Dual Universe

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Indeed DU looks like a sack of shit.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Yes it was a rollercoaster ride and no I did not play or pay for it.

I did like the idea of a space game where you do realistic things but space lego seems not my kind of thing. And Makkab is dead so this isn't a funny thread to me, sorry.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I played this a bit yesterday at the recommendation of asfasdf.

We teamed up and gathered a ton of resources and pooled our starter cash together to buy some necessities for manufacturing space ships.

I haven't really played the game enough to form an impression yet, but nothing sticks out to me so far to make the game unplayable or "bad."

I haven't followed the development of this game at all, so I don't know what to really expect, but so far I get vibes of EvE from their skill training system.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I played this a bit yesterday at the recommendation of asfasdf.

We teamed up and gathered a ton of resources and pooled our starter cash together to buy some necessities for manufacturing space ships.

I haven't really played the game enough to form an impression yet, but nothing sticks out to me so far to make the game unplayable or "bad."

I haven't followed the development of this game at all, so I don't know what to really expect, but so far I get vibes of EvE from their skill training system.

I have watched some videos, which appears to be - indeed you can build. Its all about mining resources and building, but that's it. There's nothing else to do there. Its a repetitive grindy experience with no depth or other dimensions to the game. The footage appears to confirm this, but your opinion will be interesting.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I played this a bit yesterday at the recommendation of asfasdf.

We teamed up and gathered a ton of resources and pooled our starter cash together to buy some necessities for manufacturing space ships.

I haven't really played the game enough to form an impression yet, but nothing sticks out to me so far to make the game unplayable or "bad."

I haven't followed the development of this game at all, so I don't know what to really expect, but so far I get vibes of EvE from their skill training system.

I have watched some videos, which appears to be - indeed you can build. Its all about mining resources and building, but that's it. There's nothing else to do there. Its a repetitive grindy experience with no depth or other dimensions to the game. The footage appears to confirm this, but your opinion will be interesting.

Nothing to fight at all? I guess it's suppose to be pvp then?

Anyhow, I don't really get a ton of time to play during the week, and it will be Saturday before I can even try to do much.

I might log in for a couple minutes just to collect the free 100k gold you get for the daily log in. Save up some cash for when I'm ready to play.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Beginning of game needs a definite rebalance, but asfasdf and I are training skills and collecting gold right now.

We should have the ship we need built by saturday and enough cash to stake a land claim for mining T2 ores. Definite slow grind at the start. There isn't much benefit to playing much until you can get off the starter planet.

You aren't allowed to mine any spots on the starter planet except ur beginner location, and the beginner location runs out of ores in a few hours, with no respawns. You either make multiple characters or just wait it out. We decided to wait it out.


Either way, if you are just starting out, press the "K" button to start training skills, think about how you train skills in EvE, just without a queue limit. Load it up as much as you want.

Also, press "ctrl k" to start making blue prints also. Find the ones you need for making boxes or assembly lines. You will need more space and assembly lines for crafting ships and parts.

 

[Ranselknulf]

More random tips I found while bored at work.

Some of these might be old, but they still provide some context to the gameplay. Like I think the bit about compacting your starting speeder to take with you is something I wouldn't have thought of.

• Left Ctrl + Z is autorun. You shoot across the map way faster than just shift sprinting.
• If you ever need to do the opposite action for your tool, such as removing fuel from a tank or picking up elements, it will always be Left Alt + Left Mouse Button with the tool equipped.
• On Alioth, space begins around 3500m up and your space engines will kick on when you reach <10% atmosphere. You will need enough atmospheric thrust to get through the transition area.
• When entering atmosphere from space, reduce your speed to <1200 km/h or your elements will take damage from the heat or your ship may explode.
• Always queue up your Talent points (F2) and have them training. You receive 90 points per minute while actively training or you can stockpile 6 points per minute if not.
• Some good starting talents are Scanner Range, Detector Range, Nanopack Upgrades, Core Unit Upgrades, Primary Container Augmentation and Nanocrafter Efficiency.
• Don't specialize your talents too early. There are lots of very cheap ones that take only a few minutes to learn and the benefits add up.
• If you are separated from a dynamic construct by less than 4km, you can fetch it to you once every 24hrs by opening your map (F4) then clicking Constructs in the top left and right clicking that construct in the list and selecting Fetch. This is a debug feature that will eventually be removed from the game, but is great if your vehicle is stuck in the air or underground.
• Right now, dynamic constructs completely stop moving if everyone on board logs off. That means if you are hurtling towards a planet at 30,000km/h, you can Alt-F4 to come to an instant stop. When you log back in, your ship will have 0 velocity. This is a commonly used tactic by people so they don't have to slow down in PvP space, but it is fairly exploity and will likely be removed from the game before long.
• PvP exists in space at least 500km from any planet or moon. You will get a warning prior to entering PvP space.
• If your ship controls don't work or you get a Script error when sitting down in it, just right click the seat and select Autoconfigure -> and the type of vehicle Flying/Hover/PvP Seat. This will reset all the lua coding on that object to default and link up any necessary components such as fuel tanks.
• Right now, players receive a daily login reward (23 hours from last login) of $100,000 per day, so make sure to keep logging in for that.
• Smaller cores are better for most tasks than larger cores if you can fit everything you need on them.
• A good list of resources for out of game tools is https://dual.sh/ - specicfically the community supported hud: https://github.com/Dimencia/DU-Orbital-Hud
• You can 'compact' small ships that let you carry them around as a blueprint and deploy as needed. You should compact your starting speeder.

