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How do you think DU has progressed in the last year...?


blundertwink

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Whoever NQ hires to do these videos does a fantastic job...is it a fair representation of the game? Not really...but it sure makes it look like a blast if you've never played. 

 

The most striking thing to me is that they run out of big changes after about 45 seconds -- the rest of the video is about new VFX, wallets, emotes, jetpack....not exactly big stuff for a year's labor. Almost 20% of the run length is just their final splash screen.

 

Do you think NQ has added a lot in this last year...?

 

Has the game not improved, improved a little, improved a lot...? I guess "gone backwards" is also an option if you're feeling sassy. ?‍♂️

Edited by blundertwink
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How it turned out for me? 
When I think about it, not much has changed. There are still lags and severe performance drops. Especially in heavily built-up places and markets, but also from one construction zone to another zone, you notice problems again and again. Conclusion: no change.
Getting resources to build something in the game. There was a change, digging was abolished and replaced by MiningUnits and limited, at the same time also a tax was introduced, if one wants to mine on areas, which does not correspond to the one tax-free area on Sanctuary. 
So, before: run around somewhere, scan, dig tunnels and mine ores.
Now: procure an area unit, take an area, then procure Miningunits, these then to container connect, which one must procure thus before also, in order to calibrate then one can use some liters by the calibration immediately, for more it means then: wait. Either for more MiningUnits, more calibrations or simply that one beautifies the time with something else. As an example: asteroid mining. That's right, a Space-Atmo ship is missing for that. So: wait.
Any other changes? That's right. Shields! So, who has waited enough, had finally worked out a ship by waiting or flying missions that are ultra interesting because you can watch great series up to whole seasons of series during the flight, so now you need shields instead of great voxels. But wait. Without shields there were only flights in the safe zone, otherwise you would have been shot down within a few seconds by pirates or simply bored players. with the shield you are at least lucky and can survive 2-5minutes longer. Is then but also dead and loses his ship. Conclusion: Even a shield does not make PvP better.
Fortunately, the weapons were also worked on.  At least the values have all been re-diced, the result seems to be the same: precisions laser. But it hardly matters, because you are shot down from far away anyway and the fight is often over before you get from the asteroid to your ship to defend yourself.
Almost forgotten, there are new effects such as dust and snowdrifts on planets, although I hardly notice them, since I no longer visit most planets, since you can no longer mine anything.  
What is of course great, you can now capture territories and simply rob other players who are currently pausing the beta phase, if they have not secured their territories before or protect them at least for a short time by paying many millions in taxes. However, robbing only works on static constructs, the hundreds of dynamic constructs still seem to be standing around everywhere.
What else was so great? That's right, the core limit was introduced (or was that already two years ago?) This prevents players from building too much. But it's enough to set 275 cores, we don't want the game to become too expensive to maintain. If you want to avoid the limit, you can (still!) create another 4 organizations to set 275 cores there - but this will also be changed soon, so think carefully.
Fasst forgotten, the illuminations would be changed, so that the light effects now create other effects by lighting, if these are reflected against objects. Advantage: more blingbling. Disadvantage: some buildings now look stranger and you have to rebuild.
Ah yes: taxes have been introduced. So now if I want to have an area outside of the one protected area on Sanctuary and also use it for industry, I now have to pay 1,000,000 taxes every week for each area. That means I can no longer log in and do what I want and when I want and how often I want - no - I now have to pay taxes and so somehow I have to get Quanta. So I have to sell some of my ores: so as we learned: more waiting. Or I just do missions and watch series. So basically they've introduced a login compulsion and of course made it a little bit colorful so that not everybody notices it right away. Otherwise: everything runs as usual and I'm waiting anxiously for the roadmap for 2022-2025.


 

Edited by Zarcata
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Well, last year more correctly to call it "downscaling", game pretty much moved towards saving money/making it somewhat more passable for relativly close "release".

