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NQ It's time for AvA


TheBlender

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Hi, I'm a long time backer/ Sapphire founder from 2016. I've been out of the loop for the past year approx. It has come to my attention that we're launching next month. Exciting!
However, it has also come to my attention that AvA, or even planetside combat is yet still not added to game. I've watched years tick by, seeing these things get pushed back over and over.
I tried searching the forums for relevant information on its current state, but I'm unable to find anything within this year (2022). I also clearly remember AvA being promised at launch. I saw this game a big investment, in time and money. I expected, the core features promised would at least be kept, if nothing else...
I apologize if anything is necroposted here, I honestly searched and found nothing relevant to this year and I haven't been around for some time, I'm sure somewhere in my account logs would prove this... Anyway...

What is the current state of AvA specifically? Is it even still planned? Also, what of planetside combat generally?

These are core promised features that I'm surprised we're launching without.

Edited by TheBlender
Changing title to better fit point presented
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The only mention of AvA we have had in the past few years was a recent (2022) blog post that glancingly said (paraphrasing) "NQ hope to present more information to us soon about often raised topics such as AvA, will there be a wipe, etc ...". Unfortunately the possible wipe topic then exploded, and we never returned to knowing what may or may not be the case about AvA. So the short version is, nothing is happening that we have any information about. I'm sure that plenty of people on these forums have an option about any potential timeframe (finite or otherwise).

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5 hours ago, TheBlender said:

Hi, I'm a long time backer/ Sapphire founder from 2016. I've been out of the loop for the past year approx. It has come to my attention that we're launching next month. Exciting!
However, it has also come to my attention that AvA, or even planetside combat is yet still not added to game. I've watched years tick by, seeing these things get pushed back over and over.
I tried searching the forums for relevant information on its current state, but I'm unable to find anything within this year (2022). I also clearly remember AvA being promised at launch. I saw this game a big investment, in time and money. I expected, the core features promised would at least be kept, if nothing else...
I apologize if anything is necroposted here, I honestly searched and found nothing relevant to this year and I haven't been around for some time, I'm sure somewhere in my account logs would prove this... Anyway...

What is the current state of AvA specifically? Is it even still planned? Also, what of planetside combat generally?

These are core promised features that I'm surprised we're launching without.


 

Legit question.

For the moment AvA seems totally cancelled.
Atmo PvP was confirmed post release, so only if they get enough money to "complete" the game NMS style.

Currently, we don't even have a space turf war to tell you how far we are from any real possible PvP activity in the game.

The developers seemed happy to say that the majority concern of the community was to have purple voxels. And that these will be present at the release.

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3 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

Atmo PvP was confirmed post release

I saw what looked like a chase akin to a weaponless dog fight in atmo but I don't recall seeing or hearing that it was confirmed.  I don't think it would be unobtainable to expand the boundaries of dynamic v dynamic combat to within atmo but that isn't the same as NQ putting it in writing.

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1 hour ago, Wyndle said:

I saw what looked like a chase akin to a weaponless dog fight in atmo but I don't recall seeing or hearing that it was confirmed.  I don't think it would be unobtainable to expand the boundaries of dynamic v dynamic combat to within atmo but that isn't the same as NQ putting it in writing.

 

" One of the most resource-intensive features that we have to tackle is planetary warfare. It brings significant change to the game and, before we can achieve it, we have to bring PvP in general to a more mature state. We know that territory warfare is an important game system to many of you, so continue to help us improve PvP by engaging in fights to generate data for us to analyze and continue to improve the system. "

 

 

 

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Possibly the only thing that might come close to AvA combat is the asteroid combat with XS pocket deployables and the quickly adding weapons to ambush miners on asteroids.

 

But NQ has way more important priorities for DU, like surviving the first six months after 'launch'. Getting all the planets back is already a four phase endeavor. And if the numbers they recently gave are true (mission quanta) they'll have a hell of a time getting the DU economy under control otherwise we'll have another wipe on our hands sometime in the future...

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15 hours ago, TheBlender said:

What is the current state of AvA specifically? Is it even still planned? Also, what of planetside combat generally?
 

