Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mephisto]

I saw a few videos of Deep Sky Derelicts on YouTube. The art and theme made me pause the video and go buy it before resuming. One of the videos I watched compared it to early Darkest Dungeon. You know, right when it was released? There wasn't much to it but the potential was there.

In a sentence: Hub-based dungeon exploration where you're intended to die repeatedly.

You've got a party of three. You can choose their class at the beginning but that's it. Each comes with a different loadout of equipment. Generally that's a weapon (or two), a tool (or two), and a shield. Each item gives a selection of "cards" that are randomly drawn from at the beginning of combat. Continuing the card theme, I'm pretty sure skills are shuffled back in immediately after use. You can also add two mods to each item, adding more cards to your deck.

You grab quests from the hub. You head out to derelicts. You explore, gathering loot and experience and using energy. You head back to the hub to sell your loot, hand in any quests you might have finished (you don't have to complete them in one go), and refill your energy before heading back out.

You're going to have money issues unless you play smart. When you start off, you may notice that you begin with 1500 credits and there are many nice items you'd like in the pawn shop. Those items go for 2-500 credits each. It takes upwards of a hundred credits to refill your energy each time you come back. Healing damage costs several hundred per character. Resurrecting a character takes a thousand. You rarely sell an item for more than a hundred. The starting quests may give you 500 or so, while progressing the main quest may result in 1500.

As I said, play smart. My most successful game thus far has me spending as little as possible on "stuff", instead saving it for life support costs and any healing I may have to do. My equipment and mods come from loot.

The game is heavy on resource management. Keep your shields up so you don't have to do expensive healing back at the hub. Watch your energy, making sure you've got enough to get back to your ship. Energy decreases in combat as well so keep an eye on it and don't enter combat (or just run) if you're running low. You can't completely disregard combat, however - leveling up your characters gives you skill points that greatly improve your surviveability.

The videos I watched:
SplatterCat
ChristopherOdd

The game

[Folly]

Why does space look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland?

[Mephisto]

The hint's in the title. For some reason, there are lots of derelict ships floating around. You're tasked with exploring them and finding information regarding the location of one derelict in particular that may or may not exist.

[nenjin]

The aesthetic similarities to DD are almost enough to bug me.

But man if the trailer music is indicative of anything it's going to have a great soundtrack.

[Mephansteras]

Looks worth keeping an eye on, at least.

[Biowraith]

Seems like a cool game, but note that at the moment there's very little content, you can clear what's currently available of the campaign in 2-3 hours fully exploring each derelict/map.  Other than that there's just the 'arena' - a series of fights without the ability to go back to base and recharge/heal like you can in the campaign, see how long you can survive sorta thing (in my case, about 4 fights before tpk).

[Majestic7]

huh, they really copied DD's aesthetics. The game looks interesting, but the decision to make everything cost energy is a bit strange. Especially every combat turn costing energy. Without a difficulty toggle to change the energy consumption, it seems like a mechanic that would make the game just frustrating. Basically, leading into situations were you've lost the game three hours ago but just didn't know it.

So yeah, unless that changes, pass.

[Sergius]

I just tried this.

The gameplay is actually pretty neat, plays nothing like DD but the art and attack animations are very similar (basically take the attack sprite from DD and put a comic book border around them and you get this) but it's more like Guild of Dungeoneering with the cards and how equipment changes that (but also gives you stats like damage). Some equipment looks good in theory because it gives 8 instead of 5 damage, but if you get one card instead of 4 that means it'll almost never come up in your list of attacks - but if you get a ranged weapon and some other item gives you ranged attacks, those still use that weapon's damage.

And can confirm, the energy mechanic completely ruins the game and makes it notfun. You can go back and forth with cheap energy refills at the station and explore about half of the ship, but the other half is just impossible without buying a bunch of expensive batteries. And even then, you think you have enough but if the boss battle is long enough you can't even get back to your ship and get TPK'd.

[Mephisto]

I never really had a problem with exploration. In my last run, I never purchased anything from the store (including energy refill items). Granted, the final few excursions in each derelict involved heading out to the fringes, scanning a few times, and getting into 1-3 combats before heading back.

That being said, I "beat" the game shortly after Biowraith's comment. I'm eager to see what they do with it but I'm not reinstalling until they release something more than bugfixes. It really is super short at the moment.

[Mephisto]

This appears to have fully released ten days ago. I haven't really played any PC games in at least a month - I may have to break my fast by binging my way through this again.

[Ygdrad]

This appears to have fully released ten days ago. I haven't really played any PC games in at least a month - I may have to break my fast by binging my way through this again.

Let us know how it turned out.