ProphetZarquon

It has been stated that PvP will definitely not be FPS-style point & shoot, at least for the most part. Combat will be stat based, not twitch-reflex based. Shooting will be select target & fire, like most other MMORPGs. Personally, I'd hope for some specific weapons to be point & shoot, but that's because I prize variety; I'm not actually very good at FPS aiming, even though I'm a pretty competent dogfighter if you drop me in a Newtonian flight sim with no auto-assist to regulate rotational inertia. I'm actually hoping that rotational braking will both cost fuel & require an added Lua script. That way those of us who can pilot without it can derive some benefit from the vehicle's simplicity, akin to the way drifting is easier without traction control.

Not mentioned at all in the roadmap: Creatures Is there anything at all you can tell us about wild creatures in DU? Do you hope to have any wild creatures by the full version release? Is it planned as a strongly desired feature, or is it more like "maybe if we get around to it", or definitely not in release but maybe as an expansion afterwards? If I recall correctly, Baillie has stated that he'd like to see procedurally generated creatures make it into the game eventually; but that doesn't really tell us anything about variety. ... If there are wild creatures planned, would they be a preset selection, or might they exhibit some local variations, or might they be procedurally formed in such a way that wildly different types can be found? As someone who hopes to play mostly way out in unpopulated areas, I'd like to see as much variety in biomes & attendant creatures as possible. Importing foreign species to drive out pesky indigenous life-forms (or deter claimjumpers) could be great fun. Survival & PvP gameplay is all well & good, but if there isn't any motile PvE, I worry that exploration & hinterland gameplay will feel dead boring pretty quickly.

Wide variety of PvE creatures please. Procedurally generated biology & behaviors would be great. Hopefully some planets would be hopelessly infested with camouflaged carnivorous flying centipedes with mouth-feet & seven eyes.

A monthly subscription is a non-starter for me. The only reason I became interested in this very technically innovative game is the possibility that I could evaluate & potentially even play, explore, test, build, & contribute to the game without always having to pay a monthly fee. Monthly fees for games are an extravagance I simply cannot afford. However if there is enough complexity within the game for me to offer some service to paying players, such as doing the grinding which they pay real dollars to avoid, or offering my services as a mercenary for someone who paid real dollars for an NPC faction to provide protection... That sounds like something I'd be glad to work through, for the reward of building out my own little corner of a safe zone. I really don't see an issue with a near-infinite procedural universe offering protective zones for pay. I wouldn't go so far as to give paying players anything like administrative control, just a larger virtual space protected by the ark-defenses. I am willing to pay for useless novelties that match my foibles within a game; I'm eager to pay for anything that actually provides me some freedom to build bigger projects safely removed from PvP. I have no problem with doing extra grind that other players pay to avoid if it means I get to enjoy the same game features, even if my scale is limited by budget & lack of game-time. I don't get to play often. I don't have a lot to spend, certainly not every month. That said, I am known to pay handsomely for content & resources that I want, when I can (occasionally) afford it. Attacking the OP for proposing alternatives to subscription fees does not help to build a community centered around mutually beneficial innovation & sustainable game development. Also: Never pay for Early Access. That rewards cut & run abandonware. Developers need quality feedback from fault-tolerant alpha/beta testers; You don't get that when people pay $50 up front (much less ongoing subscription fees) for incomplete projects that still need major revision. You get a few flash-in-the-pan bumps from media coverage, then whining & stagnation. Strictly limited alpha-access (to those who submit good bug reports & possess hardware you wish to support) & content-focused beta development have been crucial components behind most of the best games I have ever played. Personalization & enlistment of other players are plenty of incentive for generous Kickstarter donations. "Donate $80 & get 100 hours of (server allocated) contract services!" You pay Novaquark, & the server NPCs reward other players for doing your combat/mining/building. You get to cherry pick which types of grind you focus on, while other players get a lucrative contract for whatever play-style they're focused on. Ultimately, if the in-game economy is actually complex enough to support multiple play-styles, it's complex enough to monetize grinding without penalizing free-to-players. Everybody picks a specialty & those who can afford it can pay real dollars (or crap tons of in-game) to have other specialists take care of things they're not as good at.

Personally, I am in favor of a large group of players (or one sufficiently well-funded one) having the capability to frag/slag a planet. In a game with a near-limitless procedurally generated environment & (presumably) ever-expanding zones of influence around the safe-spawn zones, it only makes sense that resources could truly become exhausted. Also, planet-buster weapons are just fun. How splitting a voxel group as large as a planet is accomplished, I have no idea, but I'd definitely like to see something like Universe Simulator, where debris & resources can actually collect into group-objects, reform, or even evolve into complex structures. For instance, having a very large asteroid or small moon crash into an inhabited world seems like something that would not only be exciting at the time, but a desirable source of change in what could otherwise be a very static universe. (Procedural spaces are hard, yo! Ever seen a really messed up village in Minecraft?) I don't think it's actually beyond the engine/networking code's capability; More a challenge of implenting such huge map changes without utterly breaking gameplay. As for bot-mining, I'm hoping it not only exists, but will be done by NPCs if the players don't stake their claims first! NPC enemies that don't expand at least somewhat (to some limit, perhaps as imposed by other NPCs) get really boring. I like the idea of new players buying (or mining/crafting/bartering for) a share of the output from user-built, scripted & directed bot swarms. I really want my own mining drones. I'm definitely hoping for fighter-swarms to help prevent the over-proliferation of capital ships. Big ships should be vulnerable to harassment, not just made unavailable by resource constraints (except for time-sink/P2Win players). That said I definitely think the largest class should have super-effective crater-making tools. (When I was a kid & somebody told me that the core of Mars had cooled, I proposed blasting the entire surface off to get at that sweet sweet semi-refined iron core.)