 

It has been postponed indefinitely after release. This was confirmed in a podcast here in December 2019, which was later shown in a roadmap.

Podcast here with timestamp to the ava/cvc part: 

 

 

 

And of course, after listening to it, I couldn't help making memes. Link: https://imgur.com/a/uVOYJT0

 

It was just funny to see how no one had a problem except a few who pointed out the problems that already existed there. But blind trust didn't help anyone. The unpleasant awakening of the majority came later. And today we are where we are.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Indeed, even empyrion and Space engeneers has a form of AvA that, although not my style, seems to be working for some. I normally just shoot people with my ships, preferably with large missiles.

As said before, we are nowhere near what should be in a game like DU (google kickstart DU). We now get landmark in space, well with respect to landmark this probably wont last much longer is promises are not kept.

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2 minutes ago, Aaron Cain said:

with respect to landmark this probably wont last much longer

Too soon?  Maybe not.  Too much salt?  No, that isn't it either...   Righteous indignation?  Perhaps this YouTube video can answer:  watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY

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Hey guys,

 

there is a misconception here. Stuff like AvA can not be "added" to the game. AvA requires a centralized server architecture that makes strategic decisions, like who shot whoom nearly in realtime. Comparable systems in E-Sports are usually very streamlined and limited to very few players. The DU infrastructure is completely different. It uses the clients workstation for all physics / collision simulations, and uses the server only for data storage. The server itself is programmed in a very generic high level way, or with other words : it's quite slow.

 

So AvA in DU ? not going to happen.

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5 minutes ago, Ninator said:

Hey guys,

 

there is a misconception here. Stuff like AvA can not be "added" to the game. AvA requires a centralized server architecture that makes strategic decisions, like who shot whoom nearly in realtime. Comparable systems in E-Sports are usually very streamlined and limited to very few players. The DU infrastructure is completely different. It uses the clients workstation for all physics / collision simulations, and uses the server only for data storage. The server itself is programmed in a very generic high level way, or with other words : it's quite slow.

 

So AvA in DU ? not going to happen.

I'm not sure that's true for the current PvP is it?  

 

Also I'm pretty sure that 'twitch' types of games all simulate things like shooting  collisions, etc on clients which work in lockstep with one another and detect if client states diverge.  Whereas server-centric games typically look a bit more like eve and DU where you have to lock a target and press shoot to shoot at it rather than manually aiming.

 

The difference with DU is the state of an object is simulated by *one* computer which then tells a server that then broadcasts that state to all the others.  Which is the worst of all worlds because you have high latency and high network comms without centralised simulations.

 

I imagine someone thought doing it like that would reduce server costs but I bet in practice the oposite is true.

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NQ obviously bit off more than they could chew, but that is all behind us now. I think they have been more realistic lately.

 

6 minutes ago, Ninator said:

AvA requires a centralized server architecture that makes strategic decisions, like who shot whoom nearly in realtime.

 

AvA was never going to be like an FPS, it would be lock and fire just like CvC. Seems kind of tricky though like how would it handle obstructions...

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8 minutes ago, Haunty said:

NQ obviously bit off more than they could chew, but that is all behind us now. I think they have been more realistic lately.

 

 

AvA was never going to be like an FPS, it would be lock and fire just like CvC. Seems kind of tricky though like how would it handle obstructions...

I don't think anyone ever got far enough to know what it would have been.  Lock and fire does seem easier to do, but it would be a weird system compared with more or less every other game out there.

 

Might even be better to instance a tile into an FPS environment and have a different game engine unreal run the AvA part of things ...

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5 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

I don't think anyone ever got far enough to know what it would have been.  Lock and fire does seem easier to do, but it would be a weird system compared with more or less every other game out there.

In old dev Q&As they did say as much, because AvA would also include AvC and CvA. I think it would just be slower action, with the extra step of getting a lock-on

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6 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

Lock and fire does seem easier to do, but it would be a weird system compared with more or less every other game out there.

Tab target is another term for this.  When player skill/aiming isn't part of the combat it is the most common form of lock and fire for MMO games.

 

9 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

Might even be better to instance a tile into an FPS environment and have a different game engine unreal run the AvA part of things ..

