Deep Rock Galactic is a truly excellent online co-op game, one of the best in fact. Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core takes all the cool bits of it and turns it into a rogue-lite.
To step back a hot second: Deep Rock Galactic has you and a few friends pick a specific type of mission, gear up and then jump into a pod that drills into the planet Hoxxes IV with fully destructible environments, and lots of aliens to squash. Your character gets upgraded outside each mission, to get access to various different tools and weaponry. So you go in fully equipped for the mission you've selected with your chosen character class.
With Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core instead of that defined mission structure and fully equipped space dwarves, it's a lot more random, and more fast-paced. You and your friends start missions with basically nothing, and upgrade as you go through the run gaining new equipment and abilities, making a new character build each time you go through. Plus some meta-progression on top of that.
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Sounds like some fun lore behind it too. in Rogue Core, you're an elite Reclaimer, the ones sent in when the miners can't handle the job as you fight through facilities that were previously set up by the Deep Rock Galactic company.
Many have asked and wondered why this isn't an expansion to DRG, and the developers answered in a detailed post on Steam that notes:
It started out as an expansion. But as we got deeper into working on it, we found that we wanted to do a lot of stuff that felt way beyond the theme and feel of DRG. In other words, we felt more creative and excited when we didn’t have to keep making sure every idea for Rogue Core fit with the DRG legacy. Another big factor was Early Access – that’s a big way for us to get community feedback and fine-tune everything, and you can’t do that with DLC.
I have no doubt it will play well on Linux with Proton. Perhaps even Steam Deck too if the requirements are close enough to the original Deep Rock Galactic. The game is a while away though, not likely until Q4 2025.
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