Space Rig Log #3 | Darktide, Content and Copyright

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Hey people! Welcome to episode three! I’m sitting here with my second hit of caffeine today, midway through the month of February and well on my way to doing… oh a lot of stuff. I’m finally back into the swing of things as far as streaming and content creation goes but man has is been a bit rough with how my schedule is set up and the winter season throwing mild sickness my way every month. Ive managed to stay on top of it by prioritizing my health but I wont lie its slowed me down. Well, that and my recent bout of playing Darktide on and off since December.

I dont know if youre in the loop about Darktide current debacle but the short version is that the devs have kind of dropped the ball on content, left a lot of things unfinished or broken, and just generally rolled back a lot of really nice stuff from Vermintide when they released Darktide on PC in November 2022. On top of that they went on vacation the moment it released and in that time the game has gone to abysmal reviews on steam, entering the dreaded “mostly negative” category. Bummer huh?

Now I’m not here to talk about the game in depth but  I do want to say that its given me a much bigger appreciation for GSG and Deep Rocks current state. Now, its not a perfect game nor are Ghost Ship Games a perfect company, but for all their flaws they do right by the way they treat the game and the community for the most part, which is worlds better than other communities get. Just the general vibe over in other communities like Darktide is way different, and Ive seen people on more than one occasion pointing to DRG as the gold standard for how a developer and community should handle a live service game.

Gushing about my favorite game aside, I did notice a couple funny things in Darktides game design that seem like imitations of DRG features to a degree. Obviously that doesnt mean theyre directly copying DRG but its interesting nonetheless. First is the mission map design, or lack thereof compared to the space rigs mission map. In Darktide you get a holographic map of the city of Tertium with missions of varying type and difficulty available to you. Looks a lot like DRGs mission map but with the difference that even difficulty is randomized. Like, I cant imagine how much I would dislike it if I couldn’t just choose Hazard 5 whenever I wanted and had to wait for the right biome, mission type and modifiers. That’s basically what you have to do in Darktide, not the best decision in my opinion and I hear many people saying the same in the community. Its a needless restriction that needs to go. Sure we dont have every biome available at once in DRG but the mission types and difficulties are always somewhere if you want them. Secondly, Ive noticed that Darktide and Vermintide both use a hub area like the space rig. I like that these types of areas are becoming common place in games like DRG but I do still think that many times they miss the mark in terms of function. The space rig feels so lively and fun to be in, it has many of the things you need bunched together to ensure convenience while also letting you see what your teammates are doing while youre waiting for the next mission or just a nice place to jump around and talk. Darktide though, has the hub area without any of its positives. You’ve got a long walk (about ten seconds or so) to the mission terminal, your penances and assignments are still behind several menu screens after you walk to their locations, you have to walk an equally long distance to both the crafting station and the in game currency weapon store and worst of all, they make you conveniently walk right past the micro transaction store every time you go to buy weapons which seems a bit scummy to me. Not just these things but, beyond the admittedly great environment deigns and atmosphere, there isn’t anything to do here but just look around while you wait for a mission or teammates. You dont even spawn in with your own squad mates, either from your last mission or in your active private lobby, instead you get random people going about their business. Call me cynical but I think the only reason they have you here is to be able to look at yourself and others in third person to see the cosmetics people are buying, there are no other real social functions to it which is a shame. Lets just say I return to the space rig a little more glad to be able to have a brief hangout spot for my team and myself rather than a mostly irrelevant hub that could have easily been a few menu options without losing much.

Alright, rant over, now onto some various pieces of good news! First is, I got my Deep Rock Galactic board game in the mail finally and its FANTASTIC! All the pieces and cards feel really solid and high quality, the board itself is a nice, the figurines are phenomenally designed and happy to say it was exactly what I was expecting. The game itself is also really fun to play and like others Ive spoken to were saying, its a very interesting tabletop take on DRGs gameplay loop that really works. It plays a lot like a condensed version of a Dungeons and Dragons session. Everyone has move distances, a set amount of actions they can carry out like mining, attacking and using equipment. Time moves forward with each players turns, advancing the swarms closer and closer to you. You can mine minerals, dig through walls, juke and kite groups of bugs, even upgrade your weapons mid mission. Its really fun and if you like tabletop games I highly recommend it. There’s also a free version on table top sim you can try out if youre curious before shelling out the dollarydoos. If anything, its worth it for the figurines along because they look great, but, they all come in the default light grey plastic color. They know exactly what theyre doing here because theyre just begging to be painted so I guess I know what Im doing with my time onceI figure out what paints to buy. Ill post pics when I finally get to it, you know, so long as they actually come out looking good haha.

Another piece of news, thankfully about a drama thats taken its full course already. Not sure who had heard but there was a bit of a copyright scare on Mod.io about music and sound effects. Everyone, including me a and my music mod Now That’s what I Call Hoxxes, were getting messages from a Ghost Ship team member saying we had 5 days to remove our mods if we didnt have permission or ownership of the right to the content. Had a good chunk of us worried and some people just outright deleted their mods out of fear. Probably the first time Ive been genuinely upset with GSG for something but I also couldn’t blame them since legal culpability in copyright violation cases isnt something they probably want to deal with but still. Using content from other media and games is a mainstay of game modding communities, its been like that for as long as Ive been involved in making or using them so it was a bit confusing for them to be trying to act on it and with such an extreme stance. Do any of us own the content were using? Well no, very few people listen to or use music they wrote in modding but we also aren’t monetizing it in any way so Ive never seen an issue with it. My music mod has over 290 tracks of song I just like to listen to while playing the game, the mod is just my way of making it easier to do so while also sharing the experience with other people which is fun. I stood by the fact that I wasn’t doing anything wrong and just sat tight, waiting for another response from GSG on the issue with the rest of the modding community. Nothing happened, no more messages, no further actions, no deletions, just nothing. And then, a day or so ago, I get a message basically stating that I should consider our previous interaction over the copyrighted content as a reminder of the sites terms and that they will do something if content is specifically flagged. Bingo. Looks like the previous max flagging was a knee jerk reaction to some legal advice that had them spooked since they seemed to be just flagging any and every thing that could fit the bill. My music mod, mods with little jingles from other games, half life sound effects, even mods with the word “music” in them. Guess they decided to walk it back after the backlash they got and maybe after realizing they were going to lose a lot of molders good faith beyond that point because where do you stop with that sort of logic? I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty of my thoughts on copyright laws these days but I will say I’m not fond of them and I feel that they do more to harm creativity and content on the internet than they help with how outdated and exploitable they can be. They can also make a good half of the best audio mods for your favorite game vanish overnight and leave a lot of modders hard work irrelevant and a bad taste in everyone’s mouth about the whole situation in the aftermath. Cant say I’m a fan of mod.io after this debacle but hey, for now mine and many other modders audio mods are still up and available to use, so Ill call that a win for our community.

Next up, Ill confirm, I am entering the Deep Rock Recruitment video contest. That’s gonna be the thing I’m doing the next two weeks leading up to the submission deadline. I entered the last contest and didnt end up getting featured on the devs livestream with the Human Resources video but hey, doesnt mean I ain’t gonna try again this time right? Ive got some ideas so far, mostly involving me using my own voice as mission control, talking to a potential new recruit about the… perks of working for DRG. I’m hoping that this approach isnt going to take me too far out of the recruitment propaganda feel it seems theyre going for but as always I’m going to go with my gut and make what I want to make the way I want to make it, Ill see how it goes. hopefully you guys will like it too, Ill be sure to post some work in progress stuff on here leading up to the fifth anniversary, so keep an eye out since youll be the first to see it. Oh wow, its been five years now hasn’t it? Well, I actually showed up in 2020 but still, time flies when youre constantly fighting for your life while being attacked from all sides by vicious cave arachnids, doesnt it? Oh oh, also looking forward to that new supporter pack DLC that the devs released this last week. If you haven’t seen it yet look it up, they look NICE. Kinda has a Roman legionary meets Imperium of Man Custodes look, if you know what those are. Sorry, the Warhammer hyperfixation is hitting real hard these days. I gotta stop before I buy sixty thousand dollars worth of tiny plastic men… moving on.

Content! Things got shuffled around a bit because of that contest video but were still doing things in the same order. That being builds showcase, contest video, grenades, all three rival videos and then the secondary weapons finally.

I do want to say, I’m thinking about doing the secondary weapons a bit different than the previous batch of new primaries. They will still focus on the weapons and overclocks but Ill be going over the individual mods themselves more and discussing playstyle. I wont be doing math breakdowns or whatever, thats never really been my jam. I’m more focused on how the weapon feels and what each setting lets you do. Once I got over it more broadly and discuss how the mods affect how it works Ill go over the builds more broadly, mostly with how they differ from each other in gameplay. It’ll be different but I feel like its necessary with how these secondaries play. The mods really change things quite a bit, rather than simply complimenting the Overclocks so I want that to be reflected in the videos. I’m already almost done with the script for the Collette Wave Cooker so Ill be posting that here later if you want to look it over and see what I mean.

Oh, something I thought was interesting lately was what I heard in AxisKronos new video where he talks about content creation with Milligin. Someone in my discord linked me the time in the video where they actually talk about me and my content and it was interesting to hear. Also, Kronos, youre listening, hey man! Anyway, what they basically said is something along a lines of, I make these videos where I present like 5 builds but I present them equally without trying to say which is best. I never really thought about it like this but yeah, I suppose that is what I do. I never set out to tell people what the absolute best builds were, or what was going to be meta, or even talk about meta. I tend to be the kind of person in every game to seek out alternative ways to go about things that dont rigidly adhere to what the meta or most optimal strategy is. Partly because I just want to do what I do and come to the conclusion of what I have to do on my own, or at very least try everything out and then capitulate at the end and say, yeah you were right but I didnt want to ignore my options until it was for sure just dumb. Certain games require you to optimize, especially if you want to help your team. That’s actually where I draw the line, where my experimentation will actually start harming my teammates abilities to finish a mission. In games like say, Darktide and Vermintide, when you get up into the hardest difficulties, it gets harder and harder to justify doing goofy stuff and trying out strange builds. Its just so difficult you need to fall into your classes role and do your job. Different games, different rules. Deep Rock, to me, is not constrained by this so much. Ive made seemingly terrible builds work just as well. I had a stream where people tried to give me objectively terrible builds but it ended up being just as usable, albeit maybe a bit inconvenient at times. This doesnt mean the game is easy, it just means your chances of success aren’t totally dependent on your build, its your knowledge, instincts and skill that determines that. I think thats what makes the game so rewarding for me. I can try all the varied builds and playstyles I want because Hazard 5 demands more game knowledge and tactics than it does raw numbers. Builds can make things drastically easier, mind you, but a fully upgraded gun is going to serve you well so long as you dont deliberately try to make it not work with the overclock.

There was a little bit in there about how Milligin has seen people giving me shit for my picks and saying I made mistakes too. I though that was funny, that stuff can get to me but really, theres only two scenarios here. Either I simply disagree with someone’s opinion about my preferred builds based on played experience and just shrug and move on when they tell me my builds are wrong or I just straight up made a mistake and chose the wrong mod. If I did, oh well, Ill admit I was wrong and not think much else of it. There were a few instances of this and thats why I made that corrections video, to let people know I’m not just belligerently choosing bad stuff and calling it good because I dont care. I do, I only talk about builds I actually enjoy using. One example I can think of is the mods for the Hurricane on my Mine Layer System build. I had a lot of people say that choosing increased ammo or tier 5s fire upgrade were both bad choices because the explosion width upgrade and stun upgrade were both going to do more damage per hit. Yeah, on paper it says bigger numbers, I wont refute that, and if I preferred to use the build for pure damage output I would, I even said you should use the stun upgrade as well in the video. But, I dont, and my reasoning was that I just preferred to use this build in a different way. Simple as. Its more fun to me to use it as a passive killer, incinerating bugs out of my field of view with napalm mines, especially on pipeline missions than it was for me to try and use it as a generalist “kill everything” build. Ive got other versions of the gun for that, this one is different one purpose. Also, with the increased radius, I was running out of ammo FAST no matter how good they were. Its still plenty usable and can get some better value per shot but that goes away anything bugs aren’t tightly packed. They still need to hit the detection radius, which isnt doubled, in order to set the mine off. Ahhhhh I’m getting off track here, you know what I’m saying hopefully. I said this recently to someone in my YouTube comments and Ill say it again here. Track the success of a session of gaming for yourself not in damage per second, exp per minute or resources per mission but in fun per session. If you aren’t having fun and instead treat a game as a chore to get through youll never end a session feeling good. Dont let the Skinner box grip you too tight, just do what you like so long as you aren’t bothering anyone else. I wish I didnt have to tell people this but I meet far too many people who seem to hate the games they play and I just… like… why? You only have to much time to yourself, do something you enjoy man. Quite trying to skip the fun parts of anything you do to get to some arbitrary moment where youll finally have proper fun, it wont happen. Ive been there, it sucks, just clicking clacking away at a game without feeling anything but distain for the process of playing it, hoping it’ll pay off eventually but that sunk cost fallacy just doesnt pay off. I’m getting kinda ranty here but Ill just briefly touch on this next thing.

