blundertwink

Yes. Because they want to make more money. It's certainly not because they want to create the best games filled with "meaning". Behavior psychology and statistical modeling helps Activision and Microsoft farm their players to squeeze out as much profit as possible. They help extract as much monetization as possible through addiction and gambling. Of course they'll spend a ton on these projects -- theres's ample research that discusses the predatory nature of game monetization and how it exploits addiction and especially targets young people. It's still the subject of ongoing legal and ethical debates. Can behavior psychology be used to create rich game experiences? Sure, maybe...but that's not what these big companies care about and that's not how they utilize these assets -- their interest is purely in creating addictive loops and exploiting those loops to maximize profit.

The idea that Empyrion or any other game could just "use the tech" makes no sense. Entirely different engines -- you can't just "use the client side". They'd need to completely rewrite Empyrion. It isn't like the code is just plug and play. It's probably not even well documented. No one would pay big money to acquire a whole codebase for the sake of "learning" -- the concepts you're talking about are well understood, not some great mysteries that only NQ has solved. It's far, far cheaper and more effective to write the code yourself. Any studio with money to throw away on acquiring code for 'learning' wouldn't need to. The only studios that could possibly ever utilize it are those that are making brand new games; you can't "plug in" mountains of code written on a different engine to whatever project. And if you're a new studio starting a new project, you want clean code that you understand completely, not some monstrosity from an old project that will be a nightmare to fix and maintain.

Yet another good explanation for why JC needed the boot. People told him they wouldn't like it before the patch. People complained in droves after. Their reply? "You're all wrong and we're doing it anyway because balancing the game in a beta is so important" Very little doubt this "design choice" was driven by JC's inexperience and impatience -- i expect plenty of his own employees saw the backlash coming but he didn't want to hear it.

I see the game as having just as good a chance to survive as with JC at the helm. It was long overdue. Everything we've seen and heard suggested he wasn't just a bad leader because he lacked experience in the game industry...but because he wasn't open-minded and didn't want anyone else's ideas. That's reflected in how NQ interacted with the community and (from all the evidence we have) based on how he treated his own employees. It was always his project, his vision, his castle, his "ready player one" roleplaying game. When the community complained, he told them why they were wrong. I expect he did something similar with his own employees, hence the very high employee turnover and slow, slow progress. If investors want to salvage this game, they can't just "sell off" tech because there's nothing to sell. Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it. "Wanna buy tech for this game that's been mired in bugs and hasn't shown it can scale even with low population?" No, hard pass, maybe worth $50,000 but not anything substantial enough for investors. i expect the investors will make up their mind shortly -- but my guess? They wouldn't start taking things over unless they had some runway left to try to salvage the project. Otherwise they'd have laid everyone off and shut it all down already, because every day it is online is money spent. I'm not holding my breath, but getting JC out of there might be the change NQ needs.

you can go back in time and see Lethys posting back in 2016, like right after they launched their KS...so i believe it lol. What's really notable is that there's so few others left from way back then...i'm sure some of the KS people spent a big chunk of money on it, too. The optimism back then was so strong. People really supported this game for many years before slowly losing interest or moving on. like...if you're coming to the forum and wondering why people are so pessimistic, it's because it's been an ongoing devolution since 2016...

yep, i spent 3 years in game dev and well over a decade in software engineering. There's ample discussions about NQ's dev/designer turnover, development history, and leadership that i didn't rehash because...well...you can do your own research. most people that have spent time in game dev can recognize the ambitions of novice devs -- they almost always overreach and under-plan. That's DU in a nutshell. i'll believe that DU is making progress with bugs when their in-game tutorials work reliably, but they still don't after 7 months of beta...i do read the patch notes and see the amount of bugs fixed relative to the dev team size and time...it isn't impressive to me, especially considering the tech debt they've accrued. it's okay to disagree with my perspective, I get that plenty of people love this game still and that's okay -- but i don't agree that the statements i've made are "not factual" or not based on research/understanding of both this product and the industry overall. to me, the premise is still great -- but i feel most supporters fall in love with the premise and don't judge the game for what it is based on its history and current state, they want to judge it based on its promise which to me doesn't seem likely to materialize.

