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My opinion in the current state of DU's "pillars"


Wolfram

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First things first, I don't hate DU, nor hate the devs and the GM/CMs, those always were quite friendly and open to talking with players. What I hate is how the management at NQ is going to end up killing DU in their pseudo-race to see how quickly they can release it. I don't care if the game takes ten years to release and they keep charging for it as a beta, I do care about getting a good game with nice mechanics, something actually enjoyable, in return.

 

Like really, NQ is going to end up doing a paper release of DU with mechanics that are either half-finished or aren't even enjoyable and they are going to spend the only "hype" moment of release they can with it. This isn't the same as No Mans Sky that did a full 180 and became a cool game, it is an exception not a rule. If the game doesn't take off on release it might never make it. Anyways, here's what I feel about what NQ called the game "pillars" in their state today:

 

- Building and scription, well I must reckon, the voxel and Lua tech on this game is amazing and you can clearly see the devs did a work of love there, building and scripting is very nice and can be a rabbit hole if you want! Kudos to the devs working on that!

 

- Piloting is also quite good, I like the simulator feeling of DU and how we can fly in and out of space, even with autopilots it never gets old. As some people have mentioned before, it would be nice to have multi-role (rotating) engines though and maybe some passive wheels that behaved like landing gears.

 

- Mining is now reduced to just machines spitting out infinite ore after you find your unicorn 600L flower and asteroids on the Saturdays. Yeah, because the lack of rolling release of asteroids makes them mostly useless during weeks, even the ones at PVP zone. The whole "discovered but not public" thing is also a really poor attempt at forcing players to cross each other's path instead of relying on "emergent gameplay".

 

- Combat/PVP is a joke as it is right now. Clicking buttons to "target" and "fire at" someone and praying to the almighty RNG/talents instead of relying on actual skills might have worked for some early MMO in the 2000s, but definitely not for such a "big and innovative" game such as DU and in 2022. The issue gets even worse when atmospheric/planetary combat gets mentioned.

 

- Trading is okay-ish, the markets definitely need an UI overhaul, but it works. Player markets are nowhere to be seen (other in Scoopy's lost inventory, that is) and I'm quite sure they won't show up for a long time.

 

- Social, oh social. DU wants to be a metaverse and tries its best to push players to socialize, but does so by punishing those who want to play solo. There's orgs, sure, but what's the benefit of those other than maybe sharing some constructs or elements? You would assume that by having your tiles close to your org mates you would have benefits and all, but instead you actually lose the mining bonuses? Now this is inside an org. Try to scale this to something such as a nation, that was one of the things DU wanted to create (with politics, etc), why would people do that to themselves by living nearby just to create a pseudo-nation? That's not to say the really -really- bad communication system. Sometimes the only chat tabs I'll see is Lua and maybe General, and that's it. For the rest of time I won't even remember other chat channels exist. VoIP is also non-existant, which honestly makes no sense for a game who wants to be a metaverse or at least to have emphasis on social aspects.

 

- Industry, well it's fun. It's really nice but schematics are quite meh and I've said a few times before it would work much better to have an unlockable tree system instead. But yeah, let's copy EVE on that. The whole linking concept is a bit meh, I really would like to see factories with conveyors (even if they were opaque like in SE), but I understand that limitation.

 

Anyways, this is what I can say about the game in like the year and half I've been around. Please don't get me wrong, I really like DU and wouldn't have spent so many hours playing it if I didnt, but I also know there's a lot of room for improvement here and that releasing right now is a bit of a bad idea for everyone, except for management, but well, let's hope for the best...

 

Also a quick extra note here regarding DACs. I think it's a really bad idea to release them without a proper way of trading them in-game. Not only scams will happen a lot, which will lead to lots of people complaining on NQ's support tickets, but also will probably be an open door to RWT to happen, more than the game already has. Please NQ, invest your time and get this stuff properly tradeable in-game before releasing it. Thanks.

Edited by Wolfram
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Decorative building is nice, but practical building is not. The practical side is dumbed down to the max, to benefit decorative building, be it for statics or ships. 

Piloting just got a massive nerf to fun, with anything above 1.75kt having the agility of an oil tanker.

For a game boasting about its player driven economy, there sure are too many bots. Instead of slowly closing quanta faucets and sinks, every since they felt the need to introduce schematics we get more and more NPC sources and sinks of quanta and items.

 

Social, fully agree with your points, and want to also point at the current social tools in the game, especially the chat.

And instead of tackling those, we get more and more "put valuable stuff in the pvp zone, and nerf pve things, so everybody does pvp and is happy"

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- Combat/PVP is a joke as it is right now. Clicking buttons to "target" and "fire at" someone and praying to the almighty RNG/talents instead of relying on actual skills might have worked for some early MMO in the 2000s, but definitely not for such a "big and innovative" game such as DU and in 2022. The issue gets even worse when atmospheric/planetary combat gets mentioned.

