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NMS issues that I hope Dual Universe won't have


Zantsuken

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I was reading this link on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4zcsve/no_mans_sky_has_lost_90_of_its_players/

 

One of the comments sums up what is wrong with the game with several great bullet points. I hope Dual Universe does not have these shortcomings:

 

  • It doesn't actually feel like a real universe, there are no planetary physics and gravity is the same on all planets. There are no actual solar systems. The planets don't rotate around a sun but are stationary, sitting together in a blob. The moons don't even go around the planets.

  • All of the various wonders of the universe (neutron stars, supernovas, pulsars...etc) are entirely absent.

  • There are no stars, they're just part of the skybox but you can't fly to them.

  • The 18 quintillion planets that was so heavily marketed isn't impressive when you realize what that actually means: if you took 11 things and come up with 50 variations for each, that is close to 18 quintillion combinations. Most planets are entirely the same but with different bumps and colors, they have the same objects on them and largely the same resources. Once you've seen the first dozen planets, you've seen them all.

  • There is no actual differences between the ships, except the number of inventory slots. There are no ships specializing for say speed or combat.

  • You don't have a sense of scope / scale to your journey. In the galactic map you can see other stars but there's no sense of where you are in relation to the center of the universe. Likewise you don't have a way to track where you were. No mapping or history, waypoints or other ways of tracking your progress. There needs to be a way to see how you're progressing and also give some meaning to how far you've gone.

  • You can't actually fly between these systems or go into say the dark space or outer asteroid belt. The only way to travel between them is to open up the map and click warp, which initiates a loading screen animation and loads up the new planets. There is no deep space. You feel like you're in an instance with 3 or 4 planets that are mostly the same, then you load up a new skybox with a new set of similar planets. It's nothing like say Space Engine, where you actually do get a true sense that you're in a real universe.

  • You can't even fly your ship. You can't fly low across a planet as there is an invisible boundary and you can't crash your ship. The controls are terrible, it has none of the complexity of other space flight sims.

  • You can't manually land your ship, you simply press a button for it to autoland. Tons of other maneuvers (like entering a space station) are entirely autopilot.

  • The asteroids which are everywhere have insane pop-in issues, they only show up like 50 meters in front of you.

  • The freight ships don't move, they just sit there passively forever. They add zero gameplay depth.

  • The space stations are all basically the same.

  • The planets are littered with outposts, all identical and with a single NPC alien standing still and staring into the wall.

  • The NPCs are entirely shallow, there is literally no point to even talking to them since they never say anything interesting and simply give you something random you likely don't need. Even the automated quest giving NPCs in Bethesda games that hand out those Radiant AI quests would be a massive improvement.

  • All of the monoliths are the same, it's nothing but a chore to chase them down. The words you learn don't add any depth to your interactions with the aliens, since they never have anything interesting to say anyway.

  • There are no actual biomes on each planet. Each planet is the same no matter where you land.

  • The animals are build on 14 different skeleton designs, with a bunch of random animal parts scrapped on top of each section to maximize the number of permutations and there is no attempt to make the animal make any sense in it's environment or have anything unique in it's behavior. The animals have no evolutionary history and their behavior is incrediby shallow.

  • There are no tall trees like were shows in E3, they're all saplings. There are no large forests, no large creatures. There are no large valleys, huge mountain peaks, no giant volcanos, all terrain is uniformly similar across planets.

  • The grinding which makes up most of the game is not only boring, but frustrating due to the completely messed up inventory management.

  • The interface is absolutely atrocious. It's amazing that it can be messed up this bad, the fact that we need a mod just to remove the requirement that you have to hold each click for a second speaks volumes. You need to load up a menu to do anything, and the menus are terribly designed and completely unintuitative.

  • The game is a technical mess. It looks like ass yet runs with all sorts of framerate issues.

  • The traveling on foot is insanely slow and tedious. There should have been a buggy or car, or at least some sort of fast jet pack like in Tribes.

  • It fails as a survival game since nothing in the game leaves you threatened. Each planet is seeded with abundant resources, and the few things that do attack you are easily defeated. Compare to minecraft where there's a very definite risk / reward system to exploring a deep cave system. Nothing really threatens you in a meaningful way.

  • The different minerals and resources don't really matter. Since most of the upgrades to explore the universe are yours within the first hour / two hours all the rest are kind of nice add ons.

  • There's no challenge to exploring. There's very little combat and what combat there is is very boring.

  • Inside a solar system there's no way to decide if a planet is interesting or not without actually visiting it. There should be some 'classification' of the planets e.g. class M, class X, etc that allows you to say a certain type of planet might be safe vs unsafe.

  • All planets are accessible right from the start of the game. I was excited about the idea of acid planets, radioactive planets, cold planets ... I was thinking that in order to explore a radioactive planet you'd need to craft some special gear. There was a pretty obviously gameplay loop where the dangerous planets had better minerals / ruins / whatever but were very hard to explore. Instead every planet is basically just a copy of the others.

