ΔV: Rings of Saturn
Asteroids for autists.
Delta V is one of those rare games I come across trawling through the unfiltered New Release tab that exemplify why I bother to put myself through that experience. It’s done pretty well for itself, considering its niche appeal, but it’s also exceedingly unlikely to pop up on most peoples’ radar. Games like this tend to get lost in the noise of the unending release window that digital distribution makes possible, so word of mouth and the occasional mention in aggregate lists will be the most traction they get. That’s a shame, because many of them, Delta V included, provide an experience I think some people don’t even realize they’ll enjoy, and won’t be seeking out on their own.
In Delta V, you play as a mining crew trying to strike it rich harvesting valuable ore from the millions of rocks comprising Saturn’s rings. You set up your ship, hire on crew members, fly out to the field, and pick your way through it, gathering as much as you can before heading back to the station. The ore can be sold immediately or held as stock to play off the constantly fluctuating market prices, and you can spend your money on repairs, new ships and equipment, or hotel rooms for your crew. While out in the rings, you have a surprisingly granular yet accessible set of controls, allowing you to power on and off any device, pulse your main engine or rotational thrusters manually, or use your mouse to give the autopilot computer a designated heading or flight path, letting it make slight adjustments automatically to keep you pointed the right way. Even back at the station, you get an array of options for tuning your equipment, from adjusting the power and frequency of your mining lasers, the maximum thrust from each engine, all the way down to the resolution of your cargo hold scanner.
The game begins with you owning the most basic mining vessel, the K37: a tubular cargo bay with an engine at one end, a beak at the other, and a small mass driver to peck apart bigger rocks with. Your first few dives are flailing, frantic, and barely pull in enough to keep the lights on. There’s a lot to grapple with. The more energy you use to crack a big rock, the more energy gets imparted to each resulting chunk, meaning they get flung in different directions and you have to chase them around to finish the job. Setting your autopilot to cruise you towards a delectable tidbit and opening your beak to snap it up is simple in isolation, but you’re never totally isolated, and you can easily end up needing emergency evasive maneuvers if you are running that hare down into a thicker patch of matter. Those evasions themselves can cause problems - the engines draw power, eventually shutting down your controls if you overdo it, all the burns wear down the thrusters, causing them to become less precise over time, and you’d better close your jaws, or the unprocessed ores currently rattling around in your ships guts will get flung out via rotational energy, leading to a fresh chase. It’s all very overwhelming at the onset, but despite the title and the relatively grounded physics involved, you don’t actually have to do any math on the fly - you just need to develop some physical awareness.
As you get better at mining - picking targets, cruising through the ice field, smoothly snapping up the best bits - you do start accumulating cash, and the upgrade system works about like you’d expect, with a few twists. Bigger powerplants mean more energy production, to be used on more powerful thrusters, microwave emitters to gently cook the rocks apart, and cargo bays fitted with processors to melt away the icy matrix containing the actually valuable elements and pack them away to conserve space. New detection systems give you more information when selecting a rock, such as its estimated composition and value, and new geologists on your crew can help by flagging ore pieces with their weight and value faster than your computer systems alone. My favorite upgrade to the K37 is just a big arm - it can be used to grab whole giant rocks, pulling them into your beak for mastication, and then shoving the bits down your gullet without you needing to touch the main engine at all. It can also be used to grab… other things.
Most of the ‘story’ in Delta V, insofar as it has a story, consists of short, random encounters - ships and other man-made objects are detectable on your pilot’s minimap, and anything with the ability to reply can be hailed. Other ships can be miners minding their own business, pirates extorting those miners at the barrel of a railgun, bounty hunters hunting those pirates, or just derelicts, floating eerily through the icy tomb of space. You have a few choices for how to interact with any of these - you can join up with a friendly miner, turn pirate yourself, prove yourself to the bounty hunters by running support, and tow the wrecks back home to sell. Some events are less straightforward, and proceed by one of your crew members chiming in, developing small storylines where they fill the role of a character, though they’re all of course randomly generated. There are also points of interest to discover, usually revealed randomly by crew members noticing something on their scanners and tagging your map. Some small stations, for example, will pay above market rates for processed ore, and you can cruise up and dock to make a little side profit.