 

While such more grounded approch not bad thing on its own, its obviously gone far from game that was promised on KS. Basicly we ended up with some space-themed Landmark with same negative perspectives.

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The video really tells you nothing. It's a series of cutscenes with a text overlay. So no one can claim theese are either improvements or just what they appear to be. The video shows nothing that is not possible or not in game outside of maybe some camera positions.

 

It's not false advertising or misleading, it's 2 minutes and 14 seconds of.. nothing really

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10 hours ago, Zarcata said:

I am not sure how it is in America, but since the product is also advertised in Germany, German and European law applies here accordingly. According to the advertising videos, I would put here on "Misleading advertising" (correctly misleading business act).

 

The U.S. also has "truth in advertising" laws that say that adverts can't be misleading and must be truthful.

 

Even for a nation with strict advertising laws, you'd struggle to prove (to a legal standard) that anything in this video is false or misleading. Proving that something is misleading in court isn't so easy or clear. 

 

It's like if I'm advertising a club -- but it's always really dead, so I hire actors to make it look popular. Is that misleading? Colloquially maybe....legally no. Or you made a game, but the gameplay isn't very impressive so you only show CGI cutscenes in your adverts. Misleading? Not legally. 

 

Truth in advertising laws don't require you to actually tell the truth, so long as you don't make wildly fraudulent or dangerous claims you can get away with a lot of misleading shit. 

 

Even the idiots that have been hawking fake Covid protection products don't get more than a warning letter at first -- idk how i got down this rabbit hole but TLDR companies can advertise just about anything and not get in trouble. 

Edited by blundertwink
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A lot more than previous years. But a lot of it was fixing past mistakes or reworking things. And restricting progression was predictable, so it's more like an mmorpg instead of a free for all sandbox.

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36 minutes ago, Mordgier said:

I think the progress has been very impressive.

 

At this rate by this time next year NQ will have successfully reduced the player count to 0 and finally go the way of Worlds Adrift like I kept saying they would...

 

To be fair, having zero players is a bold and novel way to improve server performance, reduce cost, and eliminate complaints. 

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They’ve made some decent progress. But a lot of it was getting things more scalable and sustainable from a server perspective. Hopefully they will have more time to concentrate on delivering more gameplay loops and pvp improvements next year. The 2022 roadmap will be interesting. 

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1 hour ago, Maxim Kammerer said:

The first time I saw this video I assumed it to be a community made satire.

 

Hah! Harsh but fair. 

 

I think NQ has made really great progress....in shaping the product so it can be marketable with videos like these.

 

Come "release" time, they'll push their misleading (but not illegal ;)) videos via paid advertising...and with Demeter lowering their costs, they just might turn this beast into something profitable. 

 

Not because it's a good game or because the product has improved so vastly...but hey it's almost 2022, no one cares about a quality product when you can have quality marketing instead. ?‍♂️

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12 hours ago, le_souriceau said:

Well, last year more correctly to call it "downscaling", game pretty much moved towards saving money/making it somewhat more passable for relativly close "release".

 

While such more grounded approch not bad thing on its own, its obviously gone far from game that was promised on KS. Basicly we ended up with some space-themed Landmark with same negative perspectives.

Interesting.  Cutting costs and increasing profits on a product that isnt finished.  Thats typically what you do when you want to sell.

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2 hours ago, Underhook said:

Interesting.  Cutting costs and increasing profits on a product that isnt finished.  Thats typically what you do when you want to sell.

Nobody is going to buy NQ in it's current state.  The more likely scenario is trying to position themselves for more loans/investments by extending the time at which funding will run out. 

 

What they should do is turn blueprints into NFTs and watch investors throw money at it...I mean come on lets be frank it won't make this game any worse....

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19 hours ago, Shredder said:

They’ve made some decent progress. But a lot of it was getting things more scalable and sustainable from a server perspective. Hopefully they will have more time to concentrate on delivering more gameplay loops and pvp improvements next year. The 2022 roadmap will be interesting. 