  • The constant need to recharge things, which don't really serve a purpose. It makes the game very grindy without any positive feedback. Instead of feeling free to explore the world around me I feel annoyed that if I see something cool it means 30 seconds of tedium while I mine the abundant plutonium. I end up not landing and exploring because of how annoying it is that to take off again I have to enter a menu and recharge my ship.

  • None of the aliens interact with each other or have any sort of AI other than 'walk around a bit'. There's nothing to sit and watch. An occasional ship will fly overhead but they don't do anything. You never really see a battle take place or the ships acting in any sort of interesting manner.

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DU is going to be very different from NMS for several reasons. However if you are looking for a variety of planet types etc you may want to look at a different game. DU has a focus on player-driven emergent gameplay which may produce some variety or it may not, it depends on the players. In any case I don't know how applicable a lot of these points are with DU as there is unlikely to be a lot of NPCs or anything really not player made. They have said in their last question answering session that currently they have the sun rotating around planets (the easiest solution) but they want to put planets in fixed points and make them spin. There shouldn't be automated landing unless someone can make a script for it I imagine. Planet classification/ Planet or System Scanners would be good. The combat I have yet to see any instance of so I'm not sure how that would pan out although it may be a little like the combat in EVE or a traditional MMO (tab targeting). Really this thread has little to relate to DU directly as it is a critique of a different game with completely different objectives

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I fear the game becomes to "flat" to , but its hard as hell to provide planets with singular biomas and species and so on

i think this is a tooo early topic or comparison, they cam implement all of that, but not now i think about 1 year after the official launch many new features will probably be present. 

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Nice comparison of Apples and oranges OP. Real constructive.

DUAL's Devs have transparency and admit on difficult to implement features.

Half your complaints are on a single-player game's problems, NMS is single-player, not Multiplayer and SURE as heck not MMO. 

Freighters will be moving, because people will be moving them. In fact, there won't be NPCs. Possibly, not even animals, but that's too early to speak on.

There won't be aliens either.

Ships are custom made by players, no Sean Murray's lies.

Go read
Cybrex's FAQ thread, most of your questions are answered there. Then, go read the DevBlogs, you made a pointless thread on the forums. If you are lazy enough to read, I don't think you'll enjoy a game that requires you to build the ship you EXACTLY want to have.

Your entire post is a list of gripes you have with No Man's Sky. Go post it on the hype sub-reddit and/or the NMS forums. DUAL has nothing to do with NMS. DUAL and NMS are as similar as a car is to a carpet.

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Your entire post is a list of gripes you have with No Man's Sky. Go post it on the hype sub-reddit and/or the NMS forums. DUAL has nothing to do with NMS. DUAL and NMS are as similar as a car is to a carpet.

 

His bullet point list was copied from a NMS subreddit. Read it earlier today. :P

 

But yeah, do some digging/reading with the devblog and you'll find most of your grievances taken care of, and some of them do not apply. These DU/NMS comparisons have really got to stop.

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His bullet point list was copied from a NMS subreddit. Read it earlier today. :P

 

But yeah, do some digging/reading with the devblog and you'll find most of your grievances taken care of, and some of them do not apply. These DU/NMS comparisons have really got to stop.

I'm the world's second greatest detective after all.

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To answer your bullet points, because some of things you're listing aren't applicable in Dual Universe. This will be compiled from the information we know about from the AMA responses as well as various interviews and other responses here on the forums:

 

