blundertwink

Dear Noveans,
 
We would like to address the recent speculations that have arisen in our community, and openly disclose some changes that are happening at Novaquark.
 
First and foremost, Novaquark continues to be supported by its long term investors to allow it to launch Dual Universe in line with its original vision. It also puts us in a position to attract experienced talent to complement the team that’s already in place so that we can continue to improve the game.
 
Next week, we will share with you what we think our priorities should be for Dual Universe and how we hope to approach the development of the game with improved processes going forward.
 
An important change to note is that Jean-Christophe, the founder of Novaquark, has transitioned from the day-to-day management of the team to better focus on his position as a board member. Over the years since the creation of Novaquark, JC designed and set the standards for the structural and conceptual foundation of the game, and he feels now that a solid base is there for him to move forward as a strategic advisor. The recent changes in the administrative presidency of the company only reflect the transition of JC to his new role. We’re excited to have the team he has built deliver on his vision for the game.
 
Rest assured that Novaquark’s future is in good hands, and there is a strong partnership between our long-term investors and our team. We believe that the future is bright for the game and for the company, and we cannot wait to tell you where we want to take Dual Universe.
 
With our warmest regards,
The Novaquark team

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. 

Nearly every white material is now some sort of silverisch sh*t. Now there is no possibility to build white ships besides building it with plastic, brick or concret. 
Aged alu is more white than white alu and matte white carbon fiber is a silver flickering mess. 
I m very disappointed. 
 
Cache reduction to 5-10GB...wtf guys? 
Problem: Full market places. NQ Solution: more Parking spaces?! Rly? Seriously to reduce the lag you build more structures? 
 
I m a german game designer and dudes, you got some serious problems in your problem vs solution conceptions.. 

Buying tech is fine but the tech has to be packaged. Engines themselves are a perfect example of that tech. As are APIs, GUIs etc. IIRC NQ themselves use Coherent for the UI. That's the kind of tech you buy, packaged and well documented and easy to plug in to your project and saving you months of effort of deving it in house.
 
Nothing NQ has is portable to another game without tremendous effort. 
 
NQ holds 2 patents that I'm aware of and only the one for the partitioning has any real value - https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a7/15/87/2ec4f4e207739a/US10565785.pdf
 
The other does not. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/44/3d/9e/c0d03c82bee467/US20190279401A1.pdf
 
Basically the only thing they could do is sell the patents to a holding company and try to hope someone licenses them. With that said, server meshing isn't a new thing and they just hold the patent for THEIR way of doing it - the value there is questionable as well.

Changing the game engine is like changing the unibody of a car.
 
You can do it.
 
But you're basically building a whole new car from scratch - and it would cost you more to do a body swap than to just...buy a brand new car.
 
Taking a game off one engine and putting on another is the same way in pretty much every imaginable way.

I agree that DU will likely go F2P eventually....but I think it'd be a mistake for them to do that anytime soon.
 
While the sub model makes no sense for DU in its current state, it does work as a gate to ensure that only very interested players willing to pay install the game. 
 
If they go FTP, they'll be opening those floodgates and neither the new player experience nor the technicals can handle this gracefully.
 
They have a lot of work to do before they can even get to the point where FTP will make them money. 

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 funniest part about this post is the screenshot with the section that apparently they "forgot" to configure in their  new theme...

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. 

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 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. 

If the original engine builder can’t avoid item duplication bugs, item teleportation bugs, and keep client/server terrain state synced...
 
A third party picking the engine up has a snowball in hell chance of doing better.

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. 

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. 

DU goes f2p and brings cosmetics.

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. 

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  

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...

So many inaccurate statements here.  6-7 years?  Nope.  The company may have been established for that long, then but you act as if it has been open to players for that long.  There was pre-alpha for a bit then alpha for about a year, and now beta.  NQ has kept a pretty good forward progress roadmap, especially when compared to other large games.  
 
"riddled with bugs that never get fixed"  Apparently you don't read the release notes or haven't been playing that long because that statement is just ignorant. Yes there are still bugs.
 
You say they haven't made changes in 7 months.  Again, you may not be paying attention to what is happening.
 
"zero experience in game dev" that statement is just a big middle finger at their accomplishments thus far.  Are you a game dev by the way?  How do you know so much about the devs, and what their employees think?  Are you an ex-employee of NQ?  What is your experience in the industry?
 
I can agree that this game that is still in development is not a finished game and has some issues to work out just like any game that hasn't been released yet, but you are stating a lot of things as facts that simply are false or completely assumed.
 
It always amazes me how much time and energy folks are willing spend to talk and write about something they seem to hate so much.  Like Lethys' comment above, he has been bashing the game in these forums for years, just generally being an ass and counter productive.  I have no idea why he is still here in this game or in these forums.  You think he would be trying find joy somewhere else by now.
 
As to the OP's question, I believe the game is not going anywhere and has great things to come.  I think the Mission system will be one of the biggest transformations to the game that we have seen in a long time and bring some folks back.  It will give some "game" to the game.  I personally am looking forward to making missions for players.  I have witnessed some folks leaving the game out of frustration of some changes which is understandable.  Some will come back at a later date when more features arrive (also understandable considering playing beta phase games are not for everyone).  There is a large core base of players that are not going to leave and are very supportive.  Please take some of these more salty comments with ...well... a grain of salt.  In the end, yes it will take more time and patience to get where the game is going, but history has shown that NQ has listened to players and made changes appropriately, and that is why I plan to keep playing. Some times it does go backwards a bit, but eventually gets fixed.

I'm not going to interfere much, but if we're going to set the record straight, I'll just briefly mention the following:
 
Pre-Alpha was back in October 2017, which means that it was the first time it was open to players who were not ATV members. 
Nevertheless, his statement does not change the fact that the game has been in development for much longer. These include:
- Friends and Family Access
- Prototype of the server architecture (which, by the way, was already started in 2014)
- Preparations for the KS campaign
All in all, this statement is true. Just because players did not have access does not mean that they were asleep until then.
 
JC, the ceo, the leadership as itself, has not published a game. That does not change this fact. Instead of attacking the player here, he just said something that was true. JC has been a scientist in his career working on robots and AI. 
 
Yep, it was Naunet, not Naerais. I've corrected that in the previous post. Thanks for mentioning this.

You twisting here. He said in development, not in public. 
 
It was in development 6-7 years. JC himself: "So, I got a first prototype working back in 2014, and Novaquark was born soon after." In older interview he even says about prototype in 2013. I remember when they pitched in KS, they said game in development for 2 years or so too.
 
In terms of public access they planned it much faster (but NQ failed do so), here from 2016 article: "An alpha version demonstrating the unique single hard cluster (CSSC) and planetary engine with a preliminary set of gameplay features is planned to become available at the beginning of 2017."
 
So, factual base generaly proves point of many people here about development timeline.
 
 

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. 

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. 

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.