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THE FUTURE OF DUAL UNIVERSE - Discussion thread


NQ-Wanderer

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So long, fair well...  

 

My org decided today to shutter its doors - will spend the next week or so HQing everything we can, and hauling all the good stuff, like Rare Mining Units, either to Haven or our space stations.  Its been interesting, but its just drudgery now.  Will be watching for the next year or so to see if they turn things around and give us the game they promissed.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/11/2023 at 12:59 PM, Kezzle said:

No one has yet demonstrated what a "3D Blog" even is, let alone why anyone would want one or what function it might serve. All that word-salad seemed to do was suggest that DU is an example of one (???), and that they think that the "incentives" in DU are enough to get people "3D Blogging".

 

Pie in the sky. 

 

second life and sansar already hold this position, i think:/

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 5 weeks later...

Hello Everybody,

 

I don't know if this type of suggestion was posted by somebody already, but, as a big fan of DU I'd hate to see the game go into hibernation.

Would it be crazy to suggest that NQ did a special Subscription offer during say, 30 days of June for 6 and 12 months only, 6 month sub including 500K SP every month for 6 months and 1 year sub including 1 million SP every month for 12 months.

I definitely would sub my 4 toons for a year if it includes SP and id be able to get an additional 12 million SP during the sub.


Also knowing that PVE will be introduced soon and its going to take time to develop, the extra SP will come in handy.

Maybe the intro of PVE will be a good time to introduce the special SUB option.

 

I'd love to hear from NQ if this is something they'd consider.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not sure if this has been posted anywhere else. Sorry if it has. How does missions delivering elements to markets or a designated location, similar to the challenges sound as an idea? Gives another reason for industry to keep rolling and can help with the market economy, which seems to peak on weekends and dwindle during the week. Can even be a way to get rid of damaged elements that just seem to stored (for me anyways), and a get the ore sales flowing. Just a thought.

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What is the community reaction to Novaquark's CEO (Nouredine Abboud) stating on Linked-In: 

 

"And Novaquark has pushed the idea of Dual Universe as far as possible, with a bold shot at building a persistent MMO built by the players with next generation voxels and a single shard server tech."

 

 

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1.) Hire a designer/modeler in the short term.

2.) In one content patch release the atmo xl engine and combine it with the release of an Cash Shop (real money)

- Sell skins for engine's

- Selll skins for avatar ( easter event skin,  christmas skin, etc.)

- Sell skins for pets

 

Just milk us dry with your costly skins :D

 

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  • 2 months later...

I can see very bright future for DU, but not in the current state.

 

1. make it free to play, but sell in-game money and skins for real money, i believe NQ would make more money using this method. this would also get much more players into game. there are already some 3rd party websites that sell in-game money, so it would be much better if NQ would just make it free to play and sell quanta themselves. more players, more sales.

for example you could still have monthly subscription, but instead of playtime, it would give you bigger daily reward. it could give you quanta + random item based on the subscription tier.

 

2. optimize the game, DU is only game that i'm forced to playing in 1080p and i still get very poor framerates, like 25-35 is my average and that's with everything on minimum in 1080p. with L core ships i get 10fps or below .. it's cry-worthy how badly DU is optimized, or well i should say is NOT optimized at all. .. i mean its unplayable on HDD, this speaks for itself that there's no optimization done at all.

 

3. put more effort towards fixing annoying known bugs, such as getting stuck in your seat in populated areas when you have atmo radar attached, this is very known bug and still no fix.

another issue is with ground in certain areas, where after flattening the ground, you get 1fps or below when landing there and occasionally ships sink thru the ground and blow up (like seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRPEmAugmM )

 

4. quick pvp system, where you don't lose your ship nor items when you blow up. some kind of a "matchmaking" system, where you can fly into certain place and enter a pvp zone via portal, where you can fight it out for rewards. this would make it possible for players to quickly do some combat without having to stress over losing their stuff, i believe this would greatly increase number of players, lot of players want some action, but dont want to spend days on making a ship and then losing it in middle of nowhere. perhaps you could call it "virtual pvp". it should have space and atmospheric fights. for that purpose you could have virtual planets (like the ones for daily challenges, where you are not directly among other players).