For a long while i was thinking that yes, NQ can bring this back. For me, 0.24 was a turning point where that last bit of hope faded. It shows that no, they can't fix the game's fundamental problems. The tech is an absolute mess -- even if the game's design was fleshed-out, the tech is a nightmare: It's riddled with bugs that never get fixed (or get fixed then regress in a future version) Performance is shoddy at best and hasn't been proven to scale even with modest crowds. A million players? Please, they can't handle 10% of that without massive lag and pending ops. Devs have proven over the last 7 months that they can't make changes -- since closed beta started, what's changed? Schematics to nerf industry, jetpack tweaks, purchased 3rd-party texture packs? Barely making a dent in the laundry list of long-standing bugs? Even if they did drop the mission system in 0.24, this simply isn't enough to justify all that dev time. They've already been developing for 6 years...and are still far away from being feature-complete. 6-7 years is a long time to stay in alpha. This is hardly "early stage" of beta, it's longer than most games spend in development...to not even have a feature-complete beta. With how many bugs they've collected in the last 6 years? Even if they can get to "beta" state, it'll be another 6-7 months of bug fixes and polish before it is actually release-ready. It all adds up to one thing to me: they physically can't develop the game in a pace that makes any sort of commercial sense. Dev never gets faster as the project gets older and bigger...so it isn't like pace is going to magically improve. Then...you take a step back and look at factors other than raw technical development: the fact that their leadership has zero experience in game dev the fact that they make short-sighted design choices (probably because of the above point) the fact that they never had a complete design to begin with and are still "winging it" with core pillars of the game the high staff turnover and low player population the poor/no communication with players -- building zero goodwill with beta testers -- and even having this reputation among their own employees (that they don't listen) nothing about DU today adds up to "this game is going to turn around" Yes, the premise still has potential, but not the game. There's simply too much broken to me and no sign that NQ is capable of fixing it or humble enough to recognize their faults and make changes accordingly.

i bet that was satisfying. it was for me, anyway. ?‍♂️

i love the discussion about how devs would "never" code without backups or use built-in editors. uh, have you met coders? we do sloppy, shoddy work in the dumbest way possible all the time

always thought "stealing" in this game isn't so much "emergent" as annoying -- and not at all a good concept in terms of game design. Reward is supposed to be balanced with risk -- that's a really basic concept. Every story about theft in DU...it's just abusing trust and taking shit with zero risk and no method to retaliate. It's never some clever heist. There should be more concrete systems in place if theft is supposed to be an actual game concept. Funny how NQ cares about industry being too strong, but theft where you can rob an org blind with 100% impunity...? Totally fine. They don't mean "emergent", they mean "we're too lazy to implement real systems that would make theft interesting and balanced". For a game that puts such a big emphasis on orgs, it sure does disincentivize trust.

Welcome to the MMO where the CEO/Creative Director/PhD/Founder has never worked in game dev before...never mind studying game design. The big name designer they did hire left after 8 months. DU's design issues are a textbook case of a new developer slapping down code and features without a real plan. The only difference between JC and most new game devs is that his PhD allowed him to "convince" investors into thinking this was a real thing. I'd wager that 8 of 10 new game devs try to be too ambitious with their first projects lol. It isn't even ambition to be honest, its arrogance -- it's only "ambition" when you know how hard a big project like this because you have experience/knowledge and pursue it anyway. Going in blind and thinking you can create something vast and complex and "cutting-edge" is hubris. I think having power as a requirement is a good alternative to repair -- big factories require a lot of power plants, and power plants require fuel to keep running. Won't be monotonous to repair each machine, but also not idle. Also helps limit the scale of factories in a better way than stupid schematics. Further, more complex power plants could have their own fuel production lines leading to more specialization and a market for reactor fuel etc. Basically...just steal industry mechanics from Satisfactory and Factorio. Thing is, this was already suggested many times. Supposedly NQ planned for a power mechanic for a while, but are too incompetent/lazy to implement it.

