Deep Rock Galactic is a remarkable little game. I had heard about it in passing from some friends and picked it up myself soon after reuniting with some friends and finishing Left 4 Dead, at which point it quickly endeared itself to me. Deep Rock Galactic‘s polygonal aesthetic and lighthearted satire (at the expense of callous companies and detached management) pulled me in, but it was the fact that I could kick back in the game’s social hub with my friends and have a fake beer—sometimes accompanied by a real one—that won me over. Procedurally generated levels meant that I could keep coming back to this world that so effortlessly charmed me and boy, have I. What’s helped is the game’s radical approach to additional content, namely that everything (except for cosmetics) is completely free of charge. You need only buy the game, or pick it up on a service like PS Plus and Game Pass, and you’ll never have to pay for additional gameplay content that should land in the game or a season pass, a fact that the game’s director Mikkel Pederson confirmed in an interview with me.
Deep Rock Galactic is now five years old, a rare age in this current era of online and ongoing games. It’s a milestone worth celebrating, especially in light of the way things have been going for live service games of late, and the team behind the game is taking the time to look back as much as it’s looking to the game’s optimistic future. Part of that involves releasing an early version of Deep Rock Galactic—the earliest publicly available version as a matter of fact—for posterity in the near future. And with the future in mind, I recently sat down with Pederson to talk about all things Deep Rock Galactic, from the game’s inception, to its approach to seasonal content, and what the studio may introduce to the game down the line.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Paste: Was Deep Rock Galactic always planned to be an ongoing title?
Mikkel Pederson: I think no, but maybe it was part of the dream. I think that the, I mean, I think it’s impossible to imagine that when we started it in early access five years ago, that Deep Rock Galactic would be where it is today. So it was definitely something that we obviously hoped for, but I mean, we didn’t plan for it. When we started out developing Deep Rock Galactic, as you mentioned here, we were of course, very inspired by a game like Left 4 Dead. Actually, the core idea for the game was what if you explore procedurally generated dungeons or caves in Minecraft, and then what if you had big guns?
And you could play with your teammates just playing Left 4 Dead, right? That was basically our core idea for Deep Rock Galactic. I mean we hoped to just make a fun game living up to that premise and then of course we would just pour our hearts into it. But then as development went on, we got more and more ideas for how to expand Deep Rock Galactic, and we just saw that there were so many possibilities here. And when we started engaging with our community, they also had a lot of ideas and were in on the dream with us. We have basically just been continuing developing it, seeing features in the game that we ourselves would like to see in the game.
Paste: How heavily a role does your community have in what comes to Deep Rock Galactic?
Pederson: Basically we decided very early on that we are doing this open development, but we are the ones who are developing the game. So obviously we have ideas for what we want to do with which direction the game should take, but it is also, we are very much inspired by our community. And I think our community is so awesome and is a huge motivating factor for us. The synergy we have with our community… [the community] really wants us to do our best with the game. So in that regard, it means a lot. Obviously there’s a lot of fans that also like spamming us with a lot of ideas of what they want to see in the game. And we read most of it in the beginning of the life cycle of Deep Rock Galactic. We didn’t have as many fans as we have today, and it was way easier to keep up with all the feedback we got. And now it’s overwhelming, which of course is a very positive thing, but also makes it more difficult to stay completely one-to-one.
Paste: What would you attribute to Deep Rock Galactic‘s success and longevity all these years later?
Pederson: We were inspired by Left 4 Dead, right? And Left 4 Dead doesn’t have that many retention mechanics in it. It is basically you just go in, you play with three friends, and then it is just fun gameplay, right? And in the beginning, that was also just what we were creating with Deep Rock Galactic. But as development went on and we were producing updates for the game, we started to introduce more retention mechanics, more upgrade systems. We got this promotion system where you can promote your dwarves. And at some point we also introduced the whole game loop around getting deep dives and overclocks for your guns and that really improved the time people could sink into the game.
And we could see that our retention of players just went up there. And then we realized at some point—after the 1.0 launch—we were putting out a lot of content for free in updates, and we could see that when all this content came out, we had an influx of players and they were all, I mean, maybe they had even sunk in like a couple of hundred hours into the game already, right? So they really quickly burnt through the content that we produced, and we felt that was sort of like a pity. That we got them back for the update, but then they saw the content and then they sort of stopped playing. And that made us think about introducing a season pass.