  • Read the AMA response from Tuesday August 23rd, this addresses planetary motion and what they want to do, and the technical limitations of their options.
  • No Black Holes in Dual Universe, they could happen but they're not on the roadmap yet. That likely applies to other interstellar objects like Pulsars and and Supernovas. 
  • Unknown if we can fly to stars or not. In the current system the stars are rotating around the planets, but they did say they want to make the planets rotate on their own so that may change.
  • Billions and Billions of planets could be a marketing thing for Dual Universe, but that's not really the point. They are more interested in having large populated worlds than they are giving everyone their own planet. So while there are trillions of star systems that could be procedurally generated, it will take quite a bit of time to actually get to those new systems (weeks to months for each system), so again it's not really the point of DU.
  • Ships are player made in Dual Universe, there's going to be an endless amount of variability in the designs that people make. Sure engine placement and physics may lead to some designs happening more frequently than others, but ultimately the market will determine what is a popular ship and what isn't. 
  • Tracking "progress" in Dual Universe won't really be about tracking your progress towards a galactic waypoint (like the center of the galaxy or something). Progress is likely going to be measured in the same way that progress is measured in Eve Online. There's no "end game" to track your progress towards.
  • An AMA response indicated that we would be able to choose to fly to another star manually if we wanted, for several weeks or months, however the more common method of space exploration over long distances will be by sending unmanned probes to stars and warping to them when they arrive to build stargates. This is a pretty deep topic in Dual Universe, so I recommend reading about the game a bit to learn how it will work. It is nothing like No Man's Sky in that respect.
  • IIRC there are no ship to ship collisions in Dual Universe, however we've seen the demonstration videos which make it clear that you can fly your own ships (and do all sorts of manuevers with them).
  • If there's autopilot in DU, my guess is that it will have to be programmed by players in LUA. If you watch the 10 minute gameplay video from last month, you can tell he is manually landing his ship on the space station.
  • The trailer had asteroids and they didn't seem to pop in or out, and based on discussions in interviews about how the LOD system will work, it's pretty clear that we'll be able to see large objects from very far away. Popping issues are always going to be present when you're trying to balance LOD.
  • There are no NPC's in Dual Universe. If freighters aren't moving, it's because the owners aren't moving them. 
  • Everything in DU is player made, if space stations start to look the same, blame the people building them, that's not on Novaquark.
  • There are no NPC's in Dual Universe. It's very likely all the planets will be somewhat untouched when they are discovered, so nothing should be littering them at all unless players have been there before.
  • There are no NPC's in Dual Universe.
  • Monoliths? This is Dual Universe not No Man's Sky.
  • Listen to the GrayStillPlays interview, there's a whole 5 minute discussion about biomes.
  • I don't think procedurally generating animals is a thing in Dual Universe. It's not even clear that animals will be in Alpha. Maybe someone else can correct me on that. It seems like Animals are going to be hand made, not randomly generated, but that's just my guess.
  • Watch the GrayStillPlays interview, again biomes and terrain are covered in that interview.
  • DU's skill system is time-based like Eve Online. Look at Eve's skill system, it's nothing like NMS in any way whatsoever.
  • We don't know anything about the UI yet.
  • DU is still in pre-alpha

 

The rest of your points could be summarized with, "This is not No Man's Sky".

 

Please watch this video, as it will clear up many misconceptions you may have about Dual Universe:

 

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It's good to hear that most of these issues won't a problem in DU. I was going to get into NMS, but cancelled my pre-order and decided to take a "wait and see" approach to the game. I like EVE's skill system a lot and I also like that in DU we should be able to manually fly wherever we want. I also play Elite Dangerous (I know that isn't DU as well). But in my opinion Elite also failed to live up to the hype like NMS.

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It's good to hear that most of these issues won't a problem in DU. I was going to get into NMS, but cancelled my pre-order and decided to take a "wait and see" approach to the game. I like EVE's skill system a lot and I also like that in DU we should be able to manually fly wherever we want. I also play Elite Dangerous (I know that isn't DU as well). But in my opinion Elite also failed to live up to the hype like NMS.

 

Oh yeah it did, Elite left me with a very empty feeling after playing it. Then to be told I had to pay 60 dollars more every year just put the last nail in the coffin for me.

 

Playing it with an Oculus Rift is really fun, and after doing that it's hard to want to play the game any other way. It was pretty awesome to turn around sitting in my chair wearing the VR headset and seeing that the back of the cockpits were all modeled though.

 

 

If you dig into the AMA thread here, https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/841-ask-us-anything-event/ , you'll learn a lot more about the game too :-) 

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It's good to hear that most of these issues won't a problem in DU. I was going to get into NMS, but cancelled my pre-order and decided to take a "wait and see" approach to the game. I like EVE's skill system a lot and I also like that in DU we should be able to manually fly wherever we want. I also play Elite Dangerous (I know that isn't DU as well). But in my opinion Elite also failed to live up to the hype like NMS.

DUAL s worth its hype, if you follow the Devs and the evidence of their work. NMS had no Beta, because the game was the Beta. Perhaps in a year, with an expansion, that costs 60 USD, they'll add the rest of the game for the scope they wanted.

 

 

The point is, DUAL has some things people do not bother to look up the information for. It's not an FPS game for example, and even if it has the EVE linear upgrading system, it has 6 Degrees of Freedom, which give many a possibility for its gameplay, may favorite, is possibly having the ability to use mag-boots to crawl up walls. Who knows, I don't for once, but I do keep up with the DevBlogs and videos they release. You can do it too good sir.

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DU is going to be very different from NMS for several reasons. However if you are looking for a variety of planet types etc you may want to look at a different game. DU has a focus on player-driven emergent gameplay which may produce some variety or it may not, it depends on the players. In any case I don't know how applicable a lot of these points are with DU as there is unlikely to be a lot of NPCs or anything really not player made. They have said in their last question answering session that currently they have the sun rotating around planets (the easiest solution) but they want to put planets in fixed points and make them spin. There shouldn't be automated landing unless someone can make a script for it I imagine. Planet classification/ Planet or System Scanners would be good. The combat I have yet to see any instance of so I'm not sure how that would pan out although it may be a little like the combat in EVE or a traditional MMO (tab targeting). Really this thread has little to relate to DU directly as it is a critique of a different game with completely different objectives

"Well said. Enough said. No Man's Sky will see improvements in the coming weeks and months, and Novaquark will be watching and learning. That and the eager community is enough to keep them on their toes and produce a far better result."

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