Dwarf cooperative Deep Rock Galactic has been raising the stakes for years. While the off-world mining company was once concerned only with steep slopes and raging insects, it has since had to deal with a rival mineral company’s robot army and a killer alien plague. If the next question is: “It used to be about the rocksYou know?”, then DRG’s upcoming Season 5 update, Drilling Deeper, is the answer.
Season 5 is similar in scope to previous seasons and even serves as a tie-in to the upcoming roguelike spin-off Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, but is also a reorientation of sorts. These newer threats are being shelved, in favor of a renewed emphasis on the deadly caving and free-form digging that had previously made DRG one of the most unique shooters in the world. That’s why the new mission type, Deep Scan, is all about exploring the crispy crust of Hoxxes IV further than ever before – even if that means taking a ride on a wildly unsafe “Drillevator” to get there.
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Season 5 also brings the usual side gubbins, including a free battle pass, cosmetics to fill it and some new weapon overclocks, but after playing a round of Deep Scan I can say that the biggest version of Drilling Deeper also includes the is the tastiest. Accompanied in the darkness by Ghost Ship Games lead game designer Mike Akopyan and marketing manager Aaron Hathaway, our task was to collect Morkite Seeds from a geode hidden deep underground. So deep, in fact, that to locate it we first had to locate and scan a trio of buried crystals, after which we could drag our little butts to the triangular geode.
In part, this was classic Deep Rock: scroll through a cave to a goal, plant a cartoonish, oversized mechanism on it, and wait for a bar to fill up while space bugs try to nibble on our beards. Still, there were plenty of new cogs in the machine, including the cave itself, the result of a new proc-gen design that turned the usually spacious sand biome into a discombobulating ant’s nest of winding tunnels. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been lost countless times, although five seasons later, the injection of a little navigational uncertainty isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Since Hoxxes IV is an ugly planet – an insect planet – the local wildlife has also evolved. The Vartok Scalebramble proved to be short on extermination thrills, mostly sitting on cave ceilings waiting for us to blast off its weak points, but the Glyphid Stalker made for a much more formidable opponent. It’s a cloaked ambush predator, like Helldivers 2’s Stalkers, only much better camouflaged and giving off only the slightest glow that’s easy to miss in DRG’s frantic battles. As such, they nailed me repeatedly, with the added punishment of a shield-undermining EMP effect that left me open for their weaker brethren to nibble on.
They’re crafty little bastards, though the Stalkers aren’t Season 5’s grossest enemies. That would be the Core Spawn Crawlers, an uncomfortably humanoid mix of human, insect and mineral that overran us during an attempt at the new Core Stone event. Like Korlok Tyrant-Weeds, Core Stones are randomly occurring, optional side objectives that provide valuable resources at the cost of starting a potentially ammo-draining battle; in this case against a gang of creeping rock people rather than a sentient plant. They’re fast and strong, and while they ultimately couldn’t stop us from breaking through the Core Stone monolith to get the goodies inside, the fact that they so barely resemble any other creature in DRG made me both uneasy as curious.
This turned out to be the intention. Season 5’s links to Rogue Core are more subtle than overt (for example, there’s no post-game cutscene where a dead-eyed Mission Control tells your dwarf he’s putting together a team), but hints are given that you might be drilling too deep for your own team Good. The Core Spawn Crawlers, which Akopyan tells me will also appear in the spinoff, simply represent the first sign that the company will soon have a self-inflicted mess on its hands – a mess that needs to be cleaned up in Rogue Core.
Back in the anthill cave, however, we still had to find a Morkite geode, which was soon revealed after the third successful crystal excavation. It was too far down to reach by conventional means, but that’s where the Drillevator came into the picture: a circular platform that got us through the last few hundred meters in style, if not comfort.
What followed was DRG’s version of every slow-moving cable car defense game you’ve ever played in an FPS, as a horde of rattling Glyphids swarmed from the freshly drilled rock towards our claustrophobic metal ring. Familiar perhaps, but I loved it. The constantly moving platform and lack of escape routes made the descent feel dramatic and desperate, much more so than the static action scenes the game usually trades in. Especially when the drill gets stuck on a particularly stubborn layer of rock, forcing a dwarf’s gun to go. calm down to fix it. I play DRG pretty much every week, and this was the first time in months that I felt like I was about to drown in a mandibular sea – deep enough that my body would never be found, buried in a perfectly circular grave alongside two game developers.
We did survive, however, and our reward was a surprisingly soft landing in the promised geode. A few moments of seed collecting and gazing at the (strangely beautiful) crystal cave later, it was time to perform the extraction using another work-related expense: souped-up jet boots that could propel us all the way back to the Drillevator hole. This was also a lot of fun, and after a battle that deliberately nullified our team’s movement skills, gaining the power of flight felt like the perfect climax.
In short, I now want to make many, many more deep scans. It’s just a happy, fluid, mining-focused mission type of the kind DRG hasn’t won since 2020; I know season 1 added industrial sabotage missions, but they are focused on fighting the robots so are not good. Besides, even if we’re about to dig up something truly gruesome, a return to rock breaking makes a lot of sense. I mean, look at these bearded guys. They are not master hacking technicians or virology experts. They are miners. She mine.
I imagine they’re shooting too, since Season 5 has some promising overclocks for that calling. Judging from the ones I saw in the preview, I’d say the Gunner class is the luckiest recipient, achieving overclocks that turn its rocket launcher into an arching grenade gun or a pile of rock-shattering cluster bombs. Scouts are wary of the splash damage, though he gets some interesting toys of his own, including an M1000 overclocked rifle that marks targets for extra follow-up damage. Personally, I was hoping for more ‘motion assist’ overclocks, in line with the ones that allow Scouts to jump, although Akopyan tells me this is “a bit tricky” to balance given how essential that quick upgrade can feel. Oh well – at least Season 5’s new weapon mods keep up the fine tradition of making drastic changes to weapon behavior, and not just adding or subtracting stats.
As a whole, Season 5 isn’t as concerned with reworking the basics. In many ways it is indeed returning to them, after successive high-concept detours from the core concept of mining. Still, it looks like a new quality update, working in the Rogue Core link without turning into an ad and adding plenty of new things to see, do, and hit with a pickaxe. It officially releases on June 13, with an Experimental Branch release on June 4.