 

otherwise i think DU is amazing concept, i really like the mmo style building. i've played lot of builders, but it's just boring if you're all alone and there's no direct way of communicating with other players. for example space engineers is great and it runs much better than DU, but it's not mmo, you'd have to join a server and players are scattered all over the servers, so there's no general chat or ability for others to come see your base or buy your creations, that's why DU is much better in terms of playability.

 

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1 minute ago, Sethioz said:

I can see very bright future for DU, but not in the current state.

 

1. make it free to play, but sell in-game money and skins for real money, i believe NQ would make more money using this method. this would also get much more players into game. there are already some 3rd party websites that sell in-game money, so it would be much better if NQ would just make it free to play and sell quanta themselves. more players, more sales.

for example you could still have monthly subscription, but instead of playtime, it would give you bigger daily reward. it could give you quanta + random item based on the subscription tier.

 

2. optimize the game, DU is only game that i'm forced to playing in 1080p and i still get very poor framerates, like 25-35 is my average and that's with everything on minimum in 1080p. with L core ships i get 10fps or below .. it's cry-worthy how badly DU is optimized, or well i should say is NOT optimized at all. .. i mean its unplayable on HDD, this speaks for itself that there's no optimization done at all.

 

3. put more effort towards fixing annoying known bugs, such as getting stuck in your seat in populated areas when you have atmo radar attached, this is very known bug and still no fix.

another issue is with ground in certain areas, where after flattening the ground, you get 1fps or below when landing there and occasionally ships sink thru the ground and blow up (like seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRPEmAugmM )

 

4. quick pvp system, where you don't lose your ship nor items when you blow up. some kind of a "matchmaking" system, where you can fly into certain place and enter a pvp zone via portal, where you can fight it out for rewards. this would make it possible for players to quickly do some combat without having to stress over losing their stuff, i believe this would greatly increase number of players, lot of players want some action, but dont want to spend days on making a ship and then losing it in middle of nowhere. perhaps you could call it "virtual pvp". it should have space and atmospheric fights. for that purpose you could have virtual planets (like the ones for daily challenges, where you are not directly among other players).

 

otherwise i think DU is amazing concept, i really like the mmo style building. i've played lot of builders, but it's just boring if you're all alone and there's no direct way of communicating with other players. for example space engineers is great and it runs much better than DU, but it's not mmo, you'd have to join a server and players are scattered all over the servers, so there's no general chat or ability for others to come see your base or buy your creations, that's why DU is much better in terms of playability.

 

 

All these ideas depend on the game doing much better than it is. Moving the game to FTP, optimizing, fixing bugs...these are expensive ideas that only increase the scale of DU as a liability for NQ. 

 

Unfortunately, the chance of any of this actually turning this product around is too small to justify the effort.

 

The scale issues should be made clear by NQ's own post about the PvE numbers they've seen -- these aren't very good metrics even for single player games; for an MMO, it means that the product doesn't work. 

 

We're long past suggesting changes for DU at this point, the product will not evolve or scale and NQ has moved on a long time ago. 

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2 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

All these ideas depend on the game doing much better than it is. Moving the game to FTP, optimizing, fixing bugs...these are expensive ideas that only increase the scale of DU as a liability for NQ. 

 

Unfortunately, the chance of any of this actually turning this product around is too small to justify the effort.

 

The scale issues should be made clear by NQ's own post about the PvE numbers they've seen -- these aren't very good metrics even for single player games; for an MMO, it means that the product doesn't work. 

 

We're long past suggesting changes for DU at this point, the product will not evolve or scale and NQ has moved on a long time ago. 

