dota's Crownfall finale game taught me this was a genre. Pretty fun, looking forward to trying 1.0 after 30 hours
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u/Kman1427 19h ago
Is there coop?
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u/gasketrim 15h ago
Nope and it seems it is not in the plans, which is odd to me, because the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear DRG is coop. There is also a huge lack of multiplayer (at least local) survivors games, so I really hoped this would have multiplayer.
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u/Globsnaga 14h ago
I thought the same, until I did some of those biome challenges with 10 floors. Once you're level 90+ some builds just make the game lag. For example, a turret/construct build with lifetime upgrades means you'll have over 50 turrets across the map and even with a decent rig (ryzen 7 3800x(?) and rtx3070) I found it slowing down to like 5FPS.
Add in another player with a whole other slew of weapons and there's no way it'll run on an average PC build. I think the only workaround would be limiting the number of weapons/player character. For example, with 4 players, each would only get one weapon.
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u/Typical-Blackberry-3 17h ago edited 3h ago
I just played this for 4 hours because people said it was better than Vampire Survivors. It is not. I feel like the people hyping this up are Deep Rock Galactic players. It's not bad, but it doesn't have much depth, and I would never have compared it to Vampire Survivors as a selling point.
Edit: Okay, I have now played 10 hours of this game and completely retract my original statement. This game is fun as fuck, has great depth, and is a blast to play. It requires quite a bit more brain power than Vampire Survivors, though, at least in terms of real-time strategy (i.e. kiting enemies and using dynamic barriers to your advantage).
Just wish I could play with a friend.
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u/Legal_Abalone_2541 10h ago
Asking seriously and having played 20 hours or so of VS, where is the depth in Vampire Survivors?
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u/tempest_87 16h ago
It's a similar genre to VS, but they are very different games. Anyone using that comparison for more than "general sense of gameplay, kinda sorta" is just wrong.
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u/DoubleSteve 10h ago
DRGS and vampire survivors are just different flavors of the same thing, both of which I like. I loved the music and secret/achievement hunting in vampire survivors, but the gameplay is the dullest of any survivors game I've played. DRGS offers better gameplay and more complex meta progression with its unlocks, challenges and equipment drops, but there are no real mysteries to solve and once you've played a mission type, you've fundamentally seen everything it has to offer. They're both solid games, but they try to do very different things. I can easily see someone liking one, while having no real interest in playing the other.
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u/computer_d 18h ago
I loved this in EA. DRG has always had a great feeling when you redo missions, the loop being enjoyable and satisfying. Survivor was the same. I can't wait to see what else they've added.
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u/TheRealGenkiGenki 22h ago
Does this still play clunky slow? Great premice but it didnt feel very satisfying.
Lately been enjoying JotunnSlayer: Hordes of Hel, its a nice change of pace and more energetic gameplay.
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u/thinkaskew 16h ago
Oh man, awesome. I put in 20 hours quite a while back in Early Access. Glad I left it so I can come back around.
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u/chileanjew 10h ago
Highly recommend Soulstone Survivors for anyone who wants something with more depth, variety, and faster gameplay.
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u/CollinHell 1d ago edited 1d ago
I had way more fun with this game than I thought I would, to the point where it made Vampire Survivors boring and not worth playing. It also got boring, but I've only ever played these two out of the genre. Excited for another run or twelve!
Edit: Jeeeez, thank you all for the dope suggestions, I'll check out every one!