Hello everyone,
here is a lengthy impression from a noob, who has not followed the game prior to "release", not been in beta.
I actually joined this game by chance because I was frustrated with Star Citizen being not a playworthy game after 10+ years of development / funding campaign and a budget of a frecking half a billion dollars. In a rant about SC someone mentioned DU, I pictured it as a mix of minecraft and space engineers (with simplified physics though) but as a MMO.
The possiblilities for constructions and on top of that a seemingly powerful scripting layer sounded amazing. Good enough for me for starters, even if subscription-based.
The first worrying thing I noticed (apart from bugs), people asking in the help channel for an admin and being told, those are not reading this channel and the only option to get your problems fixed ("maybe" and after a period of "days") is to file a help ticket. Customer support seems non-existing or only in a homeopathic dosage. On a game that allegedly has been released AND is subscription-based, I want to point out again!
The bugs I and others encountered (on my side primarily regarding the daily challenges) seem to be around for years according to people that played the game from the start of alpha.
Now don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun in this game, even though I did little more than building up an industry, moved to Alioth after six weeks I spent wasting to build a mediocre space ship, found a nice org, moved to their HQ and rebuilt my industry again. I have not been to other planets apart from Haven and Alioth, no T2+ mining bases, no PVP, etc
What I conclude until now is, that this game is not much more than a sceleton of game content around mining, industry, construction and ship building. Everything feels not fleshed out, rather prototypical and quite incomplete, at least when judging from the perspective of "ordinary" games. The features that stand out, are the possibilities to create constructs and I dont know any other game that offers that to this degree (even if much more is imaginable). And that part gave me a lot of fun. I totally understand, that for someone who is not interested in that at all this game is devoid of worthwhile content.
In my personal game experience so far, the greatest challenge is to earn money, especially since the challenges are broken and the air delivery challenge got removed, which by the way I enjoyed quite bit, it tought me how to fly and was my main source of income (the space challenge is much less fun and even more bugged and less profitable so I skipped that most of the time). This is another observation I made: it seems to happen quite often that if a feature doesn't work in the game, it is not being fixed, it is not being improved, it's just being removed making the game even more bland.
Since it is hard to get money (maybe I am just too stupid, but it seems to happens to a lot of new players), game progress is even slower. I have a hard time to pay the rents for my 2 territories on Alioth and the schematics I need to build stuff. The only worthwhile mission is the 180k delivery on Alioth, which for me takes around 20 mins (though I frequently effed up my atmospheric reentry and damaged my ship so this mission becomes a loss, but of course this is on me). I would like to build up my base, but I can't afford an L-Core (not to speak of territory scanners and other 1million+ components), I would like to build ships, but I need to spend a lot of my play time to get money by doing missions and produce the few articles that can be sold on the market with a margin, get my mining bases going, ferry around ore and products, etc.
What worries me a lot from a game development perspective, is the slow progress. And this seems to be the case for a long time, according to alpha veteran players.
In all honesty and of course my view is highly subjective, but at the moment this game feels like a disregarded bastard child that has been cast out to the streets in rags by its step-parents to beg for money in order to pay the debts of its dead father.
I am a SW developer myself and daresay, I have an idea what can be accomplished in a certain timeframe with a certain manpower. What has been anounced for the next patch, given the time frame of MONTHS is - again I feel sorry to say it - just outright loughable, close to customer fraught.
I have not followed the game development, I don't know what has been promised over time, what has been changed, who got fired or replaced and how that affected the development.
For now the game is enjoyable to me, especially since I found a nice org. We have great plans and want to build a city (no, not to rent apartments to people and nonsense like that) just for the sake of the challenge.
What I am worrying the most at the moment, is that NQ might not even have the ambition to bring this game further and make it successful. It _feels_ like it is being run on a sceleton crew just to get some subscription money to cut the investor's losses until it runs out of subscriptions and then is being shut down for good.
And these worries demotivate me to actually creat some awesome stuff in the game, because this takes a huge amount of time and effort. Who wants to do that when he is afraid that it all might be taken offline in a couple of months?
And that would really be a shame, because I see the potential.
DU is not the first game that has been thrown out to the market unfinished (not just unpolished) (No Man's Sky anyone?) and with technical difficulties. Most of these issues could be solved with further development.
