My take on the recent dev blogs

[bleakcon]

So I will be the first to admit when I am wrong; I really did think the change in CEO was ragnarok for the game, I thought this game was going to be scrapped and forgotten about, with its tech sold off for parts - seems I was wrong.

 

Then to my surprise we get some communication from NQ and on the face of it a lot of it seems positive and well, it is positive buuuuuut.

 

NQ it's time to face reality before the game really does get trashed into nothing.

 

The reality for me is that the way the game is at present just isn't fun when all is said and done, sure I love building new ships and working on my space station (or should I say I like the end result and I will expand on this later on) but overall it's not worth (currently) the time you need to invest to get the output you want.

 

Let's separate this babble into subsections.

 

Mining

 

Mining has rarely been fun in any game let's be fair but mining in DU would be a good form of enhanced interrogation, you could get your prisoner on a megapode or two until the answer the questions or until their wrists implode from RSI or their mind melts because you've denied them their human right of Netflix in the background.

 

Let's forget about how boring the mining is for a little bit though and focus on the clear lack of progression, all I can do is add some talents to make myself mine a little faster which doesn't make it any more fun.

 

I recently got into space engineers, now setting aside the motion sickness this game seems to give me if I go into space one thing I thought it did well was providing the player with tools to create different machines to mine, I found it fun spending hours building a contraption that would mine efficiently, I got to choose whether it would be a static construct or something on wheels or something that could fly, quite often it would blow up in my face and I'd make adjustments.

 

It wasn't fun because I could get loads more ore than manual mining it was fun because I really had to put some thought into how I built my mining contraption and in doing so I would have to sacrifice simplicity for efficiency or mobility for simplicity etc etc.

 

Now let's look at DU; turns out this is probably a non starter as it would cause too much lag having large constructs digging into planets, instead we get things like the auto mining unit.........I don't want to just slap a unit down on a territory and pop in every few days or whatever to collect some ore, that is boring and repetitive and requires no thought or challenge at all.

 

For me there are 2 fundamental things missing from this that would make it fun, which is meaningful progression and challenge.

 

On the subject of mining units.....new subheading.

 

Mining Units

 

One of two things happens with these things:

1. they give a lot of ore so everyone builds one and ore that is grabbed from these becomes pretty worthless - no amount of rebalancing is going to solve this.

2. or of course they don't give enough and they end up being a waste of time of both the player and the developer

 

So what's missing? Firstly the linkage with other areas of the game, it's not like ore is in short supply, sure there might be some things like thoramine and the ore that makes titanium being pretty rare but things like t1 and t2 are plentiful, making it more so is going to tank the prices therefore removing the allure to mining units therefore invalidating any driver these might have had in the game as a whole (it's not going to act as a conflict driver if no one wants to build them).

 

Secondly are these going to be a fire and forget kind fo deal? Probably you will have some sort of maint requirement for them but other than that what is the CHALLENGE, grinding is boring, how about having these things be something other than just a construct like a TU that you place?

What about these things being a bunch of items like : capacitors, drill, laser, piston, scanner, drill arm etc etc and players must construct a mining unit, the design of the unit is a factor in how they function, perhaps different design choices effect the yield, types of ores found, power efficiency or whatever else.

 

The point here is to add some kind of challenge rather than it just being another 'place this here and wait x seconds for y reward'

 

Finally how are you going to balance these? One per player per planet? No problem players will have 9 alts ready to go. Not going to limit them? good luck any new player owning a tile and if you think this isn't realistic then you probably underestimate how nuts some of the player base are. 

 

Asteroids

 

I am finding it hard to believe the introduction of asteroids and mining units is going to be a good thing considering the current state of the game, NQ seem to think asteroids might end up being conflict drivers but that really is going to depend on a whole lot of things, all you need to do is take a look at EVE, players have always been able to find ways of maximising the amount of ore they gain, a lot of the time they managed it with multiple accounts, when rorquals came out the impact was so high that ore prices dropped considerably on a single shard with 100k plus active subs.........NQ doesn't have close to that so what do you think is going to happen to ore prices and product prices.

 

Once again NQ seems to be missing that there is a dependency of these systems, you can't just release asteroids and ore miners in isolation and expect there to be anything meaningful in terms of emergent gameplay.....the other parts of the game aren't there yet which brings me to another subheading.

 

The state of the game currently and the impact on the future

 

A big reason a lot of those I played with left the game had to do with the massive changes being made in beta that not only affected their fun (.23 as an example) but also really put them at a disadvantage to other players who had time to take advantage of that iteration of the game, let's name some things:

1. T5 bot buy orders were reportedly rather high though I didn't see this personally.

2. honeycomb production for quanta, this coupled with pre 0.23 allowed players to buy ores and quickly turn a profit by selling to bots, rinse and repeat to ever higher degrees of scale.

