[Update #2]: Deep Rock Galactic will be digging its way out of Steam Early Access this May 13th!

[Update]: Ghost Ship Games have now updated the roadmap ahead of full release, as well as revealed what Update 29 will bring with it.

Deep Rock Galactic will be releasing from Steam Early Access in the second quarter of 2020. In order to prepare the stage for launch, Ghost Ship Games have announced that they will be putting all of their efforts into polishing existing content, adding some long-awaited quality-of-life changes, as well as bringing in a couple of new features to help spice things up a bit.

The newest update combines all three of those thing by heavily reworking the perk system, as well as adding a variety of new perks to play around with. The most important change, however, is the split into active and passive perks. Active perks are significantly more powerful, but either have a cooldown or can only be used a certain times per match. Meanwhile, the passive perks are somewhat weaker, though they are always active and can help shape the entirety of your playstyle.

For example, Iron Will used to be one of the most powerful and popular perks in the previous versions. So instead of nerfing it into irrelevance, Ghost Ship Games have reforged it as an even more mighty active perk that can only be used once per mission. It now gives you increased movement speed, stronger melee attacks, a faster power attack cooldown, resistance to slow-down effects, and even your weapons get automatically reloaded once you use the perk!

To me, this is probably the best way to balance things as it preserves everything that made Iron Will fun, while also making it more in-line with the other perks. So once all of the potential problems get ironed out, it really seems like Deep Rock Galactic's perks will be incredibly strong but specialized tools that can and should be changed on a match-per-match basis and depending on what your overall plan is. A simple enough idea, but if done well, it really could add an entirely new layer of replayability to Deep Rock Galactic.

You can read a little bit more about the new perks, as well as the improved cosmetics system, over at Steam. And once you're done, I wish you the best of luck with mining and blasting apart bugs!