 

But some of us like it what it needs is a larger radar range for space and electronic warfare. The targeting part is not complex but if you add a remote to the gunner seat and have to stay on target you piloting and maneuvering you also don't want to aim manually that would ruin it.

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4 hours ago, Walter said:

- Combat/PVP is a joke as it is right now. Clicking buttons to "target" and "fire at" someone and praying to the almighty RNG/talents instead of relying on actual skills might have worked for some early MMO in the 2000s, but definitely not for such a "big and innovative" game such as DU and in 2022. The issue gets even worse when atmospheric/planetary combat gets mentioned.

 

But some of us like it what it needs is a larger radar range for space and electronic warfare. The targeting part is not complex but if you add a remote to the gunner seat and have to stay on target you piloting and maneuvering you also don't want to aim manually that would ruin it.

 

That's the thing about fun, it's very arbitrary. Everyone has different ideas about what's fun...there's nothing wrong with that. 

 

IMO...combat in this form is very niche both in its mechanics and its its "only open-world PvP" concept.

 

It's also very, very boring to watch -- which matters for a small MMO that needs every ounce of advertising via streamers. A typical modern MMO has a budget 5 times (or more) more than DU's ~$22 million -- in large part to pay for marketing. They need those streamers. 

 

Showing an average gamer real combat in this game will actively deter them -- it's just too niche for an MMO today in 2022. Plus...without actual Territory War, it feels disjointed from the rest of the game -- their desire to encourage combat by spawning stuff in deep space only makes it more disconnected from the rest of the game. 

 

Their inability to balance combat also spells troubles for release -- any change that breaks constructs and requires refactoring a build will annoy people. I'm not convinced they've settled into a real balance here, nor am I convinced that they'll operate any differently after release...and as we've seen, decision-making isn't really their strongest ability. 

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I always pictured DU's success would be the kind of slow snowball effect that happened with games like Minecraft.  That happens when one person sees another person enjoying the game, and they think, "Hey i might enjoy that too!".

 

But for that to happen they need to finish the game, and let the people who enjoy it, enjoy it.  And at the moment it honestly doesn't seem like either of those things are a priority anymore.

 

They have about half of an incredible game, and that in itself is pretty interesting, but they're only going to get away with capitalizing on that interest for so long.

 

  

 

 

 

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34 minutes ago, Atmosph3rik said:

I always pictured DU's success would be the kind of slow snowball effect that happened with games like Minecraft.  That happens when one person sees another person enjoying the game, and they think, "Hey i might enjoy that too!".

 

But for that to happen they need to finish the game, and let the people who enjoy it, enjoy it.  And at the moment it honestly doesn't seem like either of those things are a priority anymore.

 

They have about half of an incredible game, and that in itself is pretty interesting, but they're only going to get away with capitalizing on that interest for so long.

 

  

 

 

 

Yes, they need to let a community build by supporting what the players are doing and letting them do more of it.

 

Not constantly limiting players, removing functionality they like and trying to make everyone play the game in a different way.

 

I'm pretty sure it's too late now.  I'm one of the ones who survived since the start of beta (with a few months off after 0.23) but have been angry about where things are going for a while now and it's getting worse all the time.  I'm at the point where I'm about to just completely walk away from the whole thing for good (and perhaps to check back in a couple of years).  I know other long time players who are talking about walking away too (whether they actually will or not remains to be seen).

 

So much for the snowball.

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On 5/19/2022 at 12:20 AM, Creator said:

Though it will be against TOS, how many DACs will end up on gold farming websites or resold by players as they abandon DU like it is the Titanic?

 

I'm sure this will be the #1 thing happening, specially for players who are long gone such as the ones who left in 0.23...

 

On 5/19/2022 at 2:28 AM, Gottchar said:

Decorative building is nice, but practical building is not. The practical side is dumbed down to the max, to benefit decorative building, be it for statics or ships. 

Piloting just got a massive nerf to fun, with anything above 1.75kt having the agility of an oil tanker.

 

Oh yeah, definitely. That 1.75kt thing pretty much took most of the fun I had in the past. Physically it makes no sense, but even if they wanted to do a balance pass, having such a low threshold and a speed floor is ridiculous...

 

And Idk exactly what you meant regarding the building, but even decorative is building isn't that great when elements don't mix well with the art style of voxels. Most of functional building revolves into making ugly ships that "just work" most of the time...

 

On 5/19/2022 at 5:07 AM, Walter said:

But some of us like it what it needs is a larger radar range for space and electronic warfare. The targeting part is not complex but if you add a remote to the gunner seat and have to stay on target you piloting and maneuvering you also don't want to aim manually that would ruin it.

 

Many players of the current player base came from something such as EVE, so I guess they are just used to it. For a game with simulator vibes such as DU it makes absolutely no sense. I don't think targeting is complex, it's just too shallow. You click a button and hope for the game's math to favor you, there isn't any other real skill involved like there is in PVP on competing games, such as Star Citizen or even Space Engineers...

