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Could this game eventually "kill" Star Citizen?


aliensalmon

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In all fairness, part of the problem and part of the reason why certain groups started lobbying NQ to get these safe zones was the ever-present talk of "wait until PVP comes, I'll be kicking over all your sand castles"

 

Now, NQ could have turned around and made it clear that was not going to happen and clarify that the TW mechanics would be favouring defence (as they have done once) and that it would not be a simple matter of walking up and kicking over sandcastles. They could also have then turned the other way and said "We will be bringing in enough options for you to work on making your territory very, very safe and very hard to take over (as they hinted here and there).

 

Instead, NQ never even tried to set correct expectations for both sides and just turned half the game into a permanent safe zone.

 

 

Basic game design choices would have allowed NQ to build a system that provided pretty much an full on safe zone if you want it.

  • Have the TU as the centre
  • Allow the TU to be "upgraded"
  • Tier this in a way that each level extends a "decay and attack free zone" from say 1 S core size to 4 L core size around the TU
  • If a tile is fully surrounded by org/same player owned tiles and all of them have a TU upgraded to the highest tier, the centre tile becomes a virtual safe zone in its entirety.
  • Such a top tier tile allows players to set rules with regards to use of weapons, set taxes, charge for renting space etc.

Really not hard to come up with and mostly should really not be very costly in dev resources to create. It also builds a strong case for:

  • "You want to be safe? You can get there, but you have to organise and work for it"
  • "You want combat and take over territory? You can do so, but you have to organise and work for it"

 

 

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At the moment, I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel.
We have experienced many limitations, which were associated with cost savings or performance gains. 
Demeter was supposed to provide strong performance improvements, but instead the improvements have been used to reduce costs. 

At the same time, Demeter has slowed down the game tremendously, all the progress a player makes is now slower. Likewise, the MiningUnits added a kind of mandatory login to the game, I usually only know this from f2p games and the daily login bonuses and bonuses if you log in more than 5-10-20 times a month.
What the other players offer though is content, no matter if dungeons, thousands of quests, dailies, weeklies, arenas, battlegrounds, raids, OpenPvP, scenarios, pets, mounts, buff food system, equipment for the character/mounts/pets,...

In DualUniverse you can feel the savings everywhere, you can only hope that enough players will join this scenario in the end and can keep up the game accordingly via subscription or later ingameshop. At the moment, however, it looks rather bad and more and more players lose the air in the daily calibration grind. Many simply click through the MiningUnits to push the rates to 100% and simply leave the surface ore. Mind you, after such a short period...what happens in a month? Does no one then want to calibrate the MUs via VR?

I'm super-mega excited about the roadmap 2022 - too bad, I would have liked this info already at Christmas time as a small sweet surprise...most likely they are probably still working on filling a roadmap with content....what I just hope for 2022 and later that there will not be more restrictions. It feels like the game is getting smaller and smaller and the possibilities for players to live out their lives here in the sandbox and be creative are becoming more and more limited.

 

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39 minutes ago, Jake Arver said:

In all fairness, part of the problem and part of the reason why certain groups started lobbying NQ to get these safe zones was the ever-present talk of "wait until PVP comes I'll be kicking over all your sand castles"

 

Now, NQ could have turned around and made it clear that was not going to happen and clarify that the TW mechanics would be favouring defence (as they have done once) and that it would not be a simple matter of walking up and kicking over sandcastles. They could also have then turned the other way and said "We will be bringing in enough options for you to work on making your territory very, very safe and very hard to take over (as they hinted here and there).

 

Instead, NQ never even tried to set correct expectations for both sides and just turned half the game into a permanent safe zone.

 

 

Basic game design choices would have allowed NQ to build a system that provided pretty much an full on safe zone if you want it.

  • Have the TU as the centre
  • Allow the TU to be "upgraded"
  • Tier this in a way that each level extends a "decay and attack free zone" from say 1 S core size to 4 L core size around the TU
  • If a tile is fully surrounded by org/same player owned tiles and all of them have a TU upgraded to the highest tier, the centre tile becomes a virtual safe zone in its entirety.
  • Such a top tier tile allows players to set rules with regards to use of weapons, set taxes, charge for renting space etc.

Really not hard to come up with and mostly should really not be very costly in dev resources to create. It also builds a strong case for:

  • "You want to be safe? You can get there, but you have to organise and work for it"
  • "You want combat and take over territory? You can do so, but you have to organise and work for it"

 

 

 

This is very spot on.  in eve highsec a player citadel can take up to 14 days to kill it (dunno if that has been tweaked).  Thats a long time to prep for defense, call allies, evacuate, etc.  And the defenders choose the timezones.