A small example:
The problem with the delivery challenges not registering my delivery, therefore making the quest stuck forcing you to repeat it in total, could _probably_ be solved by giving the player a button on the progress screen (beside the container for the delivers) to activate a function that recounts the content in the container and set the mission progress accordingly. Or reset the progress and allow me to empty the container and fill it again.
A large example:
do believe this game needs PvE as an additional game loop for players who shun PVP but want some action. From what I have seen so far, what is possible with scripting (like archHUD) to steer the behaviour of ships, this is not a far stretch from having automated ships that could act as NPCs. What else would be required
- a possibility for ships to function without player control. Maybe via an additional AI core, which makes the ship functional and fulfills some basic decision making (fly to a location in space, scan for targets, attack targets until destroyed, fly to next location, rince repeat until either dead or "finished with the patrol/out of ammo" fly back to the spawn point or end of mission point - reset ship)
- with the scripting possibilities the behaviour parameters can be randomized so that not very ship flies the same route, behaves the same, etc
- it would require a mechanism to spawn those ships, shouldn't be too hard, it works for asteroids, already
- We already have ships, there is not even a need to design new ones, they just need to be able to act as NPCs, a huge range of variants could be created
- I would strongly suggest that these NPC ships should also be able to fight and be thought in the protected zone not just in the outer PVP zone. NOf course not within the small zone around the celestial bodies and maybe not between Alioth, Haven and Sanctuary, to have a real peaceful area for new players. But in the outer region and around the planets at the rim of the protected zone it should be possible. Therefore this requires the possibility to activate your weapons and target NPC ships.
If PvE was only possible in the PvP zone this wouldcause rampant ganking issues of PvPers that hunt PvE-players, so there should be an PVE-only zone. But this does not rule out to have more challenging and more rewarding NPCs in the PvP zone which add another level of action and conflict and give PvPer an incentive to defend these areas against the cowardly "Inners" to have an edge in resource income.
This would give players the possibility to have some action, risk their lives and ships, and gain loot on success. For noobs like me having the chance to loot some Tier 3+ elements or voxel material (and maybe even other stuff in the containers) that would be enough incentive to play this game loop and in a later stage to go to the PvP areas and risk more for more reward.
Ok, so now some desicion makers at NQ might say, "we do not have the DEV resources to do all that". Well, let the community help you! There is an insane amount of creative talent out there. Make a community challenge out of it!
- Provide the basic mechanism to create an autonomous ship (like an AI core element that acts as a control unit)
- Provide the scripting API to control that AI core. It can be rather basic at the start, we are in space! We don't need navmeshes and expensive AI libraries and stuff like that!
- Organize it as a community challenge, hand out the AI cores (start with XS only, and limited number), let the community build and design, observe what works and what is too performance straining, what functions should be optimized into C++ routines, etc.
- Provide prices for successful designs or let the community decide.
- Finally proclaim, which NPCs shall be taken into the game, have them spawn.
- Rince repeat the whole thing with S, M, L, XL, maybe later with expanded AI.
If it is undesirable, e.g. in terms of griefing, to have a lot of autonomous ships in player hands, or too performance-intensive, have the AI cores removed from players completely (which would be a pity, really), or have them limited, by supply, on a per player/per org base, or disallow armed ships in player hands, or all of it together. Personally, in the long run I would probably be satisfied with having an autonomuous taxi/ferry ship, that can fly on its own to my outposts, where I can un/load it via VR, to ease the resource gathering. I dont need a personal USV noob hunter craft that rampages through the inner zone and griefs people without me even witnessing it.
Though it would be cool to have a carrier ship that can spit out lots of combat drones.... yeah the possibilities are endless, at least in theory...
Long story short: this game has a lot of issues, but even more potential. It would be reassuring if NQ would demonstrate some long-term commitment. I don't see that at the moment not even ideas. Be honest to your community. We dont want this game to fail!
I for myself do not need a "Ready Player One" or "Metaverse" vision. This movie's story was about a dystopian, virtualized but totally disfunct and impoverished society that went astray big time. Who the hell wants that?
Not me for sure! I just want a decent space-themed MMO with a great degree of creative freedom that is FUN to play and enjoyable after a hard day of real-life work. Should be doable...
Regards, Kaine Vulpayne
Koffye reacted to a post in a topic:
When the White Knights turn Black (an open letter to the community and NQ)