When mining, one should expect the unexpected. That’s true both in real life and in the sci-fi co-op shooter,Deep Rock Galactic. An unaware team of dwarves will easily become bug food.
Deep Rock Galacticis a procedurally generated game. While the endgame Deep Dive missions have pre-set, repeatable seeds, most of the time players will be wandering into completely unknown caves.
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Adding to the game’s sense of uncertainty are the mutators, which are warnings and anomalies that alter the game’s rules. They tend to either introduce more hazards, such as increasing the spawn rate of Cave Leeches or Glyphid Exploders, or give the players a boon, such as double XP or extra gold. But one of the mutators, Rich Atmosphere, acts a bit differently than the rest.
The Effects of Rich Atmosphere
Rich Atmosphere’s effects are twofold. One of these effects is a minor cosmetic effect, and the other completely changes how the game feels to play.
The minor effect is, due to the unusual gasses in the air,everyone’s voices are pitched up. One of the gasses must be helium. There are no real advantages or disadvantages to this, but it will be amusing to those whoalready love to spamDeep Rock Galactic’s emotes.
The second effect is much more notable: because the air surrounding the players is lighter,everyone moves 50% faster. It probably sounds like a good deal forDeep Rock Galactic’s scout players, since they’re already all about mobility, but it’s not all positives. There’s an important catch.
When the game says that everyone’s movement speed is increased by 50%, it meanseveryone’s speed. The player characters aren’t the only ones affected;their enemies get a speed boost as well.
Despite being listed as one of the semi-beneficial anomalies, Rich Atmosphere’s effects are mostly neutral. It doesn’t change the core strategies behind the game. Even with a faster movement speed,Deep Rock Galactic’s drillers should still focus on making time-saving shortcuts. But it puts everyone under stricter reflex tests, as they have less time before their enemies are on top of them.
Right now, it’s luck of the draw on whether the player will encounter Rich Atmosphere on any given mission. There’s no way to guarantee it or ban it. That being said,Deep Rock Galactic’s developers are planning to add mod support. It’s likely that, at some point in the future, players will be able to manually experiment with different mutators.
Deep Rock Galacticis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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