 

NQ could of done the same, and it could of also used that adjacency bonus if you own tiles touching it increased the days too.  So in reality if some org or person owned 50 some tiles, and the inner tiles were its city/base it could take literally a month to chew threw the outer tiles/timers.  That right there is not some fly by night pvp gank.  That is a declaration of WAR.  and that is a good thing.  Plenty of time for the defenders to find options. or just win the fight.  But instead we have safe zone universe.  Unless NQ comes up with something soon the game will probably be put into separate servers like space engineers where you host your own server on your own dime and admin it yourself.  At least that way NQ could then turn some sort of profit.  

 

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36 minutes ago, VandelayIndustries said:

host your own server on your own dime and admin it yourself.

That is an excellent side product idea.  Give some of these talented programmers access to a few dev and engine tools so that we might see custom realms for many different games, possibly even a better, non-copyright infringing, version of EQ Next.

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4 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

That is an excellent side product idea.  Give some of these talented programmers access to a few dev and engine tools so that we might see custom realms for many different games, possibly even a better, non-copyright infringing, version of EQ Next.

 

Ya, its just obvious NQ is telling us that the server is their biggest problems.  All developments have been to reduce cost to "keep the game afloat" at the cost of REAL development of cool gameplay.  So agian, what is the point of this single shard, when everyone is on their own 10 tiles, teleporting thru VR to calibrate, and making the majority of their own products thru industry, selling stuff to bots, and AFK traveling thru space for quanta.  Where is the need for single shard universe when NQ isnt even utilizing it in ANY sense.  As many pointed out unless you go to market 6 you aint gonna see people, and even then its like 5 people there at a time.  just all around terrible.

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51 minutes ago, VandelayIndustries said:

 

Unless NQ comes up with something soon the game will probably be put into separate servers like space engineers where you host your own server on your own dime and admin it yourself.  At least that way NQ could then turn some sort of profit.  

 

If DU is put in seperate servers, just kill it. The only thing DU has over games like SE is the single server and no wipes, introduce one of the two as generic feature and DU is dead.  Ingame building and tech is nice but with the lag and time it takes to grow it would lose to other games as SE that has No monthly cost and where you can be in full PVP on day one

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5 hours ago, VandelayIndustries said:

 Unless NQ comes up with something soon the game will probably be put into separate servers like space engineers where you host your own server on your own dime and admin it yourself.  At least that way NQ could then turn some sort of profit.  

 

The DU server cluster is quite a bit more complex than the single dedicated server model Space Engineeers has and frankly, Space engineers is pretty much what you are asking NQ to provide right now and has much better combat and content to boot for such an environment.

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The devs would probably do fine.. it's the middle and upper management that woudl haveme concerned.

 

Actual devs just do what they are asked/told to do, if there is no structure and direction in that, they will fill in the blanks themselves generally, which really is something that is quite clearly happening in DU at the moment for me.

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Could this game eventually "kill" Star Citizen?

 

Having bought into SC due to the way DU killed mining and implemented taxes in a game that I already pay for access; BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, um, no.  Hell no.  

 

Pulling everything to Sanctuary and mothballing the whole thing.  SC is infinitely better in every conceivable way than DU.  Bye!

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On 12/19/2021 at 2:41 AM, Jake Arver said:

The devs would probably do fine.. it's the middle and upper management that woudl haveme concerned.

 

Actual devs just do what they are asked/told to do, if there is no structure and direction in that, they will fill in the blanks themselves generally, which really is something that is quite clearly happening in DU at the moment for me.

 

So true. I feel bad for NQ's devs -- if you think the game plays bad from our perspective....trust me, the devs doing the real work know just how bad things are. 

 

If you think it's annoying that NQ doesn't engage with players...? Try being an employee...it sucks when upper management doesn't listen and has no interest in bringing the dev team into the game design process.

 

I would really struggle to believe that NQ is an open workplace where everyone's opinion is considered...they don't run their public-facing side like that, so I doubt they are open-minded with employee feedback, either.

 

Sprinkle some crunch time and a sloppy 7-year-old codebase and your dev morale isn't exactly in a winning place. There's a reason why NQ's velocity is so glacial...

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5 hours ago, blundertwink said:

If you think it's annoying that NQ doesn't engage with players...? Try being an employee...it sucks when upper management doesn't listen and has no interest in bringing the dev team into the game design process.

 

The Paris/Montreal split I believe is a factor in this. Also the lack of a project manager (which is still an open position at NQ) would be an obvious thing.

But most of all, I honestly believe the company and game would be better served if the company moved to Montreal completely and I coudl still see that happen for the cost savings alone.

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On example that all is not right at NQ, would be that high profile Eve Online designer hire that NQ proudly announced in the news (makes it fair game to talk about) around 2018. According to linkedin he lasted about 8 months. And that is just about the time someone needs to start a new job, realize they made a mistake and then find a new one..