But that's the thing. They have been working almost exclusively on server infrastructure since 2016 at the expense of more visible game content for players, adding low hanging fruit like new fx and textures to try and appear like there is some progress.

And whenever we tried asking hard questions about it (scalability of digging and fixed resources in a persistent world, voxel performance, lag, lack of progress in the game etc..) there was nothing but silence.

And it is only now at the end of this year they have started to admit publicly to be struggling with the server stuff, and start making changes (some good, some shockingly bad).

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13 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:

But that's the thing. They have been working almost exclusively on server infrastructure since 2016 at the expense of more visible game content for players, adding low hanging fruit like new fx and textures to try and appear like there is some progress.

And whenever we tried asking hard questions about it (scalability of digging and fixed resources in a persistent world, voxel performance, lag, lack of progress in the game etc..) there was nothing but silence.

And it is only now at the end of this year they have started to admit publicly to be struggling with the server stuff, and start making changes (some good, some shockingly bad).

 

It's industry standard for MMO developers to create their own engines and stand their own servers. They don't do this for fun -- it's expensive and difficult. They do it because most game developers understand and obsess about performance and they know that it's cheaper long-term. 

 

NQ wasn't led by a game developer or even someone with gaming experience, so they decided to go the "faster" route and rent servers from AWS and use an existing engine. 

 

The result is predictable. Servers are too expensive, performance is crappy. For a game where PvP is supposed to be a critical thing, it'll never be scalable or performant enough. 

 

It's also standard for games to have NPCs and PvE and for games to use instanced servers to split load...it's great to be innovative, but you shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel if you don't understand how the wheel works to begin with. You end up with Fry's wonky oval wheel...

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13 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:

 

And it is only now at the end of this year they have started to admit publicly to be struggling with the server stuff, and start making changes (some good, some shockingly bad).

Remember when they conned us into kickstarting this game by implying that their server tech was totally sorted out and could scale basically infinitely to be a true massively multiplayer game?

 

This was the vid that largely sold me on DU. Having burned out on the unbearable lag in Empyrion - this seemed like a game that'd solve the unsolvable problem of Empyrion lag.

 

The server stuff was supposed to be the sorted out solid foundation that they built this game on. So many other open world games failed due to poor server tech - I genuinely believed that this would manage to be the exception. The game built by an actual engineer, from the ground up - focused on a solid technical foundation of a scalable and high performance massively multiplayer server engine. After all - the engine failures are what made Empyrion and Wolds Adrift awful in combat - surely DU would get it right by starting with the server tech...

 

 

So much for that....

 

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23 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

 

 

 

NQ wasn't led by a game developer or even someone with gaming experience, so they decided to go the "faster" route and rent servers from AWS and use an existing engine. 

 

 

You're wrong here - DU uses Unigine for rendering on the client side but their server tech is proprietary. There is nothing wrong with running on AWS. AWS offers phenomenal scaling capabilities and is a fantastic solution for game hosting where player counts vary through the day and life cycle of the game.  It is frequently cheaper and better performance to host via AWS than in house if you are expecting a major difference between your high and low loads.

 

It would have cost NQ far more to buy whatever silly number of physical hosts they would have needed to host the game when it launched - and then what? The player count is likely less than a third of what it was a year ago.

 

The game engine and hosting were far from the primary failure points of DU. The lack of a game and the complete and total failure to listen to the community played a bigger factor.  JC literally played the game with infinite resourced and complained that mining was too easy despite never having mined.

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14 hours ago, Mordgier said:

The game engine and hosting were far from the primary failure points of DU. The lack of a game and the complete and total failure to listen to the community played a bigger factor.  JC literally played the game with infinite resourced and complained that mining was too easy despite never having mined.

 

Its actually thing even one step more deeper. Its criminal lack of any intellegent, organic soft caps what players can do.