It is very difficult to produce content for people who have just bought your game and people who have sunk in 200 hours. And making content for both those different kinds of audience is very challenging. But then we said, “okay, what if we do a season pass and everyone will start at level one for this season pass, and we’ll go through and experience whatever is in the season, and they will do that. Even new old players will experience the same thing, right?” And then we started to do seasons and that was, basically the motivating factor for us to do seasons.
Paste: How has the seasonal model worked for Deep Rock Galactic and what have you learned since incorporating it into your game and observing other versions of that model?
Pederson: Obviously when we started doing the season pass, I was looking at a lot of different season passes that were out there. And as I said before, our motivation for doing a season pass was not to make more money. Obviously we would like to do that, but our motivation was a different one. But I think that is just something to have in mind. That, I mean, we did the season pass because we felt that it would benefit our players when we were coming out with content because it would just make it more fun to play the game. And that is also why we then decided to make this completely free. So that has worked extremely well for us.
And I think now when we rolled out season one—that would have been our 36th update—it became a little bit, not fatigued, but I was sort of missing this formula. “What is an update,” right? Before that we were doing updates to the game all over the place. It could be very different things and sort of like formalizing and saying that, well, a season is: a season pass of course, but it’s also game content that is happening in the game, and that feeds into the season pass and it has a theme, and that gives us a template for what we should be working on.
Paste: Speaking of formalizing, has the seasonal approach then locked down a template for Deep Rock Galactic updates moving forward? Like, should we always expect a new biome, or a new round of weapons with coming updates?
Pederson: No, not specifically, I would say .In the first two seasons we wanted to do a round of weapons. Weapons are very complicated for us to do, and they are very time consuming. We have 24 weapons, six weapons per dwarf, and it takes a lot of time for us to do them because we have overclocks and we have mods on them, and we have all the cosmetics that you can get. So every weapon needs to be able to be visually working in with all the old cosmetics that we have in the game. So it’s very, very complicated for us to do a new weapon. But anyways, we set out to do a new round of weapons and in the first season we did the primary weapons, and then in the second season we did secondary weapons. And then in the third season, we did a round of grenades. In the fourth season, I don’t know yet! It could be something else. It is not set in stone what it is. If it was too predictable, it’d also be boring.
That is also one of the things: When we are so close working so closely together with our community, we also have the responsibility to surprise, right? And do something that is not obvious. But of course also do some of the requests that our community has! But also give them or do something that is something they don’t expect, because that’s also interesting, especially if you’ve been playing the game for so many years.
Paste: While we’re talking about seasons, tell me all about Deep Rock‘s latest season, Plaguefall. How did you settle on rockpox (a virus that affects the terrain) as the main mechanic? Was there any hesitancy about introducing a plague given the last few years?
Pederson: First of all, I think we knew that we didn’t want to do any more robots because we had done the rival robots company invading Hoxxes and we had done that in season one and season two. So we wanted to change the theme. We were sort of exploring what we should do, and then we had this idea: what if meteorites were hitting Hoxxes with some kind of infection that would be spreading there. And we [already] have this procedural technology which we used to generate the terrain, and we thought we could do something really cool with the meteorite strikes happening during you playing a mission. So we had this idea and then we basically just went from there… then obviously we had the whole pandemic going on at the same time. Obviously we were aware that there were some parallels here, but I mean, it’s not really [inspired by] that.
Paste: You’ve been telling subtle stories with these seasons, including introducing the aforementioned rival companies, which raises the question: what’s the future of storytelling in Deep Rock Galactic? Will there ever be a more explicit narrative, or are you all happy where you are?
