CptLoRes

I'm going to comment.. and honestly maybe this'll be the last comment on the forum.
 
The appeal of Dual Universe started back in the day with networking. We built organizations in our head, put them on paper in discord, and then had final rivaling each other with the hanging out thrown in there. Then we got the game and no matter how hard we tried, we could only pull so many people from the prior networking game into the actual game. It was rough, the novelty could only be enjoyed by so many people during the pre-alpha and alpha launches. Technical issues and the unoptimized state stunted the growth that the game needed.
 
I think DU deserved a better outcome that couldn't be executed for many reasons. It wasn't one mistake, and from the people who've told me a number of what went on behind the scenes, it wasn't a lack of will. It ultimately came down to consistent failures; some failures came from scaling a small team into a larger developer, some came from lack of attention on the game, some came from game play design itself, and some came from lack of listening to community feedback.
 
Some issues killed the game more than others and I don't have the answers for which ones were the worst. To be fair, Novaquark had vision. What I'm commenting in terms of the issues is from years ago now. I hope things change. I'll hopefully download the game again and give it a spin to feel some of the memories come back. I agree with @Firestorm that it's more fun with a group... and I wish there were more groups.
 

JC: I am making an unlimited persistent open-world MMO with user created content! Single shard of course!
Players: That sounds almost to good to be true. How are you going to design for and address the obvious technical challenges for such a game?
..
Players: Hello? Anyone there?
..
..
JC: Don't worry guys! It is going to be great! You can even subscribe now if you want!

JC: I am making an unlimited persistent open-world MMO with user created content! Single shard of course!
Players: That sounds almost to good to be true. How are you going to design for and address the obvious technical challenges for such a game?
..
Players: Hello? Anyone there?
..
..
JC: Don't worry guys! It is going to be great! You can even subscribe now if you want!

Fair, but my point was that by the time the VC took over, it was too late to implement any ideas other than scaling back. 
 
The game's future was crystalized by 8 years of JC's thoughtless dev and the only choice was to scale down features to slash costs. 

Even putting the horrid tech aside, the game's design was so wildly unfinished they didn't even understand how to fit PvP into the game. 
 
I'm not convinced that the VC really had a choice in the direction they took DU. It was either push it out in a lame form or abandon the project.
 
That's reflected in how Andurance hired their current CEO, whose stated purpose was always to focus on other projects (per his own LinkedIn)...since before release. 
 
To be honest, I don't think any idea that the VC pursued to fix the game would have worked. We all knew the game was (at best) half-finished even before they started slashing.
 
I'm no fan of their strategy in pretending to develop DU while they clearly weren't, but I also don't believe there's anything anyone could have realistic done to fix this project. 

And incredibly short sighted for a game that supposedly depended on players to provide the content.
 
Not that flying around looking at what some players build with no functionality other then being eye candy, could be considered content in the long run. But that is another story..

And incredibly short sighted for a game that supposedly depended on players to provide the content.
 
Not that flying around looking at what some players build with no functionality other then being eye candy, could be considered content in the long run. But that is another story..

If I am being cynical (which is most of the time when it comes to NQ). I suspect the announcement that they will now finally begin to ship physical backer rewards, is mostly about tying lose ends for when they finally shut down DU. If not then there would be a lot of blowback with them still being an active company developing other products.

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".

I think there will definitely be a reckoning on the horizon, especially for the many firms focusing on AI-driven UGC or AI-driven assets in general. 
 
And when you think about games like Minecraft (often cited as an example of the power of UGC), the actual engagement point (at least IMO) isn't really the things people create, it's the act of creation itself...
 
When studio CEOs and leaders talk about how generative AI or UGC will change gaming, it's almost always from the widget-driven perspective where these people view making games like a factory, since that's the process they can understand. Producing more "widgets" with less people will of course lead to better things from their perspective. 
 
Not better, though, because they don't talk in language like that....they talk about how it will "vastly increase retention".  
 
It's kind of like claiming that AI will make writing novels much better, since AI can provide "more words with less time". Only idiots would believe that the quality of a novel relates to the "amount of content" it provides. 
 
When you're making something as complex and artistic as a game, CEOs and leadership often get in the way. This push for trying to make their own users develop the game so that they can capitalize on it "forever" is going to backfire because those same CEOs can only view games as cash registers. 
 
I hope that games like BG3 send a clear message about what the market actually craves -- quality, not just quantity. I highly doubt NQ's leadership has learned this even after investing 9+ years in DU. 

