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CptLoRes

Alpha Tester
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Posts posted by CptLoRes

  1. 22 hours ago, blundertwink said:

    <snip>

    In reality, I think the thing that went awry is those investors deciding it was okay for someone with no experience in gaming to lead a gaming company.

     

     

    When you consider that the current management is the VC taking over and what kind of ideas they brought to the table, it all starts to make sense why things could go so wrong both before and after JC.

     

    And the failure of DU/NQ is and has always been the inability to execute and provide progress at a reasonable pace.

    The core ideas for DU needed lots of players to have a chance. But you will never get players when you cannot even provide functional game loops, and try to build the game on a framework unable to scale even with small player counts.

  2. Anyone still playing DU is doing so despite NQ's best efforts to chase players away. The golden age for this game was in early alpha, and play ability and enjoyment has slowly been decreasing patch, by patch since then.

     

    Most (if not all) major updates released for this game has lead to decreased player numbers, with changes made against community advice because apparently "NQ knows best".

  3. On 12/6/2023 at 7:14 PM, blundertwink said:

    Will they learn from DU's mistakes, or are they doomed to repeat them...?

     

    Considering how many times they have proven they are unable to change during all the years with DU, I have little faith in them doing anything but more of the same going forwards..

  4. The entire concept of user generated content is a double-edge sword.

     

     To get user generated content worth playing, the players need freedom to express themself and tools so that they can make actual content and not just window dressing. This is what DU was supposed to be, but never delivered.

    But at the same time, giving players such freedom in a MMO would be a recipe for disaster and impossible to balance. Just look at how much drama we had (dirt walls, space towers, building above markets etc.) with the limited tools available.

  5. 50 minutes ago, nekranox said:

    - Increase spawn rate and value of abandoned wrecks

    - Move the alien cores closer and increase plasma yield

    - Increased spawn rate of high tier asteroids

    - Optimised PVP ships at UEF, low cost

    - A bunch of new elements, decorative or functional

     

    Tie it all together with a bit of storyline and do it over a weekend with 1 month build up for everyone to prepare.

     

    I am one of those diehards, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. :)

     

    The main problem is that the list of quick feature changes in your example, would typically be something like 1 year of dev time at NQ pace. And that was before they decreased the manpower working on DU to a skeleton crew no less.

     

    But don't take my word for it. Take a look at the release logs going back a couple of years, look at how many actual new features was implemented during that time period and make your own conclusions..

  6. Which is why I said "you want to own it". So it is not necessarily the end result, especially when it comes to digital products. But it is still a ingrained want most people have, and why subscription makes many people hesitate more then paying a one time sum. And I am old enough that I remember a time when once you payed, you would get software on a physical medium that you owned and that would never expire. Something you could even resell if you no longer needed it. Imagine that!

     

    And speaking on this topic. Big corp has been playing the long game for a while now, and have slowly but surly been training people to think that renting instead of owning is the norm (Neo-feudalism but with corp instead of government leading the charge).  And the end result is everything becoming subscriptions based as people start to accept this, regardless of if it makes sense or not for the product in question. I.e BMW tried to charge a subscription for seat warmers in their cars, but that turned out to be one step to far. But give it a couple of years and they will try again..

     

     

     

     

  7. You can argue that steam player count cannot be used as absolute numbers for active DU players. But more importantly the steam charts are showing players trends which should be relevant for all players regardless for if they are on steam or not. And those do not look good, and we don't have to look very hard to see that reality agrees.

    image.png.7960a4234824cfc2c81ead06e835fe04.png

     

    A steam peak of 788 players and the current peak with only 45 players, is a 94% drop.

    And even if there are more non steam players, they are nowhere near the numbers needed to justify the continued development on a game like this. You could double or triple the most positive players count mentioned here, and it would still not be enough to support a future for the game.

  8. DU is the only product NQ has, so shutting down the forum (or anything else related to the game) is a very public statement about the state of the company.

     

    So my guess is that they are keeping DU 'alive' to try and maintain the facade, while working on some other products to make it big in crypto (sigh), get bought up or some other harebrained scheme like that..

  9. Bottom line is that despite all the early stage questions we made about game design, NQ felt they knew better and painted themself into a corner by making a cloud based system that does not scale well and is to costly to host.

     

    And subsequently almost all design decisions since v23, has been about reducing cost instead of how to improve game play and make the game ohh you now.. fun to play.

  10. Problem with free to play is that DU is hosted on cloud servers where player activity cost real money. In fact just flying over a planet is probably one of the most expensive (for NQ) operation you can do in the game, since it translates into a lot of voxel streaming from the cloud servers.

     

    So each player joining for free will cost NQ real money, unless they repeatedly do enough micro transactions to offset the monthly server hosting cost.

     

    And even if they did decide to make DU into F2P, it would take at least a year to implement micro transactions using the famously slow NQ 'dev time'.

    And in the process they would of course find some strange and fundamentally wrong way of implementing micro transactions that players would not like at all. And those weird design choices would then go live regardless, because NQ would not have given us any details or asked for feedback on any of the changes until they where done making them. And by then it would be to late to make any substantial changes based on player feedback.

  11. It is well known that DU does voxel operations using the CPU only. NQ even used to brag about it in a "Voxel operations using AVX instructions" whitepaper.

    And since they never managed to do a proper decoupling of CPU, network/disk and GPU operations, you then get a "worst of all worlds" scenario dropping frames if any resource is lagging.

  12. We have been saying such thing for ever. Even before 0.23.

     

    But the simple fact is that back when NQ could have made such changes, they chose not to. Or to be more precise, they made changes but not the ones we needed or wanted.

    And right now they have so little man power and resources allocated to the game, I suspect they could not even if they wanted to..

     

    So that ship sailed a long time ago I am afraid.

  13. No question that SSD/M.2 will result in much faster cache loading times then a spinning disk.

    But.. remember that this game is designed to continuously stream data from cloud servers. Meaning that as long as your cache drive is as fast as your internet connection, then there should be little to gain during actual game play once the game has loaded.

     

    The problem here is when the game is made in such a way that loading new assets (either from cache or cloud servers) results in stutter and frame drops when rendering the existing assets that are already loaded and ready. And this choice/lack of design becomes especially bad when the entire premise of the game is to continuously stream in new assets all the time while playing.

  14. - I greatly enjoyed learning how to build and script effective designs.

    - The first time you successfully enter space and safely return again, was epic. (The failures where also entertaining, in their own way).

    - I enjoyed industry before 0.23.

    - And in the beginning I had a good time exploring space, planets and the underground cave systems. But sadly, that did not last long since there was nothing to discover.

     

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