NQ-Kyrios

Hello, Noveans! I’m Cyrille Fontaine, Creative Director here at Novaquark. These are exciting times and I wanted to give everyone an overview of our objectives and direction for Dual Universe. A game like Dual Universe is a never ending labor of love and ongoing development, but there is a point when you just need to assess if it is ready for a release. After close to two years of testing and numerous major additions to the game, we have decided to prepare the game for launch. Development of Dual Universe continues at full speed, and we’re spending the lion’s share of our focus right now on fixing bugs, stabilizing the game, improving our back-end systems, and overall continuing to polish the game. We’re close to deploying a brand new feature that we expect will be a hub for creators and merchants alike to gather and present themselves to other players. It’ll be open to anyone who wishes to participate and advertise their shop, museum, service, or any other point of interest. We’re also working hard to deliver our promises to our Kickstarter backers that supported us from the beginning. We’re searching for a new shipping partner to deliver the physical rewards as well as delivering the digital rewards through the major game updates of 2022. We’re also implementing an initial web-based version of DACs. Our team continues to analyze game data and read your feedback to focus our efforts on where we can be most effective, and this means that our plans can change with developments in the game, but looking to the future, I want to share some of what we currently have planned in upcoming content updates for Dual Universe. Flotillas are a new feature we’re developing that will allow players to form temporary groups of constructs. These will help in identifying friend from foe, assuming your foes haven’t already infiltrated your squad. This will improve many different aspects of group play ranging from fleet engagements, running convoys, piracy, and more. Another gameplay feature we’re looking to add is recycling, which would enable players to better manage their inventories by turning parts of broken or unwanted elements back into components. We want to expand PvE with the goal of helping players bring the game-world to life and improving the story in which everyone experiences the game. The mission system is one area of focus for this goal in developing more complex, interconnected, and lore-oriented objectives. We’re also developing a power management system. A good way to consider how energy will work is to look at how construct maximum speeds have changed. Players must decide how to specialize each ship, and similarly, must make choices on how best to distribute power across their constructs. We want to increase the quantity of discovered planets and moons as well as new aspects, biomes and gameplay opportunities, and to produce planetoids the size of big asteroids, much like the Thades belt rocks, but claimable as a territory. One of the most resource-intensive features that we have to tackle is planetary warfare. It brings significant change to the game and, before we can achieve it, we have to bring PvP in general to a more mature state. We know that territory warfare is an important game system to many of you, so continue to help us improve PvP by engaging in fights to generate data for us to analyze and continue to improve the system. There are also many other features that we are looking to improve or introduce in the future. Now, let’s discuss the topic of a reset. We have seen your many posts across Discord, our forums and social media. We’ve heard your frustration and know that many of you are waiting for a decision about whether or not we will reset. Let me assure you that no matter what we decide, you will not be reset back to square one. Of the different options we’ve been discussing in case of a reset, we are certain that you will keep your core blueprints, including blueprints owned by an organization that you lead. We are also looking into which other important parts of your game progress could be kept if we do reset. Yes, the internal discussion about a possible reset does continue, and it’s no exaggeration to say that this is the most significant decision we currently have to make for Dual Universe. We appreciate our players and your engagement with us, but I also want everyone to know that all of us here at Novaquark are eagerly awaiting the day we can share concrete news with you. That is all for this message. Until next time, thank you for your attention, Noveans! Please don't hesitate to provide your feedback here. - Cyrille Fontaine (NQ-Kyrios)