For me what was especially offputting was NQ's reaction to complaints about 0.23. Their statement was basically "look, we know most people hate it...but here's why you're all wrong" A single player with a mega factory might be too much, but the schematic system was a lazy, short-sighted fix. This is how NQ works, though -- they're always going for the easy route, and it always makes things harder long-term. Just look at their tech decisions. The idea of voxel to mesh is that makes it easy to run the game off an off-the-shelf engine like Unigen, because clients know how to handle the physics and collisions for simple meshes. If they did pure-voxels, they'd have to actually make a game engine to handle physics and collisions. But...they knew the game couldn't ever scale to the point where players could "create their own moon-base" etc. using voxel to mesh. GPUs are stressed enough trying to handle the billion one-off constructs loaded by markets...there's no way a bunch of massive one-off meshes that can't be pooled can scale in an MMO context. Same with their server arch. They knew it'd be cheaper and more effective to spin up their own servers long-term, but AWS is easy. Oh, but autoscaling isn't really designed for games and takes too long to react to things like PvP battles...hmm...who knew? Oh right, anyone that's ever worked with these tools before.

I do think they will end beta late this year and push the game to release. My guess is that they massively bungle testing for scale. I think their adverts will actually do a good job of getting people into the game...and that NQ will think the performance is "great" because they're testing against a low population of "beta" players. Beyond technical scale, they really, really need to resolve market clutter and figure out how to make the game work for new players. Good luck appealing to a release crowd that joins a new MMO and realizes all the hexes near the markets are taken and they have to go back and forth in a speeder to follow the tutorials. The start of a game is supposed to be a hook, not a chore.

pointing out technicalities is all i do around here. i need to focus on work jfc.

Yep, AWS does charge for outbound bandwidth -- Jeff Bezos ain't giving anyone free shit. For 150 TB, the bandwidth cost alone would be about $12,000...it seems like DU uses a lot of bandwidth, but somewhat doubt it is 150 TB for a given month considering the player count. Keep in mind that's only outbound bandwidth - AWS doesn't charge for inbound bandwidth...but it does give you an idea of the cost of AWS at scale, considering bandwidth is not the majority of the expense.

that's because of the design of their infrastructure, not due to AWS itself. If they were running their own servers they'd be in the same boat.

This isn't early beta, unfortunately -- they've been in development over 6 years already and they are planning on releasing this year. So we might not be as far from 1.0 as you'd think. So according to NQ's timeline (unless things have changed recently), we're almost halfway through beta already. I personally think they should push it back; going to "release" will attract a lot of new players, but you only get one first impression and it likely won't be ready by end of year unless dev pace really picks up (which you never know, it could). Unfortunately, it isn't clear if the financials will allow them to delay a "release" version.

No, that's not what is commonly understood by "engine" -- engine means the game engine itself, which they didn't write. it's an industry-standard term that's well-understood -- "voxel engine" is a server-side component that they created, but not even close to the same level of complexity as a game engine.

Always interesting when people go into "but actually, let me tell you" mode without doing much research first. to be fair, 6 years in development isn't bad for a game like DU at all, it's completely reasonable...but 6-7 years to not even get to beta...? That's a different story. you're right that i don't know the perspective as a dev...but that doesn't mean i have 'no clue' what's going on behind the scenes, because there are plenty of clues. Major bugs that regress or have been unfixed since beta, them doing DB changes on a live server without even testing it first, high dev turnover, leadership with no experience in game dev, and them writing all the code until today without having a complete game design plan... how do you think that project actually looks from a dev perspective? not trying to be sassy, actually just curious. i personally cringe at the thought of spending 6+ years writing code without even having a complete product plan...and more cringe at the fact that many of the devs haven't even been there 2 years, so they're piling onto legacy code after dev turnover. The slow progress kind of speaks for itself as to how well this is going. big ambitions require big plans -- DU is huge on ambition but lacking on a plan, and i'd be shocked if the tech didn't reflect this.