I would be all for instanced FPS levels using the tile(s) and static constructs as the level/map.  This would make building skill and static BPs more valuable.

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If I were NQ I absolutely would *not* want to address this topic!  Look at what happened in other games -- CCP tried it in eve first with walking in stations, which caused a player revolt, and then with dust, which had some success on its own but never really connected back to the game.  Frontier tried to add it to Elite Dangerous with Odessey and nearly killed their game off completely.  The only game I can think of where this type of functionality has been added without the players hating it is Star Citizen, which has added it before even releasing the game in the first place.

 

IMO there are more important and much lower effort/higher reward things that could be worked on in DU than AvA.  If it were me I would leave it for later and then see what the player base actually wants from the feature.

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2 hours ago, Zeddrick said:

CCP tried it in eve first with walking in stations, which caused a player revolt, and then with dust, which had some success on its own but never really connected back to the game.  Frontier tried to add it to Elite Dangerous with Odessey and nearly killed their game off completely

 

That's not the same, they were adding avatars when there were none, DU has always had avatars and is just missing the combat part.

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I think the main issue here is that all relevant space build games that have the same setup as DU have it, Space engeneers has it, Empyrion has it.

 

Then why do people from there look at DU? Its potential and the size. But without some key elemants those people will be lost very fast, if not already

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12 hours ago, Haunty said:

 

That's not the same, they were adding avatars when there were none, DU has always had avatars and is just missing the combat part.

There was a whole plan to go further with it and have combat, etc.  It upset players who wanted the effort to be put into the actual spaceship game and not making another game to distract from it.

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DU can survive without AvA but a bad implementation of AvA can kill the game in a single day.  I want AvA but not at the cost of the overall game.  In another thread there has been discussion of instances being created to which I suggested using player tiles and constructs to have AvA combat ladders.  It may be required for AvA to be in a different engine or flavor of the current engine to be playable or fun.  Instances could give that transition without breaking the game.

 

Edit:  I don't think instanced combat should have impact on non-instanced assets.  I suggested ladder combat because I did not want instanced combat to potentially put my territory at risk.  This would give NQ room to slowly work on AvA while keeping the FPS crowd somewhat sated.

Edited by Wyndle
clarification
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9 hours ago, Wyndle said:

DU can survive without AvA but a bad implementation of AvA can kill the game in a single day.  I want AvA but not at the cost of the overall game.  In another thread there has been discussion of instances being created to which I suggested using player tiles and constructs to have AvA combat ladders.  It may be required for AvA to be in a different engine or flavor of the current engine to be playable or fun.  Instances could give that transition without breaking the game.

 

Edit:  I don't think instanced combat should have impact on non-instanced assets.  I suggested ladder combat because I did not want instanced combat to potentially put my territory at risk.  This would give NQ room to slowly work on AvA while keeping the FPS crowd somewhat sated.

 

What you are asking for is a completely different game and has nothing to do with what they used to advertise.

I have always said, build the vision of your AvA Lock & Fire into the game - With a gun. Just one gun. Use that as a foundation to also show that you're not forgetting the people from a pillar, which had interest in this game.

 

Why should I pvp if it has no impact on the world? That is also something completely different from what they always said. Heck, we don't even have territoral warfare yet.

And I disagree with you. Landmark in space won't survive long like this with a subspriction model. 

 

A very good comparison here is New World, which originally started as a pvp game, then at some point fired the game designer, brought in someone new and wanted to make it a pve game with opt-in pvp. What happened then: the people in the beta said that there was no pve content. Amazon had to postpone until the pve content was delivered.

So, what happened at release? People had fun for a few months. But the game is dead. The servers are empty.

 

I would like to state here that we are not talking about an indie developer. We are talking about Amazon. (Who had a bad statistic with released games - 1 cancelled, 1 back to alpha before New World came out).

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Forget AvA and the other PvP stuff. As i see it, there are more "Creative Designer" then Backbone-Hardcore-Coders. Look at the UI*s. They look as they are codet by IT-Students 1.Semester. See it as a Buildergame with smal PvP, then you might have alot of fun

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