 

not at all. as a business, you need to understand what people want. i don't agree with what 99% of players want, but i know what they do want:

 

1) free to play games or very cheap stuff, because most people don't want to spend money on anything until they get a taste for what it's about that they are buying. planetside2 still runs strong after 10+ years with free2play and in-game sales.

 

2) players want freedom and variation, which DU offers mostly. such as ability to customize things to your liking.

 

3) quick action with least amount of stress - this is what DU is missing. that's why i suggested to add some kind of stress-free pvp where you can quickly jump in the queue. it could just be made accessible via VR, like daily challenges, only that you'd be using your own ship. this would be basically like a whole new game, with minimal effort. they already have "virtual environment" like the daily challenges, where you wont encounter other players. just make it like that, only for pvp. on planets and in space.

imagine how cool it would be to do pvp in thades' asteroid belt! or on planet's surface.

you could even have team-based attack/defence mode, where one team has to use static construct BPs to defend an entire tile from other team that attacks using dynamics.

this would basically be like a whole new game with minimal effort, because all those things already exist in a game, all they need is bit of code to add a new "mode".

i can guarantee that this mode would attract a lot of new players and it would become very popular.

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It's always amazing what random people on the internet claim people want.

 

Especially when you ignore the previous bakers who supported something other than what they have now got. And above all, mechanics that were revised several times only to end up with mining units. Or things that were announced at some point and simply not delivered.

 

But of course, 99% of the players and their feedback should be ignored, says a random guy on the internet who wasn't even in the beta.

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1 minute ago, SirJohn85 said:

It's always amazing what random people on the internet claim people want.

 

Especially when you ignore the previous bakers who supported something other than what they have now got. And above all, mechanics that were revised several times only to end up with mining units.

 

But of course, 99% of the players and their feedback should be ignored, says a random guy on the internet who wasn't even in the beta.

 I concur.  I was one of the pre-alpha players that took time off work for the 3-4 day play periods per month of the early Dual Universe.  Logged 72 hours in one of those 96 hour periods once.  I remember login queues of 2500+ people.  Sad to say but those were the best days of Dual Universe.  Too many time NQ tried to sell "Performance Improvements" that were nothing but efforts to reduce resource consumption due to bad initial design.  To compound that, their fix was often poorly implemented.

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It’s not going to end up what it started out to be. That much is beyond argument. 
I think Sethioz’s ideas are valid. Whether it’s too late or not is a comical debate, because this forum has been all about how DU is circling the drain for the year and a half I’ve been around it. They were supposed to have run out of money and closed the game a long time ago, and there are still new people popping up on the discord every day. There is a lot of dodgy math with dubious inputs going on here. Future certainly murky. 
 

Sethioz plays now. As it has been established, really not the same game as it was <per-alpha>. 
 

I wonder who has a more relevant perspective on the game today.

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The last patch announced was 1.4 back in...May?

 

That the game is still online doesn't mean it has an actual future as an MMO...a dead MMO doesn't mean that it vanishes offline, it means there's no realistic hope for scaling it to be a real product. It could stay online for another decade, that doesn't mean it will ever be scaled out. 

 

Let's also be real about just who is "ignoring 99% of feedback" -- that's how NQ has worked since the start. Maybe if they'd been more engaged years ago it would be different. This has been their reputation for nearly a decade now.

 

That I'm reminding people not to bother isn't me being mean, it's pragmatic. 

 

They've yet to even announce another patch afaik...the idea that they'd make huge sweeping changes at this point is not grounded on anything other than weirdly placed hope in the ~50-100 people that play in a given day. 🤷‍♂️ 

 

NQ has been clear that their focus is other projects, I just don't understand why people don't understand this and keep thinking they can magically turn this around.

 

I think people vastly, vastly, vastly underestimate how much retooling would be needing to make any of these suggestions practical, and that requires money that no sane company would spend for a product that hasn't scaled. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

There's still no news about a new update....the game is basically abandoned, as all evidence has pointed to for a while now. 

