Update 2 is just around the corner — it’ll go live in Rogue Core on Wednesday, September 2nd at 13:00 CEST. Here’s your first look at what’s coming. We’ll post the full patch notes when the update goes live next week. This preview will focus more closely at the biggest changes and additions, and our thoughts behind them. Bug fixes, balance tweaks, QoL improvements and smaller stuff like that will go in those patch notes. If you’d like to get your hands on all of this before next week’s release, it's now live in the Experimental Branch! Instructions on how to activate that are at the bottom of this post.
As part of making it easier to tailor the Rogue Core experience to your own tastes, we’re implementing a new difficulty system. With Update 1, we introduced the ‘Assault Pace’ setting to allow more options for adjusting the mission timer. Now, we’re introducing the ‘Threat Level’ difficulty scale. This will uncouple the game difficulty from the chosen Depth. It also means game difficulty is now totally independent from the mission timer, giving you more fine-tuned control over your own game experience.
In Update 2, you’ll see the screen above upon selecting a mission. This big screen will just show up once, and after that the Threat Level will join the Assault Pace toggle over on the right side of the screen.
Here’s how the new setup works:
Threat Level: The five Threat Levels affect the number of enemies, the frequency of swarms, enemy health and movement, enemy aggression (attack frequency and projectile speed) and overall damage.
Assault Pace: This adjusts the pacing of your run, by adding more or less time to the mission timer. Tone it down if you like taking your time, ramp it up if you work best on a deadline.
Depth: With these changes, Depth now only determines access to certain bosses (and the associated boss biome). We’re making it more of a progression system for game content, rather than necessarily being tied to the mission timer and difficulty level. For this reason we have temporarily locked Depth 4 until the fourth boss is ready. Stay tuned!
This system will be available from the start of the game. So if you’re someone who finds Rogue Core too difficult, you’ll be able to play through all the game’s content at a gentler difficulty. And if you think Rogue Core is too easy, you can start right at a high difficulty without having to grind to unlock later Depths. Mostly. To join or host a mission on the maximum “Hellish” Threat Level 5 you’ll need to beat a run on Threat Level 4 first, just to prove you can hang with the big dogs. We hope this addition gives everyone more options to play Rogue Core how they want. We’ve gotten good feedback on this from the Experimental testers so far, and we’ll be watching and listening to take in your thoughts.
Uncoupling Depth Level from overall difficulty also opens up for expanded matchmaking options, meaning more options for you to join a lobby or a game in progress. With an ungated serverlist, you can now join missions that may be at Depths that you haven’t yet unlocked. Previously these would have been off-limits, shrinking your pool of joinable options. In otherwords, more matchmaking for everybody. If you’d like to host missions in certain biomes or Depths, you’ll still need to unlock them yourself.
In response to player feedback, we're getting rid of the bosses’ long invulnerability phases in response to taking loads of damage in a short time. Instead, bosses will either do a very short block, or attempt to block in a way that can still be managed via careful aim, AoE damage or repositioning. Hopefully this makes it feel like more of a fair fight.
We’re expanding the pool of Expenite Upgrades yet again, this time with a focus on elemental damage types. Seven new Expenite Upgrades and one new Artifact are coming in Update 2:
Spark-Booster: When enemies in medium range are electrocuted, you get 45% movement speed for +3 seconds.
Grid-Shock: Damaging electrified targets spreads +50% as electric damage to other enemies connected via electrical arcs.
Weathering Blast: When active Stone Skin expires, deal 50 Ice damage in short range. +25 additional damage per 5 Stone Skin lost.
Icy Shrapnel: Hitting frozen targets launches ice fractures in the opposite direction, dealing +25% Ice damage in a Short Range cone.
Icicle Strike: Power Attacks spawn icicles lasting for +5s.
Concussive Shot: Weakpoint hits have 25% chance to stun targets for +2 seconds. Stun is guaranteed when destroying breakable weakpoints and doubles duration.