I have heard this thing before about loss aversion and gaming and it was kind of mind blowing to me but thats probably because of the type of player I am. This video, that I cant remember the name of for the life of me was talking about how a large portion of players tend to play seemingly not for the thrill of victory or a challenge but simply to avoid the negative feelings of loss. And like, wow, thats so incredibly true when you look at online gaming as a whole. Ive met so many people who just DO NOT want to do anything remotely different than the safe predefined ways to win, no matter how dull or boring they may be. Just rinse and repeat because the possibility of losing scares them more than the prospect for victory entices them. I’m not saying that you should play badly on purpose or take every incessant risk in a game with other players but, if your fear of losing prevents you from having fun with the game at all you really should try to let go a bit. Try a weird build, be risky, do something absolutely insane just because. After the hundreds, if not thousands of hours you play a game, the only things youll really pull out of it are the notable experiences. I dont remember even a fraction of the hundreds of Dreadnoughts Ive killed safely and by the book but I sure as hell remember that time we used melee only to kill one, or when we fought 14 at the same time. We came out on top and I’m telling you about it now because the experience mattered. I remember only a handful of things like this from any game Ive played and it almost always emerges from times when we decided NOT to do things the way we were supposed to. Do I like losing? No. Does it bother me a lot. Not really. Do I like playing by the book and actually being good too? Absolutely. In fact, in Darktide, despite its issues, Ive been having fun getting good at the Psyker class and at higher difficulties. I actually had to put my silly Gun Wizard build down that relied on randomly rolled procs triggering my brain burst on single targets and start using the flamethrower and other tools to fill my role as a Psyker because its just required at some point to handle the huge volume of enemies coming your way and help your team. Its still challenging and fun but in a different way, and I’m not ham fisting a bad build in stubbornly, I’m adapting to the needed playstyle and now trying to branch out and find new niches to fill and ways that the builds can evolve with different weapons at that level. Its fun, but instead of rigidly sticking to what I’m told to do, I’m learning the rules so I can try and break them in fun new ways later.

