Deep Rock Galactic defeats FOMO by letting you play old seasons whenever, wherever

As per Ghost Ship Games’ latest announcement, Deep Rock Galactic is about to Falcon Punch any tidbit of FOMO that might’ve once been attached to the game with its next major update. More specifically, old season passes will now be available to play whenever players wish to do so.

This is, of course, phenomenal news from the consumer side of things. The recent Deep Rock Galactic Q&A session on Steam revealed that one of the biggest new features coming to the game with Season 5 will be the Season Selection UI. By visiting the Season Terminal in the hub area, DRG players will be able to choose the “Season Selection” tab to pick any of the game’s prior seasons to play and progress through. Those who want a bit of everything will have the “Vanilla” option ready to go, which will randomly spawn Events and Warnings from all of the game’s seasons.

Deep Rock Galactic will let you choose which season pass to play

Activating a Deep Rock Galactic season essentially means accessing its unique unlocks, events, and progression mechanics. Having said that, turning on the Plaguefall season doesn’t mean you’ll lose anything that came into the game after the fact. Instead, doing so simply grants you access to the Plaguefall reward track and heavily increases the chances of Plaguefall-specific events being active on the mission screen. It’s similar to the “Vanilla” option in that sense, but weighted in a way that makes sense for your active season.

Most importantly, though, players working their way through different, entirely unrelated seasons can still play together just fine: “Everyone can still play with each other, no matter which season they’ve got selected. Because the Mission Terminal reflects the host’s selected season, though, it’s possible that a few individual missions might not show up for other players if they’ve got a different season active than the host. But not to worry – you can still join any lobby on any season through the server browser,” explains the Q&A.

Now, Ghost Ship did say that season-specific assignments will not be available once you’ve activated a prior season. Instead, assignments will remain as-is, with the new Season 5 task coming live this June. The good news, though, is that the game will remember your progress if you partially completed one of the old seasons, allowing you to just keep on trucking from that point onwards.

As Deep Rock Galactic used to add cosmetics and unlockables to the random drop loot pool after a season wrapped up, most players are likely to have some of these old seasons’ cosmetics, which will now be reintroduced into the rewards track. Coming across one of these will just give you a fair amount of credits, which can be “exchanged for goods and services,” as the Q&A puts it.

Neat stuff all around, then. Tied in many ways with Helldivers 2‘s handling of season passes. Now, if only other FOMO-bound games, like the Forza franchise, could afford its players something similarly user-friendly, that’d be just grand.