Eventually you can pool enough cash to make a bigger investment, and scale up operations to a larger ship. All the bigger ships have their own benefits and tradeoffs, and the end goal is always to pull a bigger haul. These behemoths are generally a lot less nimble than the K37, and can’t meaningfully chase down tiny pieces of ore, so they end up playing much different games. One replaces the beaked jaws with a pair of grinders, shoving itself onto icy rock and shoveling in as much as it can. Another can just open itself up like Pac-man, swallowing larger pieces whole, usually with the assistance of manipulator arms. Others, like the Titan, rely on remote operated drones to flit out around its body, pushing the ore into its path as it glides along like a colossal filter feeder. With the right upgrades, your ship can even split the water melted off the ore to produce its own propellent, use tungsten to help restock its stores of nano-bots, and convert iron ore into magnetized mass driver projectiles, extending your dive until you’re stuffed to the gills and ready to head back and cash in.
Once you get the hang of the basics, going on a dive is a surprisingly relaxing, almost meditative experience. The game smoothly indicates looming danger with its contextual music track, which goes into overdrive when the action heats up [or you just maintain a high enough speed] and even when something unexpected happens, you usually have the chance to flee and brush yourself off before continuing whatever you were doing. Building up a stable of ships so you can swap around with different playstyles keeps it from being monotonous… or at least makes it less monotonous, and playing around with different equipment and loadouts helps too. However, Delta V is definitely not for everyone, or even most people. It’s basically a job you’re working remotely, and the biggest issue is that there’s not really any pressure to perform. There’s a trivial fee for launching down to the very edge of the rings, with higher costs for injecting yourself deeper in, but as soon as you discover any point of interest, you can just start at the edge and set an autopilot route there for free, or bring a claim beacon along to give yourself a custom waypoint. Crew management similarly isn’t that deep - some cost more to take on or ask for raises as their experience levels increment, but it’s nothing compared to how much even a short, relatively competent dive can pull in. There are mechanics that gesture to the concept of time, but aside from the fluctuating mineral market prices and point of interest knowledge timing out for some reason, there’s no real impact to you ‘wasting’ a day on something. The game really needs some kind of pressure, at least a debt to pay down early on, and a clear end-game goal to pursue in order to give players a reason not only to play more, but to try new ways of playing.
I have played Delta V quite a bit, starting while it was still in Early Access, and yet I still haven’t really engaged much with the NPC storylines, the piracy, the racing challenges, and all of the mysteries lurking in the rocks. I wish I could speak on those, but any time I boot up the game I really just want to do a regular mining dive, play around with some new way to smash rocks, and maybe try my luck on a salvage. It doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to rely entirely on random encounters to start, and for some of them, your only option is to blow it off if your current ship isn’t kitted out just for that one task - you’re not going to go chase pirates around in a Titan or do a race with a cargo container tucked under one arm. It reminds me of the old versions of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, just a tedious job elevated into a relaxing pass-the-time past-time by a mix of presentation, freedom, and refinement. Perhaps it could cruelly be called the thinking Boomer’s Powerwash Simulator. Hell, I wish you had more range in tuning options for your components, and actually had to think about power draw and heat venting beyond them being glorified stamina bars. Some of my favorite moments in the game were the few times I really had to struggle - trying to grapple a ship larger than mine and use manual adjustments to keep the orientation thrusters from blowing it off my arm, trying to understand why the lightning generator I was using kept shorting out my entire ship, or getting a stray railgun projectile stuck in my cargo bay, confusing my autopilot system and forcing me to cruise back home manually at top speed.
ΔV: Rings of Saturn is a game that is in its own way very beautiful, very evocative, and very rewarding. But that way is unlikely to resonate with many people. Thankfully, the game has a live demo still available on Steam, and I strongly encourage anyone who thinks they might like it to check that out and see if it clicks. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but it might be a few peoples’ idea of a perfect wind-down.