Soren_GSG

This is an impressive piece of work!
As we are moving closer to launch, this is exactly the kind of info new players seek.
I will contact you directly :-)

Thx for your concern!

As Jacob wrote, we are mostly in a work-from-home situation now and are adjusting our workflow a bit, but not much. Some are home with families and kids and that will lower production speed. But for Update 29 we were in a good place already, so we still expect to release U29 before the end of March.

Just to clarify, Denmark is NOT past the high point of the pandemic curve yet. We had a lot of cases very fast because many Danes were returning from winter vacations in Austria and Italy. So that skewed our statistics quite a bit, but it also resulted in some accelerated responses from the government. It's hard to say where we are on the curve, but I estimate 2-3 months before we are out of this first corona wave with the high point happening within the next 4 weeks.

As a game development company, we are super fortunate to be in an online, digital business. While many other types of businesses are facing extremely hard times, we have it ...

Robert (our Art Director) just promised (on a live stream) for the Barrel Armor to come back at some point in the future, but not in the version that was teased some time ago. We have updated the quality and the way we create our armors, so it needs to be rebuilt.

The Miner's Manual will, later on, utilize the Laserscanner for adding info, but probably not in the first iteration. But other than that, we do not have any concrete plans on improving the PING-system. We don't want it to be too complicated or with any risk of being abused for trolling. That said, there might still be some things we could do to improve it.

We will announce more details about the Deluxe Edition when we announce the release date. And that is still some time away since we have to go to Certification for Xbox first.

Hey, thanks, those are all ideas worth considering for our Quality of Life efforts. Not making any promises other than we will at least consider these.

More Biomes is on our wishlist as well. And it has a pretty good chance of happening sooner rather than later. We'll focus on some new Mission Types first, but then Biomes might be next.
We'll keep things on Hoxxes - there are still plenty of unexplored areas on this hostile planet.

1. Yes. We just released a new Roadmap with info on 1.0. And we will be adding more Promotion stars and very likely some cosmetic rewards linked to your Promotion level.

Maybe?

But probably no, since you are all really good it finding out secret stuff!

1. We don't have a formal way of reviewing feedback. It's more like what is the talk at the office and what did we just release or are working on. We share some of the feedback in our office Slack and that helps give perspective to the discussions. When we make decisions, we always have to weigh in both technical and balance implications. And, if a change could potentially damage the current vibe of the game. In many cases, it's down to a combination of rational discussions and gut feelings. One thing that has never failed: Whenever we are transparent and open and honest about a decision it comes back in a positive way - no matter how difficult it feels to write it out.
2. I have whole talk taking 30 minutes just about that subject :-) But the short of it is this: we simply tried EVERYTHING we could think of to promote the game and then we simply repeated the stuff that worked. And scrapped the rest (which was most of it). The stuff that worked was mostly making the Close...

Thanks - it was me in the interview. Digital Logik are such a nice bunch and it was a really relaxed interviewed.

The plan is basically to continue what we have done in Early Access: deliver frequent updates with lots of new features and content. The frequency will probably slow down a bit. Right now, we are doing most Updates in 6-8 weeks and that might change to 10-12 weeks instead. You could call the updates expansions if you want to. And unless it proves impossible, we plan to give the updates for free.

Let's just say we are not going out of business anytime soon :-)
Unless we blow everything on an uber-extravagant release party!

When we started on the project 4 years ago, we had modding/map-editor on the list. But early on it became clear to us that just building this game and the whole procedurally cave generating tech was a huge task. So we pushed away ideas like a cave-editor and modding. Since then, we have learned a lot about Unreal and also talked to other developers who have shipped mod-editors to their game. So who knows what the future will bring on this?

Shooting range:
We have talked about multiple solutions based on the feedback/ideas we have seen on this. One would be a fun-and-games version for the Space-Rig, mostly just as some social stuff to do between missions (like the Abyss bar and barrel kicking). This would not be for testing your weapons as that requires a lot more features.
The other would be more like a practice-cave where you can actually test your loadouts against something that could act as enemy targets. This is a MUCH larger task, but we can see that many ...

Female dwarves, along with many other large features/content, were pushed into the future. At least they were pushed beyond 1.0, so we removed them from the Roadmap to not give false hope. But they are not gone from our wishlist of things to add. So, yes, it might happen later on, but it's not planned at the moment.

1, Yes, We expect more biomes to be added post-launch. Not immediately, but too far in the future either.

1. Voice lines are tricky since we have been developing the game for many years now. Normally, you would do most at the same time, but that's not been the nature of this development. The voice actor is the same, and so are the voice line scriptwriters, but the game has evolved and so has the voice lines. There are no plans to redo the old voice or new voice lines.

2. Spelunking in co-op in Minecraft was one inspiration. The feeling of exploring a procedurally generated cave with dangers, but then have a good shooter instead of the melee/crafting focus from Minecraft. As co-op FPS was also part of this, Left 4 Dead is an obvious inspiration. On top of this. for the theme, we were inspired by the original Aliens movies. We wanted to add elements to the game that made some of those classic scenes from Aliens appear in a non-scripted way.

We have had a Boss Encounter or a Boss Mission Type on the Roadmap several times (in the 'And then maybe...' section). We only removed it because it became clear that we wouldn't be able to add it before the 1.0 launch. So, the concept of a Boss monster is still greenlit, and it's more a matter of when it will than if it will happen.

Now, the next question is if that boss monster will be a bug queen. I have no idea :-)

Yes :-)

On the Nitra question:
Back in Closed Alpha (so more than 2 years ago), we had an option in the game for calling down a fixed turret using gold. You could also call in stationary light. But both of these were cannibalizing on class abilities and tying it into gold also created some unwanted friction.

We could consider something for Nitra resource instead, but the risk would be that less experienced players might spend their Nitra on some one-time help and then later lack it for ammo. The Nitra balance is less of a problem for experienced players, but you might still get some friction in the group if someone uses the Nitra. This would probably just be fun in a 4-player with close friends and voice-chat but might be frustrating in a public game.

Mobility tools (or traversal tools) are the least likely to get alternate options. We believe, that with the current setup, there is a delicate and well-oiled balance in the game and any changes/additions here would need some serious testing at least.

The Utility slot could be a candidate for future alternate options. But each time we add more things to existing classes, we are probably pushing any realistic options for an entirely new class further into the future.

When we started Ghost Ship Games, we coined the phrase "Co-op First" to help us stay laser-focused on our first game. This also helped fans to know what they were buying into.
And this has been so successful that we, for now, are sticking to the Co-op First mantra.

Will we in the future develop a game that is not co-op focused? That's a possibility, but I think it would at least have a co-op mode as well.

And yes, DRG has evolved beyond our dreams, so expanding IP (in any form) is also a possibility. Btw, we have previously stated that the only race we talk about is the dwarves. And for any future products that will still be the case.

We hope (and expect) that by adding in more unique Mission Types this should also greatly help on the diversity of the Deep Dives. And yes, much further in the future it wouldn't be out of the question with mission types unique to Deep Dives.