 

Like if player X can play 24/7, using 5 alts to mine and run 1000 machines factories... what a suprise, he will make game look like its super easy and progression lasts 2 weeks. And we not even talking about many such "dedicated" players also exploited like crazy, to make whole thing total (even larger) nonsense.

 

 

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Generally, I'd say DU is losing it fast.

 

MUs were a proposal even before JC was promoted to irrelevance, but I'm pretty sure they were intended to work along side hand mining. I understand the performance reason for cutting hand mining... but as game design, they cut an actual game loop (even if some found it tedious) and replaced it chores that are not fun for anyone that I've heard of. Better game design would have been some combination of collapsing tunnels after a time, slowing hand ore extraction, regenerating ore - maybe with diminishing returns so a mine would need to be mined over a period of time but would eventually become exhausted, and, of course, MUs as an adjunct on player-owned tiles.

 

Before shields, combat involved team work with a pilot, some gunners shooting, and some engineers keeping the ship from blowing up. But with shields and now core stress, engineers will never again be a thing since core stress will kill the ship after the shield goes down before any serious repairs are needed. If we had fighter plane tactics (not planes-in-space mechanics - just tactics) or fleet tactics in game, we might still have some team work in the game, but those aren't really a thing and not likely to be because of the very long distance targeting plus RNG nature of the combat. I like the shield based combat when I don't want to fight, but it's boring when I do.

 

Demeter has pretty much killed the economy. There's no reason to do business with other players now. I've stopped mining above T1 (except for the chromite and natron I need to make fuel) because the market on higher tiers is too low to justify hauling the ore to market, and generally sell T1 to bots at the market near my moon base - because the player price isn't enough better to justify dealing with landing on Alioth and fighting the lag at D6.

 

So I rate DU as a total fail in 2021. Maybe they should start 2022 by hiring some game designers 'cause game design seems to be where the big failures are.

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3 minutes ago, Daphne Jones said:

 

 

Before shields, combat involved team work with a pilot, some gunners shooting, and some engineers keeping the ship from blowing up. But with shields and now core stress, engineers will never again be a thing since core stress will kill the ship after the shield goes down before any serious repairs are needed. If we had fighter plane tactics (not planes-in-space mechanics - just tactics) or fleet tactics in game, we might still have some team work in the game, but those aren't really a thing and not likely to be because of the very long distance targeting plus RNG nature of the combat. I like the shield based combat when I don't want to fight, but it's boring when I do.

 

 

 

While I do think the game has been regressing, as someone who did pvp before, the old way just plain sucked, and lead lots of people to quit pvp.  Sure the crew thing the first couple times was unique and cool, but it wore thin extremely fast, because pvp ships wouldnt die.  So the old way had to go.  And i dont know how you can force people not to gun or have gunner alts or anything.  But the "engineer" role was in the end what made the pvp the shittiest.  T5 scrap. and heal over and over.   Ive personally shot a ship for 180 su and it didnt die and made it to the safe zone of a planet.  Thats not gameplay shooting a ship for over an hour with mutiple gunners on your crew just aint good gameplay no matter how you slice it.  What we have with shields and CCS isnt perfect, but it is actually fun because ships die.  The balancing needs to come now in other areas like in variations of speed, radar ranges, and other mechanics and pvp can actually "progress" at a meaningful rate.

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2 minutes ago, Daphne Jones said:

Better game design would have been some combination of collapsing tunnels after a time, slowing hand ore extraction, regenerating ore - maybe with diminishing returns so a mine would need to be mined over a period of time but would eventually become exhausted, and, of course, MUs as an adjunct on player-owned tiles.

 

From what I know, problem was not even per se "keeping" tunnels (while this too), but calculating their constant creation, aggravated by "dedicated" people making relativly effective digging bots. So collapsing while seems logical solution, was not complete one.

 

Basicly some people generated (with their bots help) like "x100 of tunnel digging per person" NQ was kinda expecting. Considering this in many cases was not even covered by measly subs, math become totaly unsustainable.

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