 

[asfasdf]

• Some good starting talents are Scanner Range, Detector Range, Nanopack Upgrades, Core Unit Upgrades, Primary Container Augmentation and Nanocrafter Efficiency.

I think this is no longer true now that planet mining is gone. Scanner/Detector seem useless.

 

[Ranselknulf]

• Some good starting talents are Scanner Range, Detector Range, Nanopack Upgrades, Core Unit Upgrades, Primary Container Augmentation and Nanocrafter Efficiency.

I think this is no longer true now that planet mining is gone. Scanner/Detector seem useless.

I don't know what the developers plans are, but after reading some and reflecting on my experience so far, this game feels like it's somewhere between alpha stage 2 and beta, even though it's now officially released. Dual Universe is missing a lot of the polish you expect from a released MMO, like basic options such as setting custom map markers or having chat boxes that can be moved for example. I don't want to come off as too negative though, you can find plenty of frustrated players from a quick Google search.


While the game needs some polish, I think it could become good in the future, and I'm still interested in exploring space and seeing what's out there.

The knee jerk abandonment of the planet mining system is another data point that affects my opinion of the game's "real" development stage. I've paid subscriptions for beta stage mmos before, as it seems to be a more common thing these days, and I'll probably poke around on this game for a bit too.

The serious lack of PvE content in starter areas is also indicative of game developers too focused on systems and not enough on the overall gameplay arc. Sure, it's a sandbox, but that doesn't mean you can't have any npcs to talk too.

I'll have to find the developer blog at some point to see just what they were thinking to lead them down this path of releasing a game and expecting new players to simply collect daily log in reward gold coins for a week until they can afford to make a space ship.

I'm autistic enough to power through it, but I have to imagine this will be a huge hurdle for people.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Info for later, so I don't forget.

https://board.dualthegame.com/index...t-an-order-of-10-or-even-more/#comment-188951

 

[Ranselknulf]

Hello again,

Today we are going to try to fly off planet and set up base in a new spot. I think I've figured out a little bit more of the game. Asfasdf plays a lot more than I do, so they are the expert so to speak, but I'll relay what we have learned so far.

I did finally figure out how to set custom markers on my map, it wasn't very intuitive. We also figured out how to make ore somewhat respawn. There is a weird mini-game you have to play with your autominer to make new ore spawn.

Basically you use the "calibration" feature on the autominer and some ore will spawn beneath it that you can harvest. However, you can only calibrate the machine once per 24 hour period, but to bypass this, you simply pick up the autominer and put it back down again, then you can use the calibration feature again. The developers have clearly stated that this is the intended way for people to mine. Seems bizarre, but whatever, its how you get ur ores men.

Another big thing we figured out the hard way is that you always want to carry "scrap" on you. You can make scrap from pure refined iron, aluminum, silicon, etc. While flying around ur ships will take damage, even ur starter hover craft, and if you get stuck a long way from base, well you will be running for a while. Ctrl-Z is auto-run if you ever get stuck. Scrap can be used to make repairs on ships and hovercraft. So its a good idea to always keep a bit hand, or ready to be crafted.

Anyhow, time to play. I'll see if I can get some screenshots today.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I'm sure I'll get around to posting screenshots at some point, but here's a couple things I learned in the past week.

There is a free shuttle between the starter planets that instantly transports you, but the shuttle is only at markets labeled one to ten for some reason. I'm close to market 17 so it's a bit of a travel distance for me.

There are "simulations" at the market where you can fly ships. You get money for completing challenges too. You can get up to 500k per day for these challenges. These simulations are

It's a good idea to have extra engines and space ship parts being manufactured. They seem to have a habit of getting destroyed.

 

[asfasdf]

I did some modifications to the car

 

[Ranselknulf]

Thanks for the upgrades asfasdf!

I went flying around the moon after you logged off and did some minor damage to the ship, but its been beat up from the previous weeks flights and likely needs at least one more "braking engine" and one more main engine to be crafted just for when we do finally completely destroy these parts. They do not have any repairs left on them.

