blundertwink

For all the complaints, DU's playerbase is surprisingly loyal...NQ has had to try really hard to drive its players away between few and poorly designed updates, a lack of communication, and sometimes-rudeness when they do communicate. They will be in for a big surprise on release when players aren't so interested in posting their complaints and simply unsub and roll their eyes at the $9.99 they wasted. It isn't just the lack of progress in making a simple choice that has already been discussed to death on the forums for years...it's the time wasted in learning how to run the game and manage the community for release. Update that brick constructs and poor communication will only make already-bad churn rates that much worse.

If the choice is motivated by profit....someone isn't doing their math correctly. Waiting until right before release (for example) is a great way to make the entire beta program useless insofar as Athena would be the least tested update since public beta launched. I think I read somewhere that the best way to release bug-free software is to test it as little as possible. The logic is sound: "if i can't see the bugs, they can't see me".

Agreed, it needs more than a few shallow changes to gain the mainstream appeal that other games have... I've seen posts about how much "potential" DU has for years and years. I'm not convinced that potential was ever real, though...because DU never had any real focus. It promised to be a game where you can do anything and be anyone: build, mine, trade, industry, pvp, politics, civilization... A game that tries to appeal to everyone will seem like it has limitless "potential", but only because it isn't realistic. In reality, the design was never concrete enough to capture even a fraction of this "potential". In reality, the "cutting edge" tech that was supposed to allow "millions" of players to share a world was never going to work and has never worked even at tiny populations. In reality, the game is far too niche and hardcore to scale its player-base enough to achieve its unrealistic vision...a vision created by someone that hadn't ever worked in games before (or even had significant experience in commercial software development). But all that aside....let's be realistic, here. NQ can't even make one simple choice about a wipe....so I don't think it is realistic to expect them to make hard choices on their top 5 goals pre-release and still have enough time to test that those changes for both scalability and bugs.

The thing is....this isn't even the hardest decision NQ will have to make, especially as they near release. If it takes so long to weigh the pros and cons of important choices, the game will never move forward. They have much harder decisions ahead of them...especially if they continue with business as usual and believe somehow that Athena will be tested enough for release. Why isn't this a day or two worth of business between the CEO, the lead game designer, and the head of engineering...? I suspect they have a lot more people involved in the decision-making, which isn't how leadership in a game development company is supposed to work. I just don't understand how a company can spend so much time debating a singular choice that's so critical for their customer service and so critical for their beta program to work in the time they need it most. If we think it's draining on morale as players, it's probably double-so for their developers...who can do the math on the number of subs NQ needs to pay their salaries and probably are about as optimistic as we are.

??? I wouldn't take the comment so personally...this reply comes off as ironically naive. @Jinxed isn't wrong -- software hasn't gotten more reliable over time, it's become more interconnected, complex, and brittle. In general, the older the code base (and the more people that touch it), the less reliable it is...and NQ is now about 8 years old (with a lot of their current developers having <5 years of history with the company)

The questions form doesn't appear to be set with the right permissions -- it says that only the owner's organization can access it. As much as the update is very much appreciated, it's puzzling that it takes so long to come to a final decision and makes me concerned about the state of leadership at NQ...with limited time to release, I don't really understand why making a choice like this would take so many weeks unless there's a lot of dissent internally...which again makes me concerned with the state of leadership over there.

I'm pretty sure that poster was being sarcastic...

That is what it feels like, isn't it? In reality. this is a game that's been in development for over 8 years, currently with ~50+ employees across two offices, that had over $20 million in investment. It's hardly an "indie" project by most standards. The fact that you think it was thrown together by a few devs in a basement is not exactly surprising but it is a bit sad.

They could spend the next 6 months exclusively focused on performance and bug hunting and still not be ready for release. Dragging their feet on deploying the wipe we all suspect will happen is very unwise. Conspiracy: they've spun down server resources too much as pops dropped and/or have spun up a clone of their prod resources to test the wipe implementation -- and therefore reduced the live instances so they don't go over budget with infrastructure.

Just keep in mind that MMOs are often prime targets for hackers because most MMO accounts can easily be translated into real-world value. I don't know that there will be such a grey market for DU, but in other MMOs stealing someone's game currency or account is almost always worth it. Why bother farming the gold when you can just steal it...? Especially if DU's login system is vulnerable to common things like dictionary attacks, 2FA is a wise thing to turn on and I appreciate NQ's effort and the fact that they are even incentivizing it (maybe they know something about their own vulnerabilities that we don't...) So 2FA is not a bad thing at all, it isn't something they threw in just because some people like it.

This game is never going to have balanced or interesting combat...none of DU's mechanics really make sense or work well together. AFK mission running as a core feature...? They seriously expect more than the 1,000 or so beta players to pay monthly for a screensaver? Open world PvP combat where you tab-target icons...? So fun. Haulers needing to have "friends" to sit around and guard duty while people mine? Just as fun as slow-boating missions...at some point people will get bored and attack their hauler friend just to have something to do. This game's combat is a joke at every level, from balance to mechanics to visuals to technical performance. It's fine if you find it fun...fun is very subjective, but things can be fun while still being "not good". IMO, there's no fixing this. It's broken too fundamentally and the game's overall mechanics are too disjointed for things to ever come together and gel.