Pederson: Yeah, I think the short answer is we are not ever going to tell like a traditional story arc. The game is a co-op game, and you’re playing it with your friends or with strangers. But it is, it is more about playing a game that takes place in a setting than it is actually exploring a story. The storytelling is really coming from you playing with your friends, right? You are really generating the story in Deep Rock Galactic. The story comes from something crazy happening when you are playing and then you do something crazy to solve the situation, solve the problem you are in and then you barely make it out. Basically, you just generated the best story we could never compete with if [we] were writing a story, right? I think that is really how we approach storytelling in Deep Rock Galactic, because as you say, there is a lot of story and a lot of lore, but it is more about creating these situations that you’re then interacting with… that you are changing the scenery, and then you are interacting with it and then you get a different experience from it.
Paste: So does that mean we’ll never meet Karl [Karl is an enigmatic dwarf who presumably worked for the company Deep Rock Galactic, and died or went missing. He is frequently mentioned in voice lines and has become an in-joke for the community.]?
Pederson: [Mikhail takes a noticeably lengthy pause here.]
I’ll never say never. Okay. I never say never. But Karl is a mythic character for the dwarves and I think he should stay like that.
Was it good that you saw Darth Vader as a child?
[We both burst into laughter for a few seconds.]
I think sometimes you can know too much about someone and it actually tears them down, not builds them up.
Paste: As we wrap up, I was wondering about some points the community has largely already brought up in conversations with the team. For example, are female dwarves part of your current plans?
Pederson: It is not in our plans currently. And this is a topic that comes up a lot and it is not that we have anything against female dwarves. It is just that it’s very complicated and we have to put a lot of work into it. And we are right now five years into the development of Deep Rock Galactic and basically we’d rather make new content like gameplay content than making a lot of new cosmetics and have to do a lot of new voice recordings and so on.
Obviously we could do it if we wanted to, but that would just take a lot of time and the game development would stop. And you know, we started out as a very small company and we’re still a very small company, and one of the things is that we have two voice actors in the game right now, and we only have one guy, and he’s basically just recording one set of voice lines, and then we are pitching the voice lines for the different dwarves. That makes it super easy for us to do voice lines. And I think for a game like ours, we have way more voice lines than any other game that is comparable to us. And that is because it’s simply so easy for us to do new voice lines.
Paste: You’ve spent a lot of time reworking the game’s four classes to this point, but is there a possibility of adding more classes to the game?
Pederson: You are hitting the right spots here, because these are some of the biggest questions that we constantly get. Regarding the class question, I think it is super difficult. If you play other co-op games— I think Vermintide has five classes— and you play with four players, and there’s this thing about always feeling that you are lacking a class. I really don’t like that personally. I think that is super nice that you can actually go and play a game [of Deep Rock Galactic] and you are a complete team.
So that is one argument for not doing a fifth class. Another argument is that instead of going wide with classes, we are going really deep with the four classes we have. As I said before earlier, we only have 24 guns in total split across the four classes, right? So there’s only six guns per class, but each of those guns can be customized and [players can] take it in different directions. So we go very deep on the different weapons instead of going wide, and that is just a design decision we made at some point. And I think right now it would be a tremendous amount of work for us to do a fifth class if that fifth class should have the same depth as all the other [four] classes. So those are the two reasons I think that are the main reasons for us not doing a fifth class.
“Are we never gonna do fifth class?” I’m not gonna say a clear no to that, I’m just basically saying that I think it is not in our current plans right now. I think there are strong arguments for not doing it, which is that we could potentially destroy the game balance between the four classes we already have.
Paste: Finally, what about other worlds? Hoxxes IV (the setting of Deep Rock Galactic) already has plenty of biomes but would you add a whole other world?
Pederson: Obviously that would be possible.
I mean, I can go back a little bit to when we started designing Deep Rock Galactic, we had a lot of discussions about whether we should go to multiple planets or one planet. And at the point when we were started working on Deep Rock Galactic, we saw No Man’s Sky coming out with like a gazillion different planets. And personally, I felt that like story wise, this thing about having a location—[Hoxxes IV] is where we are—was actually a super nice constraint to the game design. Obviously you can say we can just do more biomes, right? And we have the procedural generation, so obviously when you go into a biome, you could just say that it was different planets, but storywise and setting wise, there’s just something nice about, “You are here. You are working from the space rig, and this is the planet that you mine.” So from a story perspective, I just really like that setting and that’s why we went with that and not just went like multiple planets.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.