what's amusing is that this exact conversation has been had several times in this forum already... we know it's early access...but we aren't just judging NQ on the last 6 months, but the last 6 years. As a developer, you should understand that six years of alpha on a project is a long time (even for game dev) -- especially when they didn't build their own engine and didn't stand their own servers. Hell they didn't even pick a robust engine with industry-standard adoption, they picked Unigen2. As a dev, i'm sure you can imagine what a six-year-old codebase stuck in alpha might look like, especially considering that NQ's leadership has never worked in game development before or led a tech company of this size. I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to build up a stable core when major features aren't even designed yet. They still don't have a solid design around major concepts like PvP. to be honest.....if i were a new player coming in after playing DU for a small amount of time, I'd probably think people here are super negative, but it's because we've seen things, yo. i get your point, but give it a few months before insisting we're irrationally toxic or trolls. we actually know a lot about the development of this game, not just being pessimistic for its own sake.

a guy can hope

Eh....your name is JizzLobber...don't pretend you have some sort of moral high ground lol. There's a difference between being toxic and complaining about the factual state of the game. We were asked for feedback, that's the point of beta. We've given that feedback...sometimes 300 times like with market clutter...sorry if it comes off as whining, but not really our fault that NQ is so slow and refuses to fix obvious issues. Give it a few months. But....if the game has improved, the state of the community will improve too -- most people here really like the concept of DU even if they are "cancer". It is because they like the concept so much that they get angry about NQ's lack of progress and communication.

Except that DU is a sub-based game, which means that high churn rates will destroy them. Better graphics might attract new players, but it won't keep them playing for longer than a month. Let's remember that these new graphics aren't even things they developed themselves, they're third-party assets -- they take the game from 1999 to 2010, hardly enough to fundamentally change the game. I've seen this sentiment pop up a few times recently...the issues with DU have nothing to do with funds. There's no evidence of that at all -- they've had six years to get the game into a working state. That's longer than most games spend in development for a release version -- big/complex games with similarly-sized teams. Plus 6+ months of paid beta... How much more time do they need, and why is it our job as paying customers to be NQ's marketing team? How does having more money and time change the design philosophy within NQ, which is their biggest problem? How does more money infuse NQ's leadership with experience? (JC has never even worked in game dev before) How does more money actually increase dev velocity? Considering the codebase is 6 years old and written in an engine no one in the industry uses...? How does more money improve NQ's communication, which is one major reason people around here are so negative? NQ could have another $60 million tomorrow and these issues wouldn't magically vanish. Not saying money doesn't matter, but having more time/money doesn't guarantee success in dev.

The main issue for me is that this theft isn't clever and can be done with complete impunity. They used the permissions the org gave them -- it wasn't "stealing", it was looting. If theft is supposed to be an interesting part of the game, it should have a real design. Better feedback for the org to know when it is happening, skills or technique involved beyond just exploiting RDMS, and the ability for the org to actually respond. Otherwise, all it does is encourage a dictator model of organizations because no one can be trusted -- new players never being able to be a part of leadership because they could be a danger instead of an asset. The fact that there's no recourse makes this more unimpressive -- no reputation system, no bounty system, no crime system, no ability to do anything other than restrict RDMS. I'm fine with theft being a part of this game, so long as it is a real concept, not some half-assed NQ implementation where one party can operate with impunity. That's not intrigue, it's trolling. Until there's real systems in place to make theft interesting, org property shouldn't be so easy to pilfer. Theft/intrigue is supposed to have risk -- yes more PvP would help, but that's not the only thing required for theft to work as a game concept.

eh, it's not that simple though...not for any dev project. You could give NQ another $30 million and it could still fail. there's many reasons for this : a larger dev team doesn't mean more output -- more money doesn't mean more development more money doesn't mean strong leadership or strong design more money doesn't erase the last six years of code more money doesn't mean leadership will listen to the talent they do hire Projects don't become easier as they get older, they get more difficult. Having more time or money doesn't ever guarantee success. beyond the facts of development...it isn't our job to fundraise for NQ -- they are the ones that decided to launch a paid beta and wanted feedback from the players. Not our job to be concerned with player numbers, its our job to provide feedback. Has this feedback turned into a major crap festival? Sure, I'll admit that. But...that doesn't just happen because people are bored, it happens for good reasons...like having to discuss market clutter 300,000 times or wondering (still in 6+ months of paid beta) exactly how PvP is going to work.