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Author Topic: Dual Universe: Space Sandbox MMORPG - Beta out  (Read 21555 times)

Chiefwaffles

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Dual Universe: Space Sandbox MMORPG - Beta out
« on: September 17, 2016, 02:08:44 am »

If anyone has an idea for a better, less sensationalized title, feel free to share. Disclaimer: I like Hazeron, it just may be the most unpolished game that I have ever seen. (EDIT: Removed Hazeron comparison from title.) Continuing on...

Dual Universe is yet another ambitious space game, with their goals being most similar to Shores of Hazeron. Really, that's the best description I can think of. A more proper and polished game in the same genre as Shores of Hazeron. With the goal of a player-driven universe where almost all of the content is player-created.
Quote from: Dual Universe Website
Dual Universe is a Continuous Single-Shard sandbox MMORPG taking place in a vast Sci-Fi universe, focusing on emergent gameplay with player-driven in-game economy, politics, trade and warfare. Players can freely modify the voxel-based universe by creating structures, spaceships or giant orbital stations, giving birth to empires and civilizations.



Their features page lists: (Explanations mine, the bullet point 'titles' theirs.)
  • "Team Up or Go Solo" - Ships can be piloted solo or multi-crew, with different people focusing in areas such as weapons, navigation, and repair.
  • "Seamless True MMO Universe" - The universe is "single, continuous, [and] undivided". Really this just seems to mean one server, and vaguely implies little loading screens.
  • "Emergent Gameplay" - Players act as the driving force behind any kind of politics present in the game, with gameplay emerging from that. Fairly self-explanatory.
  • "Voxel Building" - The system used for constructing space vessels, stations, and buildings. Based on little what I've seen, it looks fairly standard - a bit like Space Engineers.

  • "Scriptable Ships and Constructs" - The game will allow use of the Lua THEY CALLED IT "LUA" INSTEAD OF "Lua" WHAT KIND OF DEVELOPERS ARE THEY scripting language to program any in game ship or other construct to do a variety of actions. If you're unaware, Lua is pretty popular for "ingame" scripting, being used for Gary's Mod, Roblox, and for mod frameworks for plenty of games.
  • "Realistic Ingame Economy" - "Create a bank or start your own company." The economy ingame is influenced extremely, if not created, by the players. Players can harvest and sell resources, initiate market exchanges, and more. This seems to be an entirely player-based economy with little to no "premade" things such as marketplaces.





The game is currently being kickstarted, although development appears to have been started far before the kickstarter, as they already have a team and lots of pretty stuff to show for the game. Their goal is $557,818 (€500,000) and as of this post, they've reached $338,364 in pledges with 24 days left to go in the kickstarter.
I highly recommend visiting their kickstarter for a more detailed explanation of the game mechanics - they even have some gifs showing mechanics such as voxel building.

More features, but this time from their kickstarter: (Titles and details mine)
  • Blueprints - Create blueprints for constructs such as a ship and mass produce them in factories.
  • Mining - Explore planet surfaces for minerals, but a scanning mechanic allows players to discover much richer resources underground.
  • Territory Control - Groups claim territory on planets via 1km hexagon tiles "via the deployment of a Territory Unit." Groups can fight over land to gain the ability to use it themselves.
  • Combat - Mechanics are in place for a more 'organized' combat experience, and to encourage large battles that both parties participate in. In addition to this, there are also safe zones where PvP combat is disallowed.
  • Character Progression - Characters progress in a method very similar to EVE - players choose a single skill to train over real time and gradually specialize their characters.

There's also a Community Portal that allows the creation of groups and the like, though there's not really any game for these groups to participate in yet.



So, in summary, Dual Universe is a very ambitious game that seems like a cross of Shores and Hazeron and EVE.
Will it deliver? Time will tell - I don't recommend getting too hyped for any game of this scale. While the team does seem fairly non-awful with 15 people and claims of prior experience, there is never any telling of the future in this case.

Links
Dual Universe Website
Kickstarter
Community Portal

« Last Edit: October 22, 2020, 10:28:23 am by Chiefwaffles »
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!

Cyroth

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2016, 03:15:25 am »

I've first seen this some months ago. Looks very interesting and the SoH comparison is a good one, I think.
As someone who has been playing the unfinished buggy mess that is SoH for 5 years simply because there is nothing even slightly similar I really wish the devs success.
A Hazeron "done right" would pretty much be my dream game.

I'd throw money at them, too, but sadly they only have a kickstarter and I can't use that.  :(
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TheBronzePickle

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #2 on: September 17, 2016, 04:15:01 am »

This game looks way too good to be true. The game demonstrations on the video would normally make me excited that they already had all this set up, but No Man's Sky has definitely shown that people are quite capable of showing completely inaccurate footage. I can't even start to get hype on this.

Nevertheless, I might back it once I get some money. Not for much, but their lower tiers aren't that expensive for a copy of the game, so I won't feel like I've been ripped off unless it turns out this was literally a full-on scam.
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Shadowlord

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2016, 04:16:10 am »

How exactly are they going to be able to pay their people for long enough to make this with only $557k?
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Akura

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #4 on: September 17, 2016, 04:32:10 am »

That looks absolutely fantastic.