3. 0.23 changes, schematics as an idea not a bad one, timing of implementation and the fact they are just sold by bots for quanta.......big yikes. additionally many players found themselves at a loss of what to do next, the rug was taken from under them and now they found themselves with a whole bunch of items that they could not use, they also found game loops most could take part in consisted of mining.......

4. LUA changes; yes this might help performance but this just removed another game loop for a number of very talented people in a game which prides itself on creativity.

 

I'm not advocating for reverting any of these changes nor am I saying push on with them, what I am saying is by the time you are at a stable point in development you have players with billions in assets and liquid quanta, much of it gained through now removed game loops (because they were deemed out of balance), you have hundreds if not thousands of tiles claimed but not used and some planets (looking at you lac) mined to the bone of any decent ores due to some very questionable actions from certain players from what I understand.

 

Perhaps promising no wipe was a little bit silly but here we are.

 

Building

 

Supposedly the most developed part of the game, don't get me wrong it is great finally seeing your imagination on the screen but that doesn't mean the journey was very good and that should be concerning because by most players reckoning this is the part of the game that is most developed, I'll lay out some very annoying things:
 

1. when I need to remove a construct I need to do it manually voxel by voxel, large construct are painful, it takes hours or longer and if you are cursed to miss one voxel (especially in space) expect to spend hours trying to find it in a large construct, what about a way to allow for a grid to be deconstructed automatically over time into a linked container provided the container has enough space as a first iteration?
2. when I try to line up two or more static constructs its not easy, it really should be!
3. I get that if you allowed players to select large areas of a grid it might or will cause lag, why not allow us to select as large a area as we want and then have it remove or add voxels slowly as a starter, I would prefer waiting 10 mins for a full side of a large grid to fill automatically rather than you forcing me to do it manually due to performance reasons.
4. the texture changes were........well yeah let's not go into that, some of my stuff though went from looking ok to looking like it had been spat out the devils backside.

 

Piloting

 

Actually quite good fun, I haven't got much to say about this because largely I found it rewarding taking off and landing, reaching atmosphere etc with a larger load than I should have etc etc.

 

PvP

 

I am sure PvP in this game appeals to some ( maybe ) but lol, did someone look at mining and say 'hold my beer'?

Besides that the balance......there just isn't any, there doesn't seem to be much diversity, out of every area of the game this isn't going to have any points made against it because frankly it feels like an afterthought and/or designed for a very niche audience, I'll take any other system over this one, at least eve PvP is fun if you can find yourself a small scrap or a 1v1.

 

Ship Building

 

I actually find this to be great fun but there are some glaring issues:

1. Never understood why there are XL space engines and not XL atmospheric engines......same goes for any other areas like wings on this, having a grid of engines on the back of the ship to get enough thrust just makes making things look nice harder - looking nice is what this game imo does well, if you compare some of the designs in DU to say space engineers, starbase, avorion etc etc I think it's fair to say that DU looks great and the less 'blocky'.

2. PvP ships are forced to look a certain way (previously the cube as an example) or just be terrible.

3. voxel materials double up as armour so they all have weight, if you want a ship to look like a mothership from star gate interior wise that's fine but use gold at your own peril if you want it to take off efficiently.

 

The vision

 

So I joined to play a space game that was a civ builder, with something akin to an EVE vibe.

 

In eve I wanted to get into a group, there were clear benefits, I also chose my group carefully, because being in a group had consequences, eve was challenging, yes there was some grind but there was always some risk; if I went exploring in a wormhole solo and found a juicy relic site I could find myself an easy 100mill or a cloaked ship waiting to engage me, I could counter this by bringing a friend along or I could arm my ship to the teeth at the expense of efficiency in scanning down things or I could bring a cheap ship and head back to 'safe' space often to drop my loot off to mitigate my losses.

 

My choices had consequences and my choices had an impact on the game, sometimes peoples choices made gaming history other times their choice might affect only 1 person but they did affect the sandbox.

 

I don't get any of that from this game, I feel perfectly safe, pirate on scan? hit that warp button. Someone following me? Doesn't matter I am in safe space, where's the challenge? Why am I here? Why am I building a ship that can do x y or z? Errr for the most part I really don't know

 

Let's get to the point

 

Did you agree with all my points? Doubtful, that's ok, I didn't expect you to but everyone reading this will agree that there is a LOT of work needed for this game to be a game, between then and now mistakes are going to happen, if I were betting man I'd say odds are ore is going to be worth nothing in the near future, that's ok, it can be rebalanced but let's be honest and face reality, that is going to have an effect on the game when it becomes a game.

 

Best thing NQ can do at this point is to hold their hands up, admit that this isn't beta, admit that they need to rethink what needs to happen on release and revoke the promise of no wipe and most importantly stop talking, enough visions, enough blog posts actions speak louder than words and that is what NQ should measure themselves on going forward.