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..

I like the concept of DU, the way things are mostly seamless, specially regarding to flight (atmospheric and space), they do have good tech, made by really talented people here.
The big mistake (that still happens), at least in my point of view, is that while the game was created with the intention of everything being player-made or player-driven, they still keep adding arbitrary limitations to the game, which goes completely against the sandbox concept (sometimes, even the concept of a game, which is being fun).
 
For example, limitations regarding what's allowed via scripting or building hurt quite a lot, but timers also hurt as well. Plus, some things that would have made the whole experience much nicer haven't been implemented until today.
Player markets could've been so nice, like, if we could add a Market Pod ourselves to a Container Hub and have a centralized place where we could add buy/sell orders in our construct, with that the number of districts and overall markets could be reduced per planet, which would give players a reason to make connections to get better offers. That's the kind of mechanic that is kind of implemented already, but is restricted and can't be implemented by players in any way. It gets even worse when we don't have reverse dispensers that buy stuff or don't have even the basic QoL to dispensers, which would be allowing to increase number of batch sizes at buy time...
 
The game idea is good, and I'm sure there's lots of talented people working on it, but sadly, whoever is in charge of making decisions doesn't seem to understand that for emergent gameplay to properly flourish you need to offer players freedom and tools for that...

There is A LOT that went wrong. But the fundamental problem has always been communication.
 
Here is what NQ said during the kickstarter.

 
But as we all know, this lasted only a short time before they went the complete other way and started to ignore the community instead.
And remember this was back when the community was under NDA restrictions and played with the sole purpose of testing and giving feedback on early game play no less!
 
And NQ was never able to receive constructive criticism. If you played the cheerleader and told NQ how great they where, they would interact and be all smiles and thumbs up. But any type of constructive criticism or legitimate concerns with the game design and it would be radio silence or at best some boilerplate  "don't worry guys" and "we know best" type of answer. And when things would boil over and the entire community would rage, we would get some "we hear you" type of deal with promises to do better. All promises that where broken over and over again..
 
And that is why the community turned toxic against NQ, and things are the way they are today.
And it is basic math really. When testers are telling you that things aren't working, but you ignore them and keep doing the same things. Then chances are that you will fail.
 

We have had this discussion many times. And the bottom line is that DU shows all the symptoms of bad system design.
The lack of separation on the screen render (fps) and asset loading (network/ssd streaming), being just one of many such examples.
 
I.e. the renderer should operate in a separate thread working only with the assets it has available, and by design it should never be affected (fps) by asset being loaded until the new voxels are finished processing and ready to be rendered. So having a slow network/storage would result in longer loading times before voxels show on the screen, but the fps should never drop while doing so.
 
And this problem is made even worse since DU appears to not have any occlusion culling on either streaming or rendering, meaning that everything like underground constructs, tunnels and inside of constructs etc. are always loaded and rendered while you are flying above them.

There is A LOT that went wrong. But the fundamental problem has always been communication.
 
Here is what NQ said during the kickstarter.

 
But as we all know, this lasted only a short time before they went the complete other way and started to ignore the community instead.
And remember this was back when the community was under NDA restrictions and played with the sole purpose of testing and giving feedback on early game play no less!
 
And NQ was never able to receive constructive criticism. If you played the cheerleader and told NQ how great they where, they would interact and be all smiles and thumbs up. But any type of constructive criticism or legitimate concerns with the game design and it would be radio silence or at best some boilerplate  "don't worry guys" and "we know best" type of answer. And when things would boil over and the entire community would rage, we would get some "we hear you" type of deal with promises to do better. All promises that where broken over and over again..
 
And that is why the community turned toxic against NQ, and things are the way they are today.
And it is basic math really. When testers are telling you that things aren't working, but you ignore them and keep doing the same things. Then chances are that you will fail.
 

There is A LOT that went wrong. But the fundamental problem has always been communication.
 
Here is what NQ said during the kickstarter.

 
But as we all know, this lasted only a short time before they went the complete other way and started to ignore the community instead.
And remember this was back when the community was under NDA restrictions and played with the sole purpose of testing and giving feedback on early game play no less!
 
And NQ was never able to receive constructive criticism. If you played the cheerleader and told NQ how great they where, they would interact and be all smiles and thumbs up. But any type of constructive criticism or legitimate concerns with the game design and it would be radio silence or at best some boilerplate  "don't worry guys" and "we know best" type of answer. And when things would boil over and the entire community would rage, we would get some "we hear you" type of deal with promises to do better. All promises that where broken over and over again..
 