 

Let's put this in context with some of the CEO's latest posts on LinkedIn. Consider this gem: 

Quote

...Different sector but same story on the side of Nouredine Abboud, CEO of Novaquark, who oversees just under 80 employees...

 

This is from a post about 3 weeks ago. 

 

If anyone still believes that NQ is devoting resources to DU, please explain what those 80 people are doing day-to-day considering the last 8+ months of development velocity.

 

The answer is very clear: they aren't working on DU, which we already knew because they've said their focus is on other projects and have said that for a while now. 

 

Anyone that believes DU still has a real future is not interested in reality -- there's not one single piece of evidence to suggest that development is still going on at any real scale.

 

There's not one piece of evidence to show player counts are doing anything other than plateauing at <100 players online concurrently. 

 

You can keep pretending that the game is growing and that constant churns of new players is somehow a good thing, but all objective evidence says that even NQ is not interesting in furthering this moonshot. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

A game that imposes restrictions on players has no point in existence.
A game that forces players to perform a specific activity has no point.

 

I'll expand on what's going on

 

PVP should be an option, not a requirement. You yourself write that transport missions are boring and many hours were wasted. Think of a new player who flies for several hours only to be destroyed by a pirate thief. Such a person stops playing.

 

Ship speed limits are another inexplicable limiter that has no basis in physics.

 

Faulty or missing mechanics regarding the spawning of resources in fields.

 

hese are the flaws that will contribute to the downfall of this game.
And the PVP community was the only one that was listened to.

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10 hours ago, Vazqez said:

A game that imposes restrictions on players has no point in existence.
A game that forces players to perform a specific activity has no point.

 

I'll expand on what's going on

 

PVP should be an option, not a requirement. You yourself write that transport missions are boring and many hours were wasted. Think of a new player who flies for several hours only to be destroyed by a pirate thief. Such a person stops playing.

 

Ship speed limits are another inexplicable limiter that has no basis in physics.

 

Faulty or missing mechanics regarding the spawning of resources in fields.

 

hese are the flaws that will contribute to the downfall of this game.
And the PVP community was the only one that was listened to.

To rephrase your first two sentences:  Obvious treadmills are not fun or interesting (even less so when the goal posts get moved).

While I concur with your observation that unwanted PvP is detrimental, it is optional; based on where you choose to go.  If you stumble into an active paintball field don't be surprised if you walk out with paint on you.  If you cannot stomach PvP then only fly the safe zone missions.  PvP players got more attention but they were not the only ones who had complaints or suggestions addressed/adopted in the game.

 

As for ship speed limits, there are technical and gameplay limitations working against DU that are not based on physics.  If you want realistic physics you may want to try Kerbal Space Program with some of the realism mods installed.  

 

DU started as hype (arguably, that hasn't changed).  It felt really fun in Alpha, kinda fun in Beta, and barely "fun" by Launch.  There are plenty of missed opportunities and derided changes beyond the flaws you mention that have dragged DU down.

 

For a small crowdfunded Dev team to launch an MMO is very impressive but the actual play in the game is and never was present.  At the end of the day DU is a MMO building game with great flight physics, horrible combat, and tons of obvious treadmills to keep players too deep in busy work to notice that almost everything outside of building and flight is essentially a 2 or 3 star mobile clicker game.

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4 hours ago, Wyndle said:

While I concur with your observation that unwanted PvP is detrimental, it is optional; based on where you choose to go.  If you stumble into an active paintball field don't be surprised if you walk out with paint on you.  If you cannot stomach PvP then only fly the safe zone missions.  PvP players got more attention but they were not the only ones who had complaints or suggestions addressed/adopted in the game.

 

 

This approach will destroy this game.
Since he wants to have access to the entire game.

Since I'm putting in my real money, I don't want to be deprived of it.

The current state clearly proves that people don't want to be robbed, so they stop playing.

 

Only a change to the current rules can bring about a change in the number of players.

The current game model has not worked.

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