But... from what I've seen of various voxel-based games, modern computer hardware really can't handle what I'm seeing there. Certainly not as an MMO. Unless every voxel game I've been playing are all unoptimized buggy messes and that has skewed my perception into skepticism.
...Which might be the case, since I mostly play in recent times Space Engineers and Planet Explorers, neither of which is an MMO by any definition and are unoptimized buggy messes.


Anyway, if they actually pull it off with this, then awesome. Some of the things I'm seeing there look very Mass Effect-y, but in a good way. Probably wouldn't be long before someone builds the Normandy.
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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #5 on: September 17, 2016, 02:25:06 pm »

Pretty screenshots.
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Vendayn

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #6 on: September 17, 2016, 02:41:45 pm »

That looks absolutely fantastic.

But... from what I've seen of various voxel-based games, modern computer hardware really can't handle what I'm seeing there. Certainly not as an MMO. Unless every voxel game I've been playing are all unoptimized buggy messes and that has skewed my perception into skepticism.
...Which might be the case, since I mostly play in recent times Space Engineers and Planet Explorers, neither of which is an MMO by any definition and are unoptimized buggy messes.


Anyway, if they actually pull it off with this, then awesome. Some of the things I'm seeing there look very Mass Effect-y, but in a good way. Probably wouldn't be long before someone builds the Normandy.

I'm also particularly bothered that the Kickstarter doesn't actually have the stretch goals listed. I'm even more bothered by the fact that ship-on-ship combat is a stretch goal.

Yeah, its kinda sounding like No mans sky tbh. No mans sky wasn't even going to have combat till tons of people asked for it.

Kinda bad timing for the game in any case with how bad no mans sky turned out, and showing off features that weren't even in the game. That was all staged.

Hopefully no mans sky didn't start a trend where developers lie about their game to make quick, easy money.
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IWishIWereSarah

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #7 on: September 17, 2016, 02:53:19 pm »

Kinda bad timing for the game in any case with how bad no mans sky turned out
I actually think the opposite :
The first ads I saw were one week after NMS, or something like that. With screenshots and listed features close to what NMS talked about, trying to get the disappointed players.
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Sensei

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #8 on: September 17, 2016, 02:57:59 pm »

Too ambitious, not enough money. Haxus' accomplishments with Shores of Hazeron, buggy as they were, required him working for years unpaid. If he were actually paying for his work, then his wages alone would have probably added up to more than this kickstarter is asking by now. I can't imagine a program of this scale with multiple dedicated programmers, artists, designers, QA, etc possibly filling out its feature list for a meagre half a million dollars, while comparatively less complicated AAA games made on existing engines are ballooning into budgets of many tens of millions of dollars.

Just based on that, the most likely outcome is that if they get funded, overfunded even, they will ultimately run out of money and be forced to launch to Steam Early Access with a game that is buggy, unoptimized and has a fraction of the promised features. There they will receive mixed reviews and weak sales, publish a few more updates before running out of the money they gained from early access sales, and ultimately never officially abandon the game but stop working on it and start another project a year later.
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Chiefwaffles

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #9 on: September 17, 2016, 03:02:08 pm »

Yeah, that's definitely a possible outcome. Funfact: Haxus started work in Hazeron in the 90's.
I'm personally probably not backing it. If it gets to Alpha/Beta and I can buy it then, I'll definitely consider it. But for a project at this scale with $500,000, it's really not concrete enough to back.

Maybe. I'm still considering backing it, but at this point it seems unlikely.
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!

Gabeux

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #10 on: September 17, 2016, 03:24:03 pm »

PTW, as it's the dream game and all that.
But I have no idea who these devs are, and they want to build an universe... No Man's Sky 2: The Vengeance.
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Tilla

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #11 on: September 17, 2016, 04:18:52 pm »

I'm not sure how they can afford to do this game; 500k euros split between 25 people (BEFORE factoring in taxes, merch, and other expenses) is like, poverty level, especially going into 2018 - Over 2 years if their December 2018 date is to be believed.

On a more positive side, they have made it really clear what would be in the 500k version which I appreciate.  For instance, there's no ship to ship combat and only one ground explorable planet as far as i can tell.

« Last Edit: September 17, 2016, 04:23:11 pm by Tilla »
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Shadowlord

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #12 on: September 17, 2016, 04:30:11 pm »

At least this game bothers to give Lua scripting instead of just straight C♯.

Bothers to? Lua is kind of awful, says a person who has only used it much in From the Depths.
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Chiefwaffles

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #13 on: September 17, 2016, 04:32:47 pm »

I like it myself. Pretty straightforward and simple to use.
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!

Chiefwaffles

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Re: Dual Universe: Shores of Hazeron "Done Right"? - Kickstarter
« Reply #14 on: September 17, 2016, 08:25:48 pm »

Voxels aren't really an issue to me. As long as it's more than "place a block one at a time", I'm fine. And it looks like the voxel building is going to be fairly detailed and less "manual" - namely in the kind of tools (like making a row of things, filling, etc.).

At this point I actually may back it but not really expect anything. If I were to back it, I'd just go in with the philosophy that the money's already lost. If it all works out, I get to play a really cool game. If it doesn't, I'm not really affected.
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!
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