 

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  • 5 months later...

I don't think that they will finish star citizen anyways. Like most the Kickstarter projects, Star citizen is just dream selling. How many years have they been doing this game? Did they present something really huge and innovative? They are still losing to EVE Online, so damn hard. I think DU can be a good Star citizen replacement if devs will work about DU as hard as EVE developers. Right now, I'm kinda bored with all space-related games and playing CS: GO and Valorant + selling skins on the best csgo trading site, since the economy in EVE online last year is a BS.

Edited by bambisagucio
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About 3 weeks ago I purchase Star Citizen. After several hours resulting in me dying multiple times without anything to show for it, I gave up and looked for something else. Then I found DU. First day in it was great, spent 8 hours in game world. Unfortunately didn't see anyone else and learned of the wipe/don't wipe issue so not sure if I should wait to go back in or not. 

 

But yes, I prefer DU over SC.

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I think SC is great looking Asset Game and hast His own Rules. IT IS Not a Sandbox Box Game WHO gamers Design the world. Created by Designer and use by Gamers. I think this is the hole difference.

For me is clear SC is a big playable Tech Demo and will BE need 10-15 yeahrs for Release. I Play this Demo since more as 10 yeahrs From time to time but since i Play DU i See more Potential for DU

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The only thing these two projects have in common is mismanagement. But unlike DU, SC is reasonably good at keeping it's balance sheets heathy.

It is important to note the two games are not even in the same genre. SC for all fluff one may see in promotional videos is basically a  rendition of Freelancer with online multiplayer.   Depending on your expectations, this can equal parts exciting and dissapointing, but on the whole the project already achieved what it set out to do. Yes it basically 40 million game that cost in excess to 400 mil to make to date.  It is certainly plenty buggy and probably we never reach "released"  status, but what's on the table now is pretty much what all those Wingcommander boomers wanted all along. 

 

DU on the other hand is more akin EVE online with voxels.  It certainly did not improve on EVE formula of spreadsheets on space in any measurable way, and whatever systems they might have borrowed from eve, had been implemented without deeper understanding of what makes them work or fail within eve's own ecosystem.  The biggest strenght of DU is its voxel buiding tools. But at the end of the day, what matters most is how much of "game" du really is. After 8 years of development i must say, not really much of game at all.  It's certainly pleases the Landmark crowd, which was never a large crowd (even before its cancellation by SOE Ladmark hardly ever crossed 1000 concurrent logins).

DU is certainly not the PVP game backers ( with many eve expats among them) asked for, and at the same time it's not even PVE game the peace loving, mindless NPC murdering crowd could get behind. Reasons why the way things are is besides the point, the point is, based on it's ever dwindling population one must ask the question, what is the the actual "niche" DU tried to cater to ?

 

With SC it's quite obvious what its niche is, with DU, after all these years, i cannot really say.  So in response to OP question i gotta say, no there's no chance DU outliving SC, much less killing it. That would be like asking if DRDOS 6.0 could kill MaOS 7.0

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5 hours ago, Ancient said:

Lol.

This game will be lucky if it makes 6 months past release, let alone taking on SC. No chance buddy !

 

SC just had a huge weekend in sales I heard too.  They did a free week and they are still making tons of money, regardless how any feels if it's good or not. Meanwhile NQ is lucky to clear 20k a month in subs....

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6 hours ago, Ancient said:

Lol.

This game will be lucky if it makes 6 months past release, let alone taking on SC. No chance buddy !

 

Well, it's not like SC has achieved any kind of status or position in the market that could be "taken on".

 

Neither of these games will be taking on anyone or killing anything until they spend the money to finish them.

 

They aren't products yet, they're projects.  It's baffling to me that they expect them to bring in money at all.  

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3 hours ago, Atmosph3rik said:

 

Well, it's not like SC has achieved any kind of status or position in the market that could be "taken on".

 

Neither of these games will be taking on anyone or killing anything until they spend the money to finish them.

 

They aren't products yet, they're projects.  It's baffling to me that they expect them to bring in money at all.  

 

While SC definitely isn't finished and is even by CIG fully still in alpha, one thing is undeniable.  SC is making money. Profit. And has 1000x times more exposure and interest and bigger community.  Sure we could debate it sucks or whatever but that's not my point. SC has more people interested and has continued to get money, which is half a billion now for its 10 years. DU has been around 8 years and only generates about 3mil in kickstarter and the rest was 20-30mil from venture capitalists.  On a good day there is 40 people watching DU on twitch.  SC can be 3k -4k on a average day when certain steamers are on.  If you had to chose one game which "might" be something someday, SC is definitely the better bet.

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