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Player Movement - A lack of immersion


Mjrlun

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After upgrading my talents on the run jetpack, I honestly regret doing so. The already quite small planets that comprise DU feel much smaller when you're traveling at higher speeds. Additionally the game gives no reason to walk - let alone just run normally. Due to this, I highly doubt many people have just taken a moment to walk through their planetary environment to appreciate the detail put into it in the recent updates. This compounds with the grand scale of many construction projects that appear to just be upscaled due to the speed of the character sprint. The scale of the whole game world is shattered when the character by itself can move so fast.

This comes with a few proposals:

Remove the ground-jetpack (the super-sprint). It's a main culprit of this immersion breaking, and also competes entirely with the idea of hover vessels, which are supposed to take up the 50-200KM/h range of motion.

Add a stamina bar of some sort, with a maximum sprint time of 10-20 seconds, and a recharge time that takes 1.5x the capacity (in seconds) of that bar. Additionally, when the bar runs out, add some realism with exhaustion. You have to wait for the bar to recharge half way to sprint again, and it takes double the capacity of the bar to get to that point.

 

Grant the character controller more polish, to make the movement, sound triggers, and camera bobbing more natural. Players can still float when they walk off certain surfaces. Perhaps even employ someone in particular to focus on this kind of polish (see here).


Give more reasons for hover vessels, such that we can enjoy the finer details of the planetary surfaces. Good example of this would be to increase the weight capacity of hover vessels, but decrease the max height allowed. Distinguish hover vessels from typical ships and "planes" in some way. I make a similar post to this one where I discuss this in more detail here.

 

Thanks for your time.

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No, just please no.. The mining bots and ore collection is already tedious enough as it is.. And never mind when newbs get stranded out in nowhere on their beginner constructs. Not only newbs for that matter..

 

Honestly I cannot remember the last time I wanted to walk normally in this game, except for maybe when exploring the inside of some construct. Double tapping the forward key is second nature by now. And the last thing this game needs is more limitations and slowing things down to try and pretend that there is a game loop..

 

Another example would be that before 'beta' we used to collide with trees. And while great for immersion, it was devastating for playability.

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oh man I struggled so hard to find a decent starting lane to get momentum with the speeder in what I presume must have been an older hovermode, and no airfoil providing lift, even that swamp shrubbery was terrifying ? I dread the day they come back I'm still exclusively flying "plane" type ships to this day

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I would like to mention that DU was not originally designed for players to move at such speeds, especially in the context of hover vessels. You are intended to make early game hover vessels to get stuff done - there's a lot that needs fleshing out on this front. From the perspective of literal distance, it makes little sense that the player can move as fast as a vehicle in a universe so small anyways. The issues with these hover engines as you mention are the trees. That should be a challenge. Why? The scale of the game matters intensely with how players spread out, how fast the player progresses, and also, if done right, it should be about the journey. Not the destination.

 

The wings as well need to be more limited as well (the way people use them at the moment is atrocious), especially how people take any hover vessel and smack wings onto it and fly. Travel should be more nuanced on planet surfaces, and right now we have none of it.

Edited by Mjrlun
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I actually agree about more realism to flying etc. But now is not the right time to add any more limitations to the game.

 

This game is already tedious at best, with players being forced to do mindless tasks all day long.

So before anything else, NQ has to add actual game play and ways to make income that does not suck the soul out of players.

 

And it is only after that we can start talking about potentially slowing down some stuff to balancing out the game.

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Where I'm coming from is that you can slow down a game regardless of its completeness as long as you make it enjoyable. Especially when you consider all the artificial ways they are trying to slow down progression - instead create a bunch of organic pockets (that are enjoyable in their own right), focus on those, combine them, and continue.

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No no nooooo!

Please stop asking for more rules and limitations. You are only confining yourself.

If you dont want to use or exploit something what you think is wrong, then just dont. You wont get any praise or anything from that, only you yourself will know about your 'good' action, but (imo) thats the path of becoming a good human.

 

I do agree that they made hovervessels a bit obsolete. Thats a bit to he fault of demeter as before that, I wanted to  have a giant hovervessel on each planet collecting ore in VR and pick some up when you got there yourself. There was no need for owning a tile. Now you cant mine without owning a tile which makes the giant hovervessel project obsolete.

 

Maybe they could add a function or a hover-only dynamic core that can have industry.

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Seriously, "The journey is more important than the destination" is just a saying that In DualUniverse, where there is nothing to discover along the way just wrong. What should one be able to find or discover in the solar system or the planets/moons? 

I had started before Demeter to create cave systems with terraforming, have hidden there puzzles, built small monsters and spider caves and much more. Yes, you could discover something if you are into that kind of thing. Otherwise, from the game side, it's just dead land, no matter where you fly or run to.

There are games where you can walk for hours through the area, because it was just beautifully and interestingly designed, no matter if you just looked at the worlds, roamed through caves, discovered interesting plants, animals or mini-treasures - it was an "adventure". There is NOT anything like that in DualUniverse! 

We are also in a game, here you should be able to create more creative and limitless content, why always this urge to recreate a real world dull with its rules? It's boring! I want to experience more than just something, I want to see developers really come up with content that makes me marvel at what they can come up with. Currently, I don't think any of the developers have even the slightest bit of "imagination".

 

 

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9 hours ago, Zarcata said:

We are also in a game, here you should be able to create more creative and limitless content

This was in the beginning one of the things I though DU would allow us to do, and what sold me on the game.

 

But turns out LUA in DU is only for cosmetics, HUD's and casino slot machines, with no real creative freedom.

And yes the argument is that allowing to much freedom in LUA would ruin the balance of the game. But with just a tiny bit of imagination from NQ, they could have tied LUA functionality to tile DRMS and voila players would be free do to what they wanted on their own tiles and create mini games etc without causing balancing issues in DU as a whole.

 

Or to put it a bit more harshly. NQ is the least meta, meta-company I know of..

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18 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

This was in the beginning one of the things I though DU would allow us to do, and what sold me on the game.

 

But turns out LUA in DU is only for cosmetics, HUD's and casino slot machines, with no real creative freedom.

And yes the argument is that allowing to much freedom in LUA would ruin the balance of the game. But with just a tiny bit of imagination from NQ, they could have tied LUA functionality to tile DRMS and voila players would be free do to what they wanted on their own tiles and create mini games etc without causing balancing issues in DU as a whole.

 

Or to put it a bit more harshly. NQ is the least meta, meta-company I know of..

 

They also allow lua to destroy their own gameplay they implemented. So now I can have lua automatically choose the best resist when I'm being attacked. It's 100% automated. So everyone who pvp does it. So at that point even having resists in game becomes quite pointless.  GG nq.

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