Don't recommend playing this weekend TBH, at least without first checking Discord (the memes are well spammed when it's not working). As of Thursday they've pushed an update that made network connections really unstable, so you're unlikely to be able to fly more than 10KM without a crash. Considering planets are 40,000KM between each other in the best cases (max speed is 29,999KM/hr in space, you could technically go that fast on a planet but most ships start to burn at 1,000KM/hr). Jump drives are also very expensive ATM, so you will be "slow boating" to your next planet (which you probably will need to do to make your own warp drive).
So they pretty much literally set the game up where any newbies are stuck in newbie areas, probably for the next week or so. Just because they're stuck in "not rolling back Thursday changes".
So it's a spaceship building game, where if you try to fly them you'll end up crashing your game.
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When flight was working before Thursday I was seriously enjoying myself. Got a test flight into low orbit (ships obey orbital mechanics, planets are stationary), and was able break that orbit (fuel is so cheap weight/volume wise that it's not an issue).
Then on Thursday got utterly screwed and was forced to expend "new planet" resources on repairing and limping back home fund.
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As for other mechanics mining is great, and well balanced. Most of the effort/time expenditure is in the actual finding of the ore, which means that the process that has the most player control in the form of "mastery"/"skill" is the part that saves you the most time. While actually cracking an underground ore node feels great in how fast you can make it poof away to a linked container.
Industry is nice and a little spread sheety when it comes to making generic elements. Some high level pieces of gear can take well over 6 hours to make in the final level processing, though it's a bit like EVE where all industry jobs run even while off line.
Ship building is great. Voxel manipulation works well, and it is very easy to break out of cubic design. It's also interesting designing for how well each ship element interact with each other, and with air resistance when planet bound.
I don't like the skill system though though. There are too many "passive skills" that you unlock once, and then never need to think about again. And normally these are pretty strong passives for ships (5% thrust bonus 10 times from two skills), or pretty weak for industry (level 3 ore processing before you actually see a whole number output). I'm a fan of intermediate "character build" steps, where sure you can unlock everything but you need to choose which handful of bonuses you want at the moment.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
I'm sorry, but this is the worst piece of dog crap on the internet right now...it's even worse than the alpha of star citizen....and they are calling this BETA. Not only that...they charged $60.00 and now want to charge a monthly sub. Right now the server is down for the fourth or fifth time just today because they can't get it right.
Tutorials - broken
Economy - broken
no missions
no quests
nothing to do but build and mine so far......oh and disconnect from server yet again..
The term open beta is from a time where developers had the honor to not charge people for testing their game.
And this is why for me open and closed is only determined by the amount of people who can participate.
Closed = Only open for a selected amount of users.
Open = Open for everyone who wants to join as soon as he fulfills the participation requirements (Account, connection, Hardware needed (e.g. VR), User activated (which might imply a subscription))
I'm sorry, but this is the worst piece of dog crap on the internet right now...it's even worse than the alpha of star citizen....and they are calling this BETA. Not only that...they charged $60.00 and now want to charge a monthly sub. Right now the server is down for the fourth or fifth time just today because they can't get it right.
Tutorials - broken
Economy - broken
no missions
no quests
nothing to do but build and mine so far......oh and disconnect from server yet again..
This is what a real Beta experience usually looks like. Where optimization and polishing is done. Server problems are to be expected in every mmorpg launch, specially in a crowdfunded project by a new company. What you pay is backing the company to make this thing a reality.
Running a live service means they have to pay additional costs for server upkeeps along with community service/GM's etc besides the general Developers.
As they will get more imput from player reports they will iterate and improve the experience, if you are eager to play but don't want to burn yourself out because of performance/bug issues I'd suggest you skip the beta and wait for the official release, or just go at it with a more relaxed attitude knowingly that those issues mentioned before are happening to everyone and that the dev's are actively working on them and listening to feedback to improove.
