Dual Universe preview friv game
French company Novaquark is working on a space MMO sandbox with a single shared universe, which will be entirely managed by the player community. What Dual Universe is at the moment and what state it is in - we present it in a brief preview.
You will say that such tricks with a single mega-server and almost completely controlled by players economy has long been successfully realized in EVE Online, but the developers of Dual Universe decided to go much further and not only exclude this "almost", but add to the project mechanics, such as we had the opportunity to see in Space Engineers. And even more!
Here you can not only walk freely on celestial bodies, but develop them in search of valuable rocks, build entire cities on the surface, terraform them at last. And also imagine that instead of well-designed factions game from the developer Friv2Online community will rule the ball and all, absolutely all ships and other equipment are built manually from voxels or from drawings of other astronauts.
But at the moment, Dual Universe looks more like a prototype of a giant robot spider, which the creators are trying to wind up before the fateful presentation. Wobbling menacingly, it stands on legs that can barely support the weight of the structure: industrial production, mining, ship design, living market, building system and flight model.
All newcomers, after avatar customization (still rather modest) and a general introduction to the concept of the world, settle into the confines of the terminal for new colonists. While wandering through the corridors with your mouth open not so much from amazement as from confusion, you involuntarily pay attention to banners with useful information for guests. If you don't miss anything, you'll get a good introduction and even a schematic of one of the simplest speeders.
It is a land-based mode of transportation that greatly speeds up travel across vast areas within the planet. True, it requires maintenance, you'll need fuel and it should never be left in random places. If it is not a parking zone and the territory does not belong to you, say goodbye to the bike and run for a new Blueprint. They won't teach you that at the academy.
Next, load into the shuttle that takes newbies to new horizons. Grabbing the sleeve of the curriculum, like a child who first appeared at a noisy, crowded exhibition full of incomprehensible exhibits, you will gradually, step by step find your place under the alien stars. You will have start-up capital and even your own piece of land where you can create whatever you want without fear of raids from aggressive neighbors.
Unfortunately, the visual side of Dual Universe is not that it suffers, but frankly repulsive, which is highly undesirable for a friv game about space. The developers plan to solve this issue, publishing artwork about how they see it in the future. So far we have bald, poorly loaded landscapes. The sky is as impersonal as the surfaces of planets and water bodies, and the game manages to overload the system and slow down.
On the other hand, the light sources, all sorts of structures and the ships themselves look presentable. Here the strong sides of the engine with its reflections, quality textures of surfaces show themselves. The equipment near the central areas of planets is collected in a variety of ways and you can wander around the docks for a long time and marvel at the ingenuity of players.
Everything in the friv game tries to unite in a chain, starting from mining and ending with their realization in the form of components necessary for construction or design. The principles of creating machinery partially resemble those in Robocraft or Space Engineers, with the correction for the extreme flexibility of the voxel, which is not so much a decorative element as a full-fledged part of the construction.
But before you can put it to work, you need to acquire or create the right materials. The more ambitious you are, the more you'll need various parts of the constructor, and this is where industrial objects come in handy, with the help of which you can, as in Minecraft, set up a stream production of components - just replenish containers with ore.
Ore, respectively, is extracted by ripping up planets. Players are offered several handy tools for finding and mining it. In addition, on the surfaces of the planets in some crazy volume scattered stones of the first and second dash in case you want to quickly extract some minerals and, for example, earn money by selling them on the local market.
Over time, the player's avatar gains talent points, which can be freely allocated to the disciplines of piloting, navigation, crafting, manufacturing, mining, and so on. Each category has several to dozens of subcategories, which in turn are also divided into a number of sections.
Mastering many of them is a prerequisite for players wishing to gain access to various components and cores, others will help develop your mobility and survivability, simplify resource sourcing, speed up your machine tools and nanocrafter (pocket picker). The tree is huge and very interesting, but a bit confusing.
Almost every aspect of Dual Universe isn't obvious, but the hub has terminals with courses that will prepare players for both mining and assembling their first ships, teach them how to trade and much more. Aphelia's assistant speaks a lot and mostly to the point, but exclusively in English.
Under her careful guidance, players will learn how to collect and distinguish stones, pilot vehicles in the atmosphere, and work with the complicated but very promising block editor. After that the colonists will be left to themselves, well, or to one of the local factions, if there is a desire to join some community and create something together.
And everything would be fine in principle, if the robot spider Novaquark didn't get tangled in its own legs. In the beta stage, the friv game feels like an early alpha version and contains a huge pile of problems - from a completely unattractive exterior, to regular breakdowns.
There are very uncomfortable models of flying and piloting speeders, the development process looks very primitive, all the tools have one single skin, the interfaces are not that unfriendly, but overloaded and lack any integrity, you can go on and on.
There is no stability in the way even the training programs work now. I've had to literally wade through crashes, non-working or outright bad mechanics, and hangs. Flying out to nowhere and losing all your stuff at once is commonplace here, and the support team ignores or doesn't have time to respond to requests for help.
It should be understood that now, instead of cities and stations, private fields are dotted with all sorts of buildings of various degrees of lousiness. There are some interesting specimens, like tall towers with improvised pixel-art on the walls, but don't count on more than that yet. Perhaps you won't have to count on it later.
If you are a convinced fan of space constructor, you will probably be interested in experimenting with local tools. For players who expect from the project a nice working universe in which they will want to live and try to build something of their own, in Dual Universe in its current state I would recommend to enter with special caution.