Dual Universe, post 1 of <=2

"if you're looking for a combat simulator you won't like it but if you wanna build stuff that's great"

Thus a veteran DU player welcomed a new one in general chat a couple of weeks ago while I logged in for my daily log-in, and it inadvertently reveals one reason why Dual Universe can be considered vaporware.

I built this plane. It is not great. Stuff it.

 

In case you haven't heard of it, DU is one of the games promising to make good on MMOs' potential as persistent virtual worlds, and in fairness it sticks to a couple of valid core concepts like a player-driven crafting economy, single, uninstanced world and destructible goods (and relatively realistic physics to boot) but unfortunately flounders both in execution and banking on legitimized cheating.

 

Before addressing the construction system issue, note I will be referencing quite a few of my old posts about MMOs. Half the reason I started this blog was that I'd gotten tired of explaining to random teammates the problem with theme park multiplayer games and wanted to set my thoughts down so I could just link you all to my MMManifesto, beyond which I honestly expected my interest in this blog to peter out. A decade later, the games which fueled my initial complaints (WoW, EVE, LotRO, CoH, TSW, WAR, Rift) are either dead or zombiefied, but newer titles like Dual Universe insist on copying old gimmicks regardless of their validity.

Let's start with that player's comment above. I concluded when conceiving of superhero games and City of Heroes' self-appointed successors by saying "Merely copying CoH will not in itself yield a worthwhile product. The game failed for some very solid reasons. If all I get from your product is a character creator, I may as well just take some 3D design courses instead." If I "wanna build stuff" then I could get into Minecraft or fire up a new Dwarf Fortress or expand my already towering base in No Man's Sky or launch a few new junkpiles in Kerbal Space Program. MMOs need to offer a convergence of styles and levels of willing cooperation and equilibrate divergent player motivations in a single interconnected system. If PvP combat is your mode of competition, then your combat simulator had better damn well work, because competition is the greatest driving force behind all other activities in such a persistent world.

 

Does DU's PvP work? Not from anything I've heard, though admittedly I never tried it before going inactive. Mostly I remember complaints about lag, but I'd like to point to another issue. My little plane in the image above is flying over to repair and unload goods from my totalled interplanetary vessel, which crashed on approach to the Sanctuary (safe zone) world, when my graphics began stuttering and grinding to a 0.5 FPS slideshow making it impossible to maneuver. It put me off the game, being the second time I'd had to repair every component on my ship due to a graphics glitch. Not into computer science myself, I can't tell you exactly why it happens, but it might have something to do with this:

No, that's not actually the voxel cache size upon crashing. Just what I'd accumulated after clearing the cache (so I could log in) then a week of running around on foot without even passing through any major spaceports. While Novaquark will inevitably hide behind being officially in open beta (though "beta" is a meaningless term these days) and have promised to address the issue of clutter and loading times in future patches, at some point the sheer scale of such a problem makes scaling it down highly improbable. This is in beta. Even if you pare the issue down to a tenth of its current impact, are you not banking on getting ten times as many active customers in the future?

 

On the same note, at the moment it seems only small surface deposits of baseline minerals respawn in DU, meaning planets have already been getting mined hollow by large player organizations. While this is obviously meant to drive competition away from safe areas to the outer reaches of space, it's backfiring stupendously in that any new player will soon find himself staring at barren prospects while his neighbour's sitting on an immutable 25 percentage of a planet's material wealth. Novaquark obviously intends to release new mineral sources as old ones get depleted (to secure their continued relevance as content developers) but what will this yield except masses of players gold-rushing in whenever a new planet's announced only to then sit on their pile of loot hoping to starve out their competition? This is somehow even worse than Darkfall's infamous favoritism of zerg guilds.

Dual Universe is primarily and overwhelmingly an EVE-Online copycat, as shown among other things by their implementation of the market system before all other considerations. Mine resources, build and sell goods. Good, clean fun. However, DU tries to approximate the scale of EVE's lovably multi-tiered production while having basically the same number of raw materials as EVE did at launch... when production had a single tier. So, while EVE's crafting eventually tied together many resource streams, DU's merely has you re-combine the same 8-12 minerals, mined in exactly the same fashion, at every production tier from cement to rocket engines. Instead of an engrossing, multifaceted system allowing participation in various steps of production or none at all, it comes across as deliberately time-wasting.

Also, if my little plane above looks like a simple plank with some engines and wings glued on... that's because it is. Instead of combining modular components, DU makes a big deal of having players sculpt the body of their vehicles, "voxelmancy" as the fanboys call it in an apt summation of its mystical obtuseness. While it sounds great in theory, in practive it makes a nightmare of even linking two objects diagonally, as many long-winded YouTube guides can readily demonstrate. Along with mandating LUA scripting for spaceship actions, this reiterates a repeated issue with computer game designers' conceit in their own specialty, sort of like a doctor demanding you pass a cardiology college course before he'll deign to hand you your arrhythmia meds. Or, as I put it before, about as realistic as a musician expecting you to figure out his song's rhythm is an in-joke about Gregorian chants. A game should reward general knowledge, yes: geography, algebra, history in broad strokes, Newtonian physics, a basic notion of profit and interest, core biological precepts like cell division, etc. but as a rule it should not require specialized knowledge. There's a reason why the most time-honored PvP games in human history like chess or go deal in abstractions and not inside knowledge of the jogging styles of bishops or of phalanx flanking maneuvers. 3D modelling and LUA scripting are not general knowledge and if my success in your game is to be measured by them... well, you've limited your customer base to college sophomores in IT, before they move on to misconceive their own games.

Oh, but wait.

All this is just window-dressing. The big issue is yet to come.

I said DU apes EVE, including in the worst way possible.

One of my very first complaints back in 2012 had to do game developers finding it more profitable to sell cheats than to sell products, and even last year I had to admit the greatest impediment to the establishment of persistent virtual world games is the lack of Byronically chivalrous humans willing to play fair. DU copies EVE's business model of selling multiple accounts. It has the same offline skill training, and with heavy scripting of ship actions you'll likely see even more PvP multiboxing. While at the moment it's not a large issue, the advantage of those maintaining multiple accounts will only grow with time.

So, OK, let's assume you learn all you can about herding voxels and scripting luaus, you drive your graphics settings down far enough that your game doesn't freeze on contact with an inhabited area, Novaquark gets a robust enough server infrastructure to prevent lag from preventing interaction and manages to perfectly time the release and distribution of new resources to drive players toward consumption instead of hoarding.

None of that will matter.

Because nothing you do as an honest player with one account will ever match up to someone with thirteen accounts mining and producing ships on six different planets for his own private armada.

 

When cheating is the ultimate virtue, everything else is rendered moot.