And that is why the community turned toxic against NQ, and things are the way they are today.
And it is basic math really. When testers are telling you that things aren't working, but you ignore them and keep doing the same things. Then chances are that you will fail.
 

This update was without merit. The players numbers will further be punished till mandatory fun is had. 

Unfun combat- unfinished PVE- and a rug pull on scans by the community. It bought NQ a single day of 2x player activity and it's back down to dwindling. If the PVE had been more... open world based, and fun- maybe. Where are the NPC ships flying about delivering goods? The Police enforcing Aphelia's laws...? or potential points of dynamic fun with everything that having dynamic NPC's in world means.... instead it's walled off in it's own part of the game, not adding anything to the game world itself.

I still hope that one day they'll have territory warfare, and more dynamic PVE. Daisy... daisy.... 

Yet somehow people around here still insist that NQ's "tech" is worth money and that DU has always been a vehicle to test, develop, and "sell the tech".
 
When I ask "what tech exactly are you talking about...?" there's only shrugs and vagueness, because no one can point to one single concept in this game that actually works properly and works properly at scale. 
 
Issues like this are why NQ has effectively (IMO) put DU on the shelf to focus on other projects. There's very little interest in today's planned update and there's no real chance that the "addition of PvE" does anything other than amuse people. 

This is the only part I slightly disagree with in your post. And the reason is that NQ never even came close to finish the tools we need to make proper content. So all they really proved was that a game with subpar content creation tools, will fail when they are supposed to be a content creation game.. Duh!
 
But I do agree that unless the players are given so much freedom that they could script fully interactive content (and we disregard all the potential exploit issues), then yes there must be some PVE elements to make a game fun and interesting for normal players.
 
And this is part of the problem. It would appear that the only players NQ have been listening to, are certain PVP focused org players who have gotten a foot inside the door. And the interests of those hardcore org players does not even remotely represent the needs and wants of the majority of normal players in DU who has a life outside the game..
 

More web3...  web4?!! I am going to be rich!!
 

I am more fascinated by how every one of those "revolutionary future tech" web3 portal tech demo/game sites, manage to look like it is some type of early year 2000 style game or CGI from The Lawnmower Man movie.

I am more fascinated by how every one of those "revolutionary future tech" web3 portal tech demo/game sites, manage to look like it is some type of early year 2000 style game or CGI from The Lawnmower Man movie.

And some of us asked NQ multiple times from day 0, "how are you going to solve the obvious technical limitations and scaling issues with this design?".
And for years NQ/JC would only shrug and say "don't worry guys" or something to that effect. But guess what, the problems did not go away.
 
And by now the history of DU is pretty much just a long list of community "we told you so" issues being proven right as time went by and NQ continued to ignore the feedback.

PvE in a normal MMO:
Explore some exotic world with your friends, discovery hidden treasures monsters and loot. Have chance encounters with other players that you may or may not cooperate with to take down difficult PvE enemies for better loot.
 
PvE in DU:
No exploration because there is nothing to discover. PvE is basically just a collection of new VR challenges that use the existing and lackluster PvP functionality, only difference is that NPC's replace players as opponents. Ohh.. And it's instanced away from the main game to make sure there absolutely will not be any kind or community interaction or emergent game play/strategic element to the PvE missions.

PvE in a normal MMO:
Explore some exotic world with your friends, discovery hidden treasures monsters and loot. Have chance encounters with other players that you may or may not cooperate with to take down difficult PvE enemies for better loot.
 
PvE in DU:
No exploration because there is nothing to discover. PvE is basically just a collection of new VR challenges that use the existing and lackluster PvP functionality, only difference is that NPC's replace players as opponents. Ohh.. And it's instanced away from the main game to make sure there absolutely will not be any kind or community interaction or emergent game play/strategic element to the PvE missions.

This looks to be is some kind of fixed Player-vs-Challenge type of deal. So basically just an extension on the existing tutorial/challenge system in the game.
 
PVE on the other hand as the name implies, is embedding different types of challenges into the actual game environment so that there is a risk and reward system that makes it fun and exciting for players to explore the world. And exploration was supposed to be one of the main pillars of the game btw..
 
But this has nothing of that.. and looks to be just another example of NQ doing some half-assed feature implementation like with so many other parts of the game.