Life-sustaining oxygen whistles through a wound in the hull of the massive battleship, evidence of a shot that landed from another looming capital ship. Except after the salvo, it heads towards us when we return fire, but things are not looking good. It’s time to rescue, and after some unsuccessful attempts to make a hasty mosaic, we headed to the hangar bay to board fragile but deadly fighters. There is little hope of getting home on one of these, but our chances are slim and worsening aboard the paralytic cruise. In the worst case, we will go down to fight and give them some scars to remind us of.
I’m not playing this first public ship-to-ship combat demo in Dual Universe, Novaquark’s incredibly ambitious sci-fi MMO, but the nature of the demo has not overshadowed its excitement. Studio founder and CEO Jean-Christophe Baillie and chief game designer Baptiste Agati are talking