Ghost Ship Publishing and developer Ghost Ship Games have announced Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, a cooperative roguelite first-person shooter spin-off of Deep Rock Galactic. It will launch in Early Access for PC via Steam in November 2024.
Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:
About
Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core is a spin-off of Deep Rock Galactic with a roguelite twist. The roguelite twist means you start from basics in each mission and cooperatively build up powers and abilities for the team, sometimes leading to insanely overpowered builds and other times to spectacular flops.
Story
Expenite, a new mineral of incredible value and utility, has been discovered within planet Hoxxes IV! Space mining company Deep Rock Galactic immediately sets up covert mining operations deeper than ever, to harvest this precious material. But without warning, all the dig sites go dark, and all contact is abruptly lost.
In this action-packed one to four-players cooperative roguelite, you’ll join a team of elite dwarven Reclaimers called to planet Hoxxes IV to deal with the situation. Bring the lost dig sites back online, unravel the mystery of The Greyout, and keep it from happening again using all the guts, guns, and grit at your disposal.
The Core has gone Rogue. Deep Rock Galactic needs your help!
Gameplay
Each Rogue Core mission begins with selecting your loadout. Pick a Phase Suit equipped with an Active Ability of your choice, as well as one of a range of unique Reclaimer Weapons. Once loaded up, you board your Drop Pod and land at the outer boundary of a lost dig site, facing the Greyout Barrier surrounding it. Luckily, R&D has equipped you with a device capable of carving a hole through the Barrier—but once you go in, there is no way back except mission success. Proceed through the Barrier on foot and fight your way down multiple procedurally-generated stages to the deepest and most dangerous level of the dig site.
During each stage, you will salvage caches of Deep Rock Galactic equipment and weapons to expand your arsenal for that mission. The dig sites are also full of the wonder-mineral Expenite. Deposit any Expenite you can find into your trusty Processor Drone to generate a wide range of powerful temporary upgrades. Thus, as you progress ever deeper, your power will grow, but so will the challenge. Every advantage will be necessary to make it through all the stages, reach the Core, and reclaim the dig site.
Between missions, you return to your ship—the RV-09 “Ramrod,” parked in low orbit above Hoxxes IV. By completing mission tasks and reclaiming dig sites, you will earn the means to research and permanently unlock new Reclaimer Weapons, Phase Suits, and Suit Mods. Expand your gear options and experiment with various setups to tackle the deepest and most dangerous dig sites.
Open Development
With the announcement of Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, we want to invite you along for the early, early, early open development journey of Rogue Core. That means that you will be exposed to early ideas, early sketches, early mockups, and early implementations, way before stuff is “done”.
…Did we mention this was early development? Also, this is a good thing.We started our Open Development journey on Deep Rock Galactic two full years before we even launched into Early Access, and by now we feel very experienced with the process. The engagement we established with our community during and after that time has simply been awesome. The process made Deep Rock Galactic a better game than it otherwise would have been, and we very much want to reproduce that for Rogue Core as much as possible.
In other words, this is our open invitation to you. Come join us on this journey as we tackle making a game right from the very earliest stage of development, way before we launch into Early Access. We recognize that this kind of thing is not everyone’s cup of tea, and if that’s the case, no worries. But we have faith that a lot of you will.
We will keep you up to date on the Steam forum and on Discord. If you are interested, join us and help us make Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core the best game it can be!
Further down the line, there will of course also be closed alpha testing to be done. So follow us, if you’re interested in getting your feet wet in the early-early access versions of the game.
Deeper, darker, and more dangerous than ever. Join the Dwarven Reclaimers.
Watch the announcement teaser trailer below. View the first screenshots at the gallery.