I ended up missing updates for several games during the week I spent updating the site, and there’s really no better place to start catching up than Depth of Extinction. As a refresher, this is a game that I ended up giving a 6/10 to primarily because of the absence of story content, so the recent update that adds in cutscenes and banter to bolster the underlying story piqued my interest. Giving your characters actual dialogue is bound to go a long way toward making them seem more like characters than mere units, even if that’s just an illusion. After playing for an hour and a half, though, some of the additional gameplay changes started to get on my nerves to the point where they counteracted the good changes.
This is Depth of Extinction‘s 48.8.8 patch, and the most immediately noticeable change is the option to select a less punishing “casual” mode that makes things slightly easier for new players. This can be freely changed in-game in addition to popping up every time you start the game, so it’s possible to jump back and forth from the normal difficulty to casual as needed. Accessibility that doesn’t require watering down a game’s original difficulty is rare, but always appreciated.
I kept a number of save backups at key story junctures in addition to a cleared endgame save, the latter of which I used to jump right back into end-game combat. The Mission selection screen has been overhauled to no longer label missions as “easy,” “normal,” “hard,” “impossible,” or “insane,” instead scaling the easiest missions to your abilities while the harder missions don’t scale down, keeping things difficult.
Other changes include disabling your ability to regenerate health between fights, reducing the distance bonus you get from the Flip the Field skill, increasing the variance of missions (which includes two additional areas you can find yourself fighting in), and giving you a handy little popup that allows you to return to the ship after all Enemies are dead. Before, the only way to automatically evacuate after enemies were dead was to grab every item in the entire level, so this speeds things up quite a bit. Speaking of which, there’s a general speedup to the gameplay, though you’re not likely to see it in endgame gameplay because things still chug a bit when you’re going up against a lot of enemies at the same time.
That need to engage only small groups of enemies clashes somewhat with Depth of Extinction‘s other big change, which is giving enemies aggro circles that you can avoid. I’m going to be perfectly honest—I haven’t figured out exactly how these work. Before, you’d enter a room and enemies would be mobilized against you the second the fog of war revealed one of them. Now, walking into their detection radius triggers them, but enemies can also trigger each other in unpredictable ways. While that may be bearable in early game scenarios, I also faced a situation (at the end of the first embedded video) where every enemy I defeated was replaced with two more who would randomly appear from the shadows, eventually wearing down my group and ensuring that only two units survived. That’s not a fun possibility.
The problem I have with this is that where you used to feel like an ambush predator silently taking down rooms of enemies, now you’re having to face unpredictable waves of enemies. If you can’t reliably separate them into smaller groups, then you can’t really plan out the best time to use your items or the best way of approaching any given situation, and a lot of the strategy ends up going out the window in favor of battles of attrition. It’s likely that there’s a set of underlying rules for how enemies are triggered, but if that’s the case, I failed to figure these rules out in the hour and a half I spent with the endgame.
On the bright side, the new dialogue kicks in during story missions, and it’s pretty nice to have. Permadeath precludes characters having their own unique personalities (plus they’re randomized), but it’s still a nice touch that I really appreciate.
On the flip side, there are still some bugs that I found myself contending with, which has been a recurring theme with Depth of Extinction since its release. The first bug I came across was shop-related, where I could sell items to some slavers, but not purchase a new unit from them despite having more than enough money. The other one struck on multiple occasions and boils down the mission simply refusing to end for whatever reason, forcing you to quit out to the menu and clear the same map out a second time. Thankfully, there are additional updates planned (the update post on Steam explicitly mentions upcoming controller support, which I’m especially looking forward to), so it’s a safe bet that some of this will be ironed out. Especially since the major bugs that I faced in Depth of Extinction‘s original release—like endgame enemies who were healed by bullets, making defeating them impossible—appear to have been fixed.
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