Frostbane: For every active Stone Skin you get +5% Ice bonus on all melee damage.
[ARTIFACT] Nuclear Optics: Enemies in your flashlight beam take 30 Radiation damage per second.
We’ve got a new encounter down in the caves: an unfinished, highly-classified research site left behind by R&D. This is a new event which can grant you an Artifact, which has a random chance to spawn instead of an Expenite Event. You don’t have to select the ‘Artifact’ Mission Alteration in order to encounter it. You’ll need to reactivate the experiment and see if you can’t finish what R&D started, before they were forced to abandon the project. OMEGA will guide you along the way.
Based on player enthusiasm about the ‘Jumble’ Alteration, we’re adding four new Alterations to give more gameplay variety to your missions:
High Stakes: Increased Luck in upgrade RNG, but reduced Expenite gains from all sources.
Siege Engines: All enemies (except bosses) move at half speed and have twice as much health.
Headhunter: Expenite does not spawn in the caves, but all enemies drop Expenite on death.
Death Mitosis: All Core Spawn split into two smaller ‘baby zombies’ when killed. All enemies (except bosses) have less health.
The Engineer’s Smart Rifle from DRG is now part of the standard weapon pool. It’s taken some work to get this weapon’s unique auto-lock firing mechanism to work with Rogue Core’s player upgrades and damage systems, but now it’s tested and combat-ready. It’ll probably be really good at taking out those pesky Boomticks. Let us know what you think.
A long-range threat is coming to the mines. Meet the Voidkin Dominator, a tankier, harder-hitting version of its smaller cousin, the Drifter. Consider this a high-priority target. The Reclaimer’s Handbook reads:
"The Dominator exists as a living siphon of Rift energy, corrupting its body in the process. Little is known about this creature in an adolescent state, before exposure to extreme Rift radiation. It is able to target foes with hard-hitting projectiles that leave volatile Rift energy lingering in the area of impact. On death, the Dominator releases its internal energy reserves, resulting in an intense explosion. Keep your distance."
We’ve added 3 new facility entrance rooms (the place where you select your first weapon) and 15 new cavern formations to the cave generation system. We’ve also reworked the cave generator’s process for connecting individual caverns, so this will hopefully result in more variety in the physical layout of each level.
We’re putting together a new home for the Molaktula Gatekeeper boss, so now each of the Gatekeepers bosses have their own corresponding biome. Like the others, this biome should ‘bleed’ into the original mission biome more and more as you venture further down. Our intent here is to give each boss and Depth a more distinct identity, and more visual variety between missions.
All Reclaimers have been automatically granted Security Clearance Level Alpha within the Intel system. This means that brand new players will no longer be locked out of starting Expenite Events or opening the Grenade Locker during their first missions.
Maybe this is a smaller thing but hey it’s in the post now.
Like we said up top, all of this is currently live over in Experimental. We’ve started running Experimental Branch for longer periods of time, with the aim of collecting feedback on gameplay systems with enough time to make tweaks and rebalances. Much of Update 2 has already been shaped and sharpened by the feedback of our brave Experimental testers. If you’ve got the time and interest, you’re very welcome to hop in and give it a go. Anybody can access the Experimental Branch if they own Rogue Core on Steam.
Here’s how to set it live:
Right click Rogue Core in your Steam library and select ‘Properties’
Under ‘Properties,’ click the ‘Game Versions & Betas’ tab
Select ‘experimental’ within that tab
Then the game will update and will boot into the Experimental branch next time you launch it. You can switch back any time through the same menu. Keep in mind that your save files from the Experimental branch don’t carry over, because we have cheats enabled there.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Again, the full run-down of everything new (even the little stuff, of which there is plenty) is coming in the patch notes when Update 2 goes live. Which is next week on Wednesday September 2nd. At 13:00 CEST right after we eat our lunch. Rock and Stone, Reclaimers! With love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew