This is just not it.
Really, what I'm seeing in this title is a disconnect between the development team's vision, and what the actual audience wants. And I'm not going to lie, I saw it coming, and still bought in under the hope a few updates would make it better, and with 1.1 things did get a bit better, if not to the point of being almost enjoyable, and now with 1.2, it's another fumble. Let me explain this a little.
Let's take the whole, possibly overdone subject of "timing". This was probably one of the most universally hated aspects of the game. It made the design philosophy this disoriented mess, and further deviated from what the consumer audience of the first game expected. Deep Rock is about exploring caves. How about punishing the player for that? See a ledge slightly too high? Nah, the event isn't worth it. Run by, ignore the in-game mechanics, repeat. Are we designed around rewarding or punishing speedplay? And the solution: allow players to choose slow, normal, or fast pacing. This was... acceptable, by its lonesome. But with everything else, it shows a certain stubbornness I've seen since Deep Rock's later seasons.
Pacing was absolutely despised for the aforementioned reasons and more. So they just allow you to tweak it, to the point where "slow" basically removes it from relevancy, and there's no real time crunch. Yet it still exists. The bad thing is still there, normal mode is just the same thing, and fast is worse (perhaps just for the challenge it could be fun). What did they do with the Stingtail? They released a horribly unfun, buggy as utter hell, stat-bloated abomination. Do we remove it? Rework it? No, we tune the numbers down until it's essentially a non-factor.
My brain processes this like having a sick engine that overheats in an automobile, and the mechanic just caps the engine at twenty miles an hour and calls it good. At this point, Ghost Ship just says that this is the car they want, it will have jank and broken parts, and if they run at 15% and you can tolerate it, then it's acceptable. And that seems to be their design philosophy now. It's why Deep Rock has felt like, despite each season being smaller, the actual content and quality is just worse. It is. This is an unsustainable methodology.
And now with 1.2 we see this "players are more powerful! But we want bosses to not die so fast! Bosses are supposed to be walking/flying slabs of meat with six digit health!" And then my friends with this game say it's not a good change, I go in, and yeah. Your boss fights aren't good enough to warrant ten minutes. It's a slog, and feels completely disconnected from the fact that everything else melts and blows up. People didn't seem to want this, but the devs did, and their solution is once more to crank numbers.
Look, I'm not taking the position that you can never tweak something. But if it's your response to every problem to either crank the dial or make a new dial to crank, and you do little else about the problem, you're not going to solve the problem. And new guns, unrelated biome work, all of that- it doesn't solve it, either.
I don't need to rehash what everyone else has said. I'm just deciding where I stand on this, finally. I don't like this game, my friends that got it don't like it, and that's counting the one who wouldn't shut up about this game's release since it got announced. It's missing what made the OG Deep Rock good, doesn't improve much of anything, makes everything from movement to gunplay just worse, and the devs have a vision and will stubbornly stick to it, it seems. If your studio's first game was lightning in a bottle, consider this one a fart in a jar.