 

On 5/19/2022 at 2:36 PM, Zeddrick said:

Yes, they need to let a community build by supporting what the players are doing and letting them do more of it.

 

Not constantly limiting players, removing functionality they like and trying to make everyone play the game in a different way.

 

They want the game to be player-driven BUT as far it follows their model/way, which is absolutely annoying. I really had lots of hopes for DU when I joined, wanted to build big things and make cool stuff, but pretty much everything is getting more and more restricted, it isn't fun anymore. I pretty much migrated to other games for now and hoping to see what they come up with release.

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2 hours ago, Wolfram said:

 

You click a button and hope for the game's math to favor you, there isn't any other real skill involved like there is in PVP on competing games, such as Star Citizen or even Space Engineers...

 

You haven't done any PvP in DU have you?

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5 hours ago, Wolfram said:

And Idk exactly what you meant regarding the building, but even decorative is building isn't that great when elements don't mix well with the art style of voxels. Most of functional building revolves into making ugly ships that "just work" most of the time...

Pretty or not, compared to many other games, there is not really a lot of depth. 
While most other areas of the game have a "if you can’t do it, this is an MMO, find another player who can do it" philosophy, building a working ship is kept as simple as possible so that everybody can do it.

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The current combat mechanics allow it to be a world based game instead of a region based game. If we want a twitch based combat sim we would need a 20ms ping to each other instead of the 2,000+ms ping that some have to each other. So I don't expect a game to have gunner sights that you walk onto target.

 

For me the most interesting part of pvp is ship design. The ability to make your ship more offensive or more defensive. And that's part of du combat.

 

Can they do better?  I think they can do two thing. 1, allow gunners to select specific systems to target, ie engines, or weapons or command....  and 2 a flare/decoy system. Where the defending pilot launches a decoy. And the attacking gunner must decide if his target is the real or decoy target and if he should stay on target or swap.

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image.png.c20fb909dd15e9267705efb9bf9b5738.png

 

 

RPG - non existent

Exploration - non existent

Social - non existent

Economy - Terribly broken and contaminated by exploits and "mistakes being made" as well as bots

Building - OK-ish..

PvP - sub standard as the server tech does not allow for anything really. At the same time NQ seems hellbent on shoe horning this in for whatever reason.

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So if we are being generous a score of  (0 + 0 + 0 + 0.5 + 1 + 0.5) = 2 out of 6, after how many years of development?

 

Basically the one thing that mostly works (building) we have had since start of pre-alpha testing in late 2017, and the rest are just half finished add-ons hold in place with gaffer tape and bubblegum. And some functionality has even started to regress in the last year. That is such a unbelievably bad level of performance from a dev company the size of NQ, that it is almost impressive in it's own weird dysfunctional way.

 

And I hope that when NQ collapse (they show no indication of changing, so it is just a matter of time in my opinion). Someone from the inside will finally tell the true story of what went on behind closed doors at NQ.

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I feel like the true story is that the full time development staff were laid off.
They then and went quietly contracted out all the rest of development after the beta launch flopped.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the core development team isn't working other jobs, on the promise of shares once the game is "fully" launched.
I mean current development trends have all the hallmarks of a team doing this in the evenings/weekends after their jobs that pay the bills.

Really pretty sad if you think about it.

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12 minutes ago, Rokkur said:

I feel like the true story is that the full time development staff were laid off.
They then and went quietly contracted out all the rest of development after the beta launch flopped.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the core development team isn't working other jobs, on the promise of shares once the game is "fully" launched.
I mean current development trends have all the hallmarks of a team doing this in the evenings/weekends after their jobs that pay the bills.

Really pretty sad if you think about it.

 

Based on NQ's linkedIn, there's definitely been turnover, but nothing akin to their entire dev team being laid off or quitting. NQ still has 6 job postings for permanent contract -- (which usually means full time employment with benefits AFAIK), not what you'd see from someone that laid off their whole team. 

 

The slow pace of development isn't a big surprise even with many full time devs -- it's an old codebase full of bugs and performance issues...and there's not a lot of devs that have experienced the entire 6-8 years of development with the project, which likely means corners of the code no wants to touch. 

 

Plus, we've seen how slow it is for their leadership to make choices...that filters down to devs, too. Hard to plan for the future from an engineering perspective when leadership refuses to plan the game's direction in a reasonable way. 

 

Finally, loss of morale is a huge thing -- if devs working on the game 8+ hours a day don't believe in it, they simply won't care. They'll do things in a sloppy half-assed way, not want to research or refactor legacy code, and just won't move as quickly in general.

 

This is especially true if NQ feels the need to do crunch time -- oh you want me to work 10+ hours a day on a product that has an almost 0% chance of success...? Riiight, that's a sure way to make things slower and get even less than 8 hours of work out of people. 

 

TLDR: slow dev usually is a symptom of bigger issues, but doesn't mean NQ has sacked their entire dev team...

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