I managed to repair/craft more of the ships adjustors and I made 2 small ailerons to replace the medium aileron that was destroyed. Hopefully that assists you when you fly the ship back to the planet.

I'm gonna keep scanning the planet for a bit and hopefully find some decent ore, but so far I haven't found anything useful.

As a side note, I think we should make an XS or S Container to put all these ore scans into. I doubt the games "geology" changes much, so it might be useful to have these all in a centralized location for future reference. It's not like they take up any volume anyways, so I think an XS Container would be fine for this. You never know what sort of automation or data analytics tools that might come along to assist us.

I flew to the market after repairing the ship and I think I have a better idea of how not to crash on moon type environments now. Here's a picture of the Madis Moon 2.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I'll do a full review at some point, kinda busy with moving currently, but I can say without a doubt to avoid the game in it's current state.

They keep rebalancing the game to make it nearly impossible for new players to start off. The game needs an expansion or something to make it even viable for new people to start off. It's too small for the existing tiny population already and there isn't a market to sell stuff too. Basically there is no way to make money as a new player and no way to effectively get higher tier ores needed to do literally anything in the game.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I'll do a full review at some point, kinda busy with moving currently, but I can say without a doubt to avoid the game in it's current state.

They keep rebalancing the game to make it nearly impossible for new players to start off. The game needs an expansion or something to make it even viable for new people to start off. It's too small for the existing tiny population already and there isn't a market to sell stuff too. Basically there is no way to make money as a new player and no way to effectively get higher tier ores needed to do literally anything in the game.

So theres game design issues...are there also technical issues or other limitations?

 

[asfasdf]

Technical part seems quite stable, but game design is atrocious.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I think the game design is beyond atrocious.

It almost seems like the developers have contempt for the players. I say this as someone who has only followed this game for less than two months and basically spent two months subscription on it. I'm not a butthurt player following since alpha by any means.

The game development decisions come across to me as somewhat like a corporate board managing an MMO would come across as. The corporate board has no clue what the players want, but that doesn't matter because they need to cut costs, the company is failing. So, they cut costs by reducing server load in ways that makes the game boring and reducing content. I read that the Beta had 12 planets and you could physically mine tunnels into planets subsurface looking for ores if you wanted to. Now on Release there are 5 planets and the only way to mine is with autominers. The developers are removing all efficient ways to get ore except by pvping over a few asteroids. And you can't even pvp without the ore from those asteroids because there are no weapons you can build without that ore, and there is no money to be made to buy the weapons ore because the T1 ore you can automine is worthless and the slow autominers you do have crank out just enough ore to keep you barely able to make basic parts.

The game is essentially an idle clicker game until you can maybe build a pvp ship and train pvp skills (months of subscription required), then if you die? Well it's an idle clicker game again. This isn't even touching the games taxes and expensive schematic system.

TL/DR: This is not a builder game. It's an idle clicker game, but the devs really want you to pvp over a few asteroids. If you've ever played one of those crappy phone games where after a day you might get to do something, that's what this is, but instead of a day it's a week.

asfasdf I think we should try some asteroid mining tomorrow, but I'm not gonna renew my subscription when it ends. I think the only way to get their attention is to stop paying them, and if you read the DU forums at all, you would see there are a lot of people saying the same. I'd be willing to play again if they release an actual expansion, or even just return to what the game was in beta with 12 planets and subsurface mining, but we should search for something else to play until then.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Below is a quote from the DU forums that explains the situation a bit better. It definitely sounds like a corporate board trying to grab what cash they can from the game before it collapses.

Doesn't bode well for the future of the game either. I can't see people like that selling the IP to another company to develop. The game is likely gonna be dead in a few months.

Enjoy it while you can.


Quote from someone named "Gunhand"

I wasn't going to write this post. It was also a post I never actually thought I would have to write, but events since release two months ago led me to this point.

I don't post a great deal on these forums, but I'm an avid reader and professional lurker since joining at the Alpha stage. I try to keep my finger on the community pulse and to keep up to date on updates and the general buzz. I've played since Alpha and mostly enjoyed all the time I've spent. There has been many times when DU has fought against me and attempted to break me down. However I was always sold, like many others, on that potential carrot on a stick of "What if?".

Over the DU development since 0.23 and beyond, the community was gutted due to the introduction of schematics. As updates and patches were introduced to the game, I've watched with dismay the amount of players with high standing in the community, slowly turn on NQ and Dual Universe when they get that stark realisation that this game is never going to live up to that perceived potential. Some go quietly into the night, others announce their vitriol for a few weeks before quitting with much fanfare.