Yeah I wouldn't disagree, but IMO it's "feature complete" by definition since they are on the path to release and Athena was the last major update. That's not to say I think it has a "complete" set of features, but it is finally beta by the strictest definition. Unless they intend to keep adding/tweaking features until the last moment, in which case there's no point to having this testing program at all except as trying to generate a bit of revenue.

This is the speed in which NQ has always moved...I do think it's weird that they expect people at release to stay subbed for months while they do small changes and rarely communicate about them between patches. Release is going to be really hard for them...like, really hard.

Ah, one of many, many kickstarter statements that hasn't aged well. Over 6 years on, and some of the most fundamental aspects of the game as outlined by the KS are still missing with no ETA or planned ETA. Many games are designed, developed, tested, and released in 6 years or less...for reference, NMS was developed in about 3 years by a team of <20. NQ's team is twice the size (or more) and they've been developing this since NQ was founded in January 2014. "But DU is so much more complex" -- eh, yes and no. Do a deep dive into how NMS procgen actually works and tell me it is a "simple" game...it ain't so simple. My point is that there's something rather wrong with DU's development and by now it's unfortunately clear that there's no fixing their issues.

When they say "shedding light" they mean shedding as if it were fur. So really they are cloaking themselves in darkness by shedding off all the light. Make sense? No? I stopped caring like 20 pages ago, so.... 🤷‍♂️

100% -- the design of DU makes no sense anymore. A game with no NPCs where players also don't have the power to do anything....yeah, that's a "bold" design choice for sure. There's no real reason that NQ hasn't rolled out player markets other than being stubborn and having a poor design vision. They have had ample time in the last 8 years. They have instead focused on refactors to existing features...usually making the overall gameplay worse. I mean...are you telling me that they coded the markets without player controls in mind...despite saying this was always a planned feature...? Puzzling at every level.

Agreed. It's literally the opposite of engaging gameplay when you're forced to do other stuff while DU is running in a background. It's a waste of electricity in an age when developers should know better. It's "hardcore for the sake of hardcore" to force people to slowly crawl through the black -- I've yet to hear any real game design justification for slow boating other than some vague ideas about realism that don't really make any sense in the context of game design. "But Eve has it and that's been around for 20 years" isn't a meaningful statement. But...this ship has sailed (slowly) -- it is what it is and isn't going to change (except in adverts and promotional cinematics). 🤷‍♂️

Okay, thanks OP. That's really the most important thing to me. Don't blame good drugs for bad VFX! I personally don't understand why they'd even bother touching VFX when the UI is in serious need of attention...they'd make the game look at lot more polished and professional with a better UI compared to all these VFX tweaks.

Step 1 of every software release plan: beta testing Oops...they finally need to beta test, but vastly reduced the population actually playing and testing... So even if they are working on this release plan, they should realize 10 minutes into this planning session that they need as many testers as possible as soon as possible if they intend to fix bugs and scale the product, and that means ending this thread with an announcement. Or maybe they believe step 1 should be "make cool videos that don't show real gameplay". Their money to burn, I guess.

Nope. They either have some major leadership issues and can't arrive at a decision...or have made their choice but don't feel like it is their best interest to announce it yet. Either way...it does indeed shed a lot of light on NQ's decision-making and explains why 8 years of dev has translated into a game that's still very incomplete and clunky. I do hope they realize how critical it is to get as many players testing Athena as early as possible....no matter how much time they think they have to fix bugs and get ready for release, it's never enough time. Very odd that they haven't settled this BS already. Very revealing of NQ's core issues.

I agree that VFX still need work. I think NQ's issue is that they let technical people design the game, do the VFX, implement the UI/UX, underestimating all the skills that aren't technical in nature. Leading to...this. That said, please don't take this out on LSD -- if anything, it's coming from being stoned and lazy, not having a nice trip.

Ah, thanks for the link! I missed it completely. 🤦‍♂️ I don't understand why this internal discussion is dragging on for so long personally, but at least there's sort of an update in all this noise. You'd think the decision on wiping or not would take an afternoon -- the actual "discussion" that's ongoing is probably around how to implement it and how severe the wipe should be. Hopefully they finalize this soon and put an end to this madness

If that's really the intent behind their strategy...it just isn't a good idea. They've made considerable changes that affect how the game will scale at the same time that they've drastically reduced the number of people testing those changes. That's not a great combination. Every day they drag their feet is another day that people aren't finding bugs or testing how the game scales at any sort of load. If the game does release, they'll be flooded with bug reports and performance issues because it hasn't been tested enough...which won't help the conversion rates for new players. Plus, it's just bad practice for customer engagement and communication. They've promised to do better with this but have expended very little effort in doing so -- a few small windows where they actually respond cushioned between vast gulfs of silence. When release does drop, they won't have the ability to engage with their customers because they don't know how. They never bothered to learn -- that will cost them in the long run.

Sometime between now and release, with a very slim possibility of "never" 🤷‍♂️ They haven't given any real information. AFAIK they haven't posted a single update on where they are at in this mess of 850+ replies. I'm sure all this practice in "transparent" communication and community management will go over really well once the game releases.

I know things like this are very subjective, but to me it's just corny... Personally, I don't find the story or lore of DU to be solid enough for this video to be meaningful, and don't really see how this video improves on the lore, setting, or theme. Yeah, agreed -- I get that it isn't necessarily meant to show "real gameplay" but people will take it as such if used for promotions.