Mike, our lead designer answered a lot of the questions from the chat and was later joined by Mikkel our game director. It's a bit long, but we might do a blog post with some time stamps or similar next week if we feel it makes sense. Feel free to do so and share with the rest of the community, if you manage to watch the entire thing.
I'm gonna piggy-back on this thread to post the most notable excerpts from GSG_Robert's Thursday impromptu Q&A he did in the official Discord. No commentary, interpretation or opinions from me, just quotes presented verbatim and very loosely grouped into logical sections (the original chat flow was a bit chaotic).
EDIT: I should've clarified that, but this is not a transcript of the Q&A from the Friday stream that Jacob linked in the OP! This is a different Q&A that took place on Thursday in a Discord channel.
Big thanks for this effort. It's very appreciated.
Rock and Stone, Miner.
Idk what having more q&a time will do. It's the same answers every time. "We hear what you're saying but we don't wanna and it's too hard and now we're doing this other thing so wait for that" this is dare I say getting like cube world
Did you watch the stream?
I have 1 question. Just 1.
The stream yesterday, one of the recurring themes was 'we have to balance dev time between getting Rogue Core to a somewhat stable alpha, which means we have to delay season 5 of DRG. No matter which way we turn there's just no way around that.'
That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly understandable.
But the question I kept asking my self as I watched the stream was why you guys placed this (what seems to me) artificial time pressure on yourselves?
Hypothetically - Why not just focus on Season 5 and when that gets released you announce Rogue Core with a note that dev times needs to be split, and newer seasons will see longer spans of time between them so you can block out time for both games.
I know it's too late to do that. But the core of that question remains - why the time pressure for Rogue Core? Why not delay the Rogue Core Alpha by 2 months ( I believe I recall ya'll saying there would be 1.5 months or something to build and stress test season 5 before it's June release.)
Why MUST the Rogue Core alpha come first?
I ask this with genuine curiosity. It's not a complaint, it's not criticism. But I just couldn't wrap my head around why the Rogue Core Alpha has to be done before season 5. Why that time pressure?
Is it because you want to build out Rogue Core so you have a foundation to build from for season 5's 'theme'?
Regardless, I'm super excited to see what GSG does with Rogue Core. And I'll still be working overtime down on Hoxxes until then.
… That’s not one question.
But anywho, I’ll try to address it all, but it’s going to be in short form as it’s late/saturday.
As to why not do season 5 first, I think Mike did talk about that, but overall, the reactions would have been the same. Season 4 already took long to do, and it didn’t make sense to keep it secret for much longer, when it outwards seemed like we were just slow at seasons. Resource wise it just makes more sense to focus on getting RC to a state where we can test it and collect feedback, and at that stage we can look into the next season.
Essentially, we’re not putting ourselves under pressure. On the contrary, this is the setup needed to not be under a time pressure. That’s why Season 5 will arrive later than we originally wanted to - so we’re not spreading ourselves thin.
this whole stream can be summed up as
It's too hard :( give us your money
At this point, all your posts are telling me that maybe you just shouldn’t buy the game. :)
Why does all communication have to be in a 2 hours stream format? I appreciate that the devs are trying to communicate with players but this is just inaccessible for a lot of people. Why not post answers in text format on Twitter, Reddit and Discord?
Because this was something that happened during our regular Friday stream, which is a thing that happens just before we close down for the weekend.
Thanks for doing all that. Makes me more patient for season 5. I dislike most plague-themed stuff and hearing we'd have another 7 or 8 months of this just made me want to drink a Leaf Lover's. Rock And Stone :)
You said "Adding 8 player content isn't as simple as just putting four more players on the team" ... how could it not be as simple? I figure it'd just be a bit tedious to copypaste four more slots into a mission session. Bug waves scaling up to X people aren't that hard, are they?
Distilled down to that, it pretty much is that simple, yes. But I think we'd have larger ambitions than that if we went for an 8-player mission. :)
Yo Robert just wanted to say this. At first, I was disappointed that Season 5 was postponed, and me being not a huge fan of rogue-likes didn't help ;) Nonetheless I get more and more excited for it day by day somehow. And like you said, it's good for the team to work on something new and I can see that.
I think you guys could've made the announcement a bit easier for yourself, if you said "don't expect season 5 to come this year" the moment you dropped season 4, since "we work on something new and exciting". Just from a communication standpoint, it's smarter to kinda forewarn people when they are busy with the new shiny stuff :P
With full hindsight like that, that does feel wise, yes. But the fact is, we did not have that information when Season 4 was released. For instance, as I've said elsewhere, it's not until recently it was decided that Rogue Core would be a standalone product. With everything going on, this was pretty much the earliest point in time we could confidently reveal our plans and stick to them.
This makes no sense. If you had released season 5 first and made it clear that season 6 wasnt getting released any time soon people wouldn't be mad and you could take all the time you want. Instead, season 5 was "promised" to come out this year and now people are mad because you shifted your focus on another project without telling us anything first.
We’ve never said anything about a Season 5 release window. The reaction hadn’t been different, because it’s based on assumptions and expectations, and we’ve been extremely careful to not say anything before we knew we could - something that’s been true for every update and season we’ve done.
This is a bit of nitpicking but I feel like it wasn't necessary to keep it vague until the last moment.
This is a part of the Steam announcement for the stream:
"Last, but certainly not least: we’re finally ready to share an update on Deep Rock Galactic, and what we’ve been working on over here. :)"
To me this doesn't exactly communicate that I am supposed to expect a break in the season cycle that has been going for 2 years. I might be mistaken but I don't think there was any additional information about the future of DRG beyond this, leading up to the announcement.
With post-stream clarity, I don't think any of us in here disagree with that. We'll try to do better next time.
This is a little off topic but, will you still be Mission Control in RogueCore or is that role assigned to a different person now?
That's a bit up in the air right now. We have some fun ideas.
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