Being a player since Alpha affords me an ability to see the bigger picture of what I perceive has been going on:

If you look at all the updates since Beta started and outside of some balancing updates to PVP and visual upgrades, everything else has been implemented to cut costs due to what I believe as woeful inadequacies at the design and concept level. The vision of this game and what was perceived could be done, didn't match the budget available and the technology. In short, the game that NQ wanted to make didn't match what they could afford to do. Hence, I believe, this is why JC was ousted and the company is now ran by the main investment company (who I feel wants their investment back). The game has had its life and soul gutted out of it, and with every "improvement" it takes another little piece of itself away.

When the announcement came that this game was going to be released, I'm pretty sure we as the community, were in the unanimous agreement that it was way too soon. The game was undercooked and needed a lot more time before it was ready. Any development company who wanted their undercooked product to survive would of released it as an early access product. However, Novaquark is a business ran by an investment company who wants to recoup. Keeping the game in another few years of beta or early access wasn't going to make them anywhere near the money needed to recoup. With no new investment, there was only one possible course of action, throw it out the door and see if it sinks or swims. Unfortunately they forgot to teach it how to swim or provide any floatation aids.

I don't want to be one of those doomsayers who, when they're not happy with the state of the game will immediately declare "zomg, this game is dead!" But It saddens me to say that, that is what I now believe. It died sometime ago when Novaquark realised that under the budget they currently have that there was no way they could afford the server costs to make it work as intended. It just took some of us longer than it should to see it for what it is.

So what is the immediate future? If you look at the current lack of content and updates, all that we're really getting is the completion of the supporter goals that should of been ready on release. Beyond that, as of writing this, nothing, no road map, nothing. No enthusiasm from Novaquark, no excitement, nothing.

Can the game be saved? In short, no. To do this, the game would need a large, fresh influx of money, coupled with a long protracted development time to essentially re-release and reinvent itself. We are at the point of no return though. NQ, I think are running on fumes and they know it. Releasing the game, wiping and increasing the subscription prices and then going essentially dark speaks volumes to their future plans.

I do wish it wasn't this way, and I am kicking myself a little for having to write one of these posts, but I felt it needed to be said. I know this game will still have its staunch defenders (I was one of them) who will go down fighting to the very last day. But this week the game broke me. As I logged in and did my busywork and realised I was barely able to cover my costs to keep the lights on with no real goal of progression any more, my love, passion and perceived potential for the game melted away.

I appreciate my rantings here are purely opinion and conjecture, but if you take the time to take a long hard look at the past few years of this games development, the clues are there. Many of us already know it and made their comments known on the various channels. The tone and overall feelings of the community are at an all time low right now and that should tell you everything as to what the community is currently feeling.

I'd love to be proved wrong, I still want the game to succeed, but my joy and passion, like many others past and present in this community, is gone and it would take a truly Herculean effort on the part of NQ to get it back again. However, judging by recent efforts I won't be holding my breath.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Shame, but pretty much what I expected.

 

[Ranselknulf]

100% don't even buy this game men.

I never authorized recurring charges for this game and they are still charging my credit card.

Steam also has zero support options for stopping it. So I will have to cancel my credit card now.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

100% don't even buy this game men.

I never authorized recurring charges for this game and they are still charging my credit card.

Steam also has zero support options for stopping it. So I will have to cancel my credit card now.

That really sucks, that they would stoop to this. But I always had this feeling they were a bit scammy.
Very early on I did invest 30 eur in their basic tier and never got the reward.
Their moderators/admins were deceitful about granting access when I repeatedly inquired.
It felt like it was mostly built on lies and desperate half truths. Perhaps it would have been better to outright fail then continue with a sham.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Was it a steam subscription? I've heard a few people say they've had problems canceling those but I haven't(yet)

 

[Ranselknulf]

It was a subscription, I canceled mine a couple weeks ago, but I still got charged.

I think I found a spot on steam to dispute it, but we can see what they do. Hopefully steam comes through seeing as how I waste hundreds of dollars on their platform each year and I've never asked for a refund, even for the many shitty games I ended up playing less than an hour.

Dual Universe is a special class of shitty though, so I don't want any extra money going their way either.

I could try to file a dispute with my bank also, but its not a huge amount of money at the end of the day. It's more the principle of the matter.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It was a subscription, I canceled mine a couple weeks ago, but I still got charged.

I think I found a spot on steam to dispute it, but we can see what they do. Hopefully steam comes through seeing as how I waste hundreds of dollars on their platform each year and I've never asked for a refund, even for the many shitty games I ended up playing less than an hour.

Dual Universe is a special class of shitty though, so I don't want any extra money going their way either.

I could try to file a dispute with my bank also, but its not a huge amount of money at the end of the day. It's more the principle of the matter.

might be because I never used my credit card directly on steam, and instead buy steambux due to paranoia