ROADMAP UPDATE: PREPARE FOR WAR WITH THE COMING OF 0.29 "ATHENA"

[NQ-Wanderer]

 

 

Can you hear that low rumble tumbling across the sky? It’s the goddess of war and wisdom, and she’s bringing the heat.

 

Slated for the end of Spring, the Dual Universe Athena update heralds a new tidal wave of conflict that will set Helios ablaze.

 

For peace-loving Noveans uninterested in warfare, Athena also includes a completely overhauled First Time User Experience (FTUE), a Space Market, and a variety of visual upgrades to the game.

 

 

 

WHAT’S IN IT

 

Space warfare hits a new stratosphere with the introduction of alien core units that will spawn in PvP zones. Think of them as resource-generating facilities, like space mining points. Players and organizations can claim these points to accumulate resources. But nothing comes free or easy in space. Alien core units must be defended. Do you have the mettle to get this metal?

 

These alien core units also serve additional purposes. The first is to provide fresh new PvP challenges for fighter types, and the second is to reduce the pressure on players who wish to avoid PvP side of DU but still find themselves ambushed by pirates when they step out of the safe zone.

 

To better balance PvP, we are adding stasis weapons and altering the behavior around a constructs’ maximum speed. With these sweet guns, big armored ships with powerful space engines will no longer have an advantage that allowed them to escape more agile smaller designs.

 

Last but not least on the topic of PvP, our voxel team has improved the performances near combat-related explosions, especially the destruction of voxels. We aren’t losing focus on keeping improving our players’ experience in Helios!

 

Shifting gears away from the pew pew pew features in Athena, we have also revamped the FTUE to provide a better, more easily comprehensible starting experience for new players. We want to give new players all the information they need to settle into DU with a solid foundation.

 

Among other features, you can look forward to the following:

• New space map
• New skybox and stars rendering improvements
• Improved water visuals
• Improved flashlight visuals 
• Mining Units Lua API
• Space market
• Element stacking exploit fix

 

The best news of all is that we plan to release a smaller update between now and Athena release to introduce some quality of life improvements.

 

WHAT’S NEXT

 

As usual, we’ll publish a series of devblogs to provide deeper insight into the new Athena features. We hope that you’ll like what you see!

 

Thanks to your constructive feedback, we have fine-tuned and balanced the content of Panacea with overall good results. We hope to see more of the same, so we encourage you to continue engaging with us as you read the upcoming articles. Your ideas and feedback are what will make Dual Universe better.

 

Head over to this thread and let’s chat!