Another thing they mentioned was that I make Overclock centered content in my videos. I wont deny it, almost every build I show focuses on an overclock and its a criticism Ive had pointed at me a few times. Im not upset though, I can definitely see why that would be a problem. The game has a ton of overclocks and it takes a considerable amount of time to get all of them, let alone have the luck to get the ones you want sooner rather than later. I know this, which is why I kind of build in a sort of safeguard against giving the wrong idea about the builds and Overclocks with my videos. I present each build not as an example of the pinnacle of what is possible, but as just another build amidst many. I even say there are plenty perfectly good builds that I dont even end up showing due to them either being popular already or just not my thing. The point is that I show off many builds, sometimes using Overclocks that are written off by many players as terrible or just not as good as other but I think that right there is what breeds this problem Ive seen players talking about. Some OCs are put on a pedistal to the degree that people will groan everytime they infuse a matrix core or play a Deep Dive and dont get the one theyre looking for. Not that wanting certain OCs is a bad thing, but some people Ive talked to have put off playing with a weapon or even an entire class because they dont have the OC they consider vital to it. While theres no garantee to get certain overclocks, there is a sure fire way to not be disappointed and be able to play the game regardless. You just... gotta stop caring and work with what you have. I know that sounds like a cop out but hear me out. I show off builds with stuff like Tranq Rounds for the Subata, just as an example. Not a lot of peoples favorite overclock or gun, BUT, someone out there wants to play Driller and thats the first and only OC they got for their secondary. Instead of telling them "yeah thats dogshit, just dont even bother with the class till you get something good." I go out of my way to show that when used with a decent primary like a damage focused flamethrower and using the Born Ready perk, you can turn it into a fantastic part of a builds tactical rotation. I think people like seeing weird stuff not just as an oddity but as a way to see fun and interesting ways to use weapons that many consider to only have one, maybe two """viable""" ways to use them. The viable there had three quotation marks around it by the way. The gaming community, especially the community centering around games with build making involved, tends to have this obsession with putting everything in a heirarchy, tier lists and reducing the number of options you truly have to as few as possible for efficiencys sake. "Given the opportuniy, players will always optimize the fun out of a game", a quote from a game developer Ive heard quite a few times and wholeheartedly believe. Now, you heard me earlier talking about this so I wonder mull over the point again but the quest for absolutely optimal gameplay, mathmatically, strategically and tactically will always be needed when tackling games hardest content. Sometimes its just indisputed that you need the best numbers to even get by. But againn, DRG, at lest vanilla DRG is not like this. Many new players come in seeing the game through this, "ok what stuff in this game can I completely disregard and ignore completely" lens right away. It makes me sad to see because the fun I derive from the game stands in absolute opposition to this attitude. If it feels good to use and I find a use for it Im absolutely gonna use it, even if its rarely. And Im going to keep making videos that cater to people who have every overclock unlocked as well as those who only have a few obscure ones and are wondering what the hell they should do with these while they work their way through the games content.

WEW, sorry about the rant there haha! I’m passionate about this stuff, so I could go on forever about it but I think Ill leave that for another time. Ill get to the last few things I wanted to say here.

A little news on another mod of mine, the Siirvend Mission Control mod actually. For the longest time the mod has just done without subtitles and voice line parity between clients. At the time of making it wayyyyyy back in the modding communities infancy, I had no idea I could even do those things let along know how so I just passed them up in favor of adding more lines. Well, were like 1500 lines in now and I still haven’t done anything about it which has prompted some other more knowledgeable people to ask me if I want help with making a framework mod to address these issues. One mad lad actually went ahead and did it the other week. He made a whole framework that is capable of doing biome specific, mission specific, and even secondary objective specific lines, as well as adding subtitles and parity to the mod too. It would be a much needed update to Siirvend Mission Control but I may have just one problem here, the time needed to actually convert all of my lines over to this new format, let alone edit and add all the subtitles needed. Ive already been uploading the mod files to a Dropbox page for people to look through them as they please but I may be utilizing this in the future to ask the community for help with the massive task of getting all of it subtitled and reformatted over to make the mod as good as it can be. My plan is to get the formatting in the text file finalized with how I need the subtitles and naming conventions set up to make things easily findable, once Ive got that done I can upload it to a GitHub or something along with the link to the audio files and let people start sifting through the incomplete subtitles I have already. Part of the problem is that I do a lot of improv in my lines so theres quite a few where the script is written almost like a guideline for me to use when Im recording than a word for word transcript, hence why I need to do pretty much all of them over again for subtitles. Ill get back to you in the discord server about that when I get around to starting the whole process but Ill letcha know when I do that.

Oh one fun tidbit I found while messing around with mission control lines this last update. They have lines in there for every single holiday referring to us depositing some kind of object for season bonuses! Not only does this mean that seasons will probably continue for the foreseeable future but that well get these all year long. Halloween has skulls, Easter has bunnies I think? Not sure if I saw anything for summer but Im sure there was one I just cant remember what it was but still, very neat to find. Ok actually I just looked and no there wasnt anything for a summer event in there yet but there was a trophy for the anniversary event so consider this a little early leak!

Well, I think thats everything I wanted to talk about today! I have my work cut out for me this next week or so. I have to finish the build showcase and get right to work on that contest video so its crunch time once again! Ill see you around here as I post some sneak peek stuff, as well as in a week or so when I have another log for you guys. Until then, happy mining leading up to the anniversary event! Heres to five years in orbit! Thanks as always for the support! Episode three, out, Rock and Stone!