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.
The Beta launch is coming in just a few weeks and as you might expect it, so is the pre-Beta wipe! You will have 2 last test sessions before the wipe, during which we ask you to save all the Constructs you want to keep under the form of a Blueprint.
We know that this official announcement comes on short notice, but as you can imagine, the whole team is on a tight schedule to deliver the Beta at the end of the month and we’re trying to inform you as much in advance as possible with the time constraints.
The last test sessions before the wipe will occur will be:
From Thursday, August 6th at 14:00 UTC
To Monday, August 10th at 14:00 UTC
From Thursday, August 13th at 14:00 UTC
To Monday, August 17th at 14:00 UTC
Remember, everything will be wiped following this session, except the normal blueprints located in your Player Inventory (Nanopack), so be sure to keep those previously on your character, and not anywhere else (like in a container).
Last but not least, we also want to apologize for the inconvenience regarding the very short notice about the extended PvP zone and the issues that may have resulted from the situation. However, if you’re in a situation where some of your Constructs have been damaged before you can make an up-to-date blueprint of the said Constructs, please contact our Customer Support as soon as possible so you can get help from our team before the next test session. If you’re in such a situation, please read carefully the process described in the previous announcement published here.
(this DevBlog has been posted on the website on April 30th, 2019)
Hey guys!
NQ-Entropy here today with NQ-Wave.
We’ve been working on a significant overhaul of the game’s balancing and we’re going to do our best to explain the big changes we’ve been working on. The main subjects today are the major rebalance of inventory and container capacity, material transportation, crafting recipes, and almost every single step between mining and crafting. Saddle up.
Our starting point was the dialogue we had with the community about the issues with containers. We heard everything you guys said, from smaller containers not being useful and crafting times on larger containers being too long. This wasn’t lost on us; we also agreed that it was a little ridiculous at how weak certain containers were as opposed to the Nanoformer inventory, which held a staggering 64m3, the equivalent of a large container, or 64 extra-small containers. There was an issue.
What happened in the following weeks was us going down a massive rabbit-hole where we started pulling different strings and unearthing a lot of inconsistencies in our global balancing on almost every level. We decided that we wanted to start over on solid and healthy ground, and make sure that we knew what we were doing, how, and why. We are now at the finish line of the first major pass, and we’re ready to talk to you about it.
One of the initial issues excavated from the wreckage of our investigation was the difficulty of transporting materials while in atmosphere. As it turns out, in a realistic physically based system, it's really hard to transport hundreds of cubic meters or potentially tens of thousands of tons in materials. Who saw that one coming? It was a learning experience to see some of you try and transport raw material, only to end up with about 20 large hover engines to lift a couple of containers, which amounted to no material at all.
So this is where we began. No matter what happened next, we needed to drastically reduce the amount of weight that a player would have to reasonably move around; even in the context of large transports. As previously mentioned, the main culprit was our overly common use of cubic meters, which artificially drew upwards the volume and weight of everything we did. We globally changed our main volumic unit from m3 to liters. We now had finer control over volumes and had a more human-level metric to base our foundations on. Your inventories will now have a capacity of 4,000 liters; goodbye cubic meter, it was nice knowing you.
Having said that, we mostly liked the ratios we had in place for how fast players filled their inventories when mining and made sure to adjust everything so that it remained similar to how mining was done previously.
Continuing up the chain, we reached crafting recipes. We were also generally happy with the feedback we received for the crafting mechanic, but our first recipes were more for functional testing than any sort of real balance. Now was the perfect opportunity to take a look at it in more detail.
We want you guys to discover this without too much of a heads up, but there's a couple of cliff-notes we can mention here:
Global rebalance of item volume and weight across the board.
Conservation of mass during crafting across materials, parts, and elements during crafting (some exceptions apply).
Rebalancing of all ancillary materials recipes (honeycomb, fuel, products and scraps).
The end result of this is fairly significant, and we’re not quite sure we fully grasp all of the implications at this point. What we are confident in is that we have all of the tools in hand to effectively make adjustments and deal with any issues that arise; something that we couldn't quite say to the same degree before.
In terms of clearer changes:
Parts are generally more coherent in weight and volume with less outliers. Smaller parts will generally take up more space in your base inventory while larger ones will take less. You can still expect large parts to take up significant space, but not multiple base inventories worth.
Elements operate in the same ballpark of weight and volume as before, but we have less outliers. Smaller elements are not so small and larger elements are not so huge.
Generally speaking, honeycomb materials will require more ore to make. The amount of honeycomb material you could acquire previously was a little too high and we wanted to rein that in a little. We don't want you to feel constantly limited by honeycomb material, but we also don't want to make acquiring large quantities of honeycombed materials trivial. It's worth noting that we fixed a bug which changed honeycomb mass; honeycombed material will likely be overall heavier than before.
Fuel cost and weight have been drastically augmented, but as counterbalance, we reduced both fuel consumption for engines and fuel tank capacity. Hopefully, this ensures that fuel is more difficult to acquire and weighs more, but you will need a lot less of it for similar performance. The end result is that you’ll be able to fly for longer while retaining a similar overall cost per distance traveled as before.
In regards to scraps, the first thing we did was add scraps for all ore. You can now craft equivalent level scrap from level one to four using any ore that you’d like. Secondly, we had previously done a quick fix adjustment on scrap repair, making it less painful to repair your elements. The new scrap recipes will allow you to make more scrap for less raw ore than previously, hopefully addressing said pain points of having to mine for ages just to repair a single element. It should now be more efficient to repair an element with scrap than to craft that element from scratch.
Finally, containers. Containers haven't changed at all. Not one bit. An extra large container is still 128m3 of volume. But in a world of liters, 128 cubic meters comes out to just about 128,000 liters of capacity. That’s roughly 32 times the size of your basic inventory, and frankly, that's a hell of a lot of storage.
Additionally, there’s been a significant revamp of the information displayed in the inventories information panel. We won't go into too much detail here as we hope the new information should be easily understood and explain itself well enough.
This was a huge undertaking and we’re confident that we’re going in the right direction, but we expect there to be issues. We’re looking forward to you guys testing everything out, hearing your feedback, and hopefully providing answers.
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