I'm not even bothering with below-ground mining, ship building or flying yet. Working on learning and setting up industry and really loving the crafting intricacies. I've almost got all of the medium machines set up then I'll start duplicating the ones that will make things more efficient. Once I can make anything low tier I want I'll focus on figuring out ship building.
There are several default shapes to use and these can all be scaled in size. There are several additional tools to quickly make other shapes, like the line tool to create angles and the smoothing tool to round off any rough edges. Portions of voxels can be embedded inside other blocks and, with the addition of prefabricated elements, anyone with a bit of artistic vision (not me, a Borg cube would be my masterpiece) could put together a visually stunning building or spaceship.
Game will be full of fleets and cities of penis shaped spaceships and buildings.....I would say "calling it now" if it were not so obvious.
Only because it's much harder to buld a vagina shape.
That would be impressive.
open beta just means theres no population restriction, not if the game is monetized or not.
a closed beta is usually limited on how many players are able to join while open beta releases that restriction
The game has run much better since Sept 10. This is a very hardcore game and people should remember that. The problem for new people is mostly. "I want to do everything NOW, have a big ship and haul a lot of cargo and be filthy rich". Unfortunately DU isn't that kind of game. People are starting to build amazing things. This is not a game for everyone but it is the best creative game in a long long time.
After playing it, and hanging out too much in Discord. This seems to be a rerun of Worlds Adrift:
So far there has been market imbalances, that were corrected (but left early adopters gains alone). Where the devs assumed that each tier of ore had a 5x difficulty multiplier, and had market NPC starting orders priced on that very false assumption.
Those starting NPC orders also had some higher tier gear listed as well.
With industry bugs stopping industry runs randomly, and frequent server crashes/resets resetting industry. It has been incredibly difficult for other players to craft their own high end gear (which needs thousands of intermediate products, and 20-40 hours of uninterrupted time of servers running)
There have been item duplication bugs. With no feedback from the devs about which actions were taken, and Discord bans of people asking about which actions were taken.
There have been Streams of Streamers exploiting bugs/mechanics and those streamers explaining exactly how to duplicate their actions complete with logic about why it's ok. WIth no actions by the devs.
That does not even begin to cover the unbalances from the fact that current ore/reward mechanics are all "PvE" ore, even ones that would normally be covered by a combination of open PvP/Territory control mechanics.
Also in six months with territory control the safe zone shrinks from 3 planets and a couple handful of moons. To one moon, that is also resource starved intentionally, and a blighty scar on the server where you'll "feel" a server crash coming about two hours before the entire cluster decides to crash.
Likewise the devs are playing favorites with the community with interviews like this: https://youtu.be/h8nNhFuYMp8 Where they announce major future changes, without any links on their own Discord/Forums/Website of that interview existing. (Goes over future cosmetics from backer rewards, talks about their future cosmetic shops, talks about future "build protection" updates for selling completed ships/similar, and the only source of their rapidly changing PvP mechanics) (Essentially this is like giving EVE's The Mittani exclusive YouTube interviews to cash in on, and making that interview "actually important")
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
@topic
I dont mind bugs or unfinished state. I just want to play a Universe-Simulation where everything is as close as possible to reality. (most sandbox).
The size of the universe is secondary, the sandbox features are more important.
What should I concentrate on?
- Dual Universe
- Star Citizen
- Elite Dangerous
- Empyrion
If you have a HOTAS definitely Elite, it has a living galaxy, an economy you can play and even planetside activities
Comments
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
You're not qualified to be a MMO relevant writer, are you?
Well, unless you say you specialize in fantasy or something.
Tutorials - broken
Economy - broken
no missions
no quests
nothing to do but build and mine so far......oh and disconnect from server yet again..
I'd go with Empyrion if you want voxel building, the others you listed either doesn't offer that or is so broken.
Only because it's much harder to buld a vagina shape.
That would be impressive.
a closed beta is usually limited on how many players are able to join while open beta releases that restriction
Chi puo dir com'egli arde é in picciol fuoco.
He who can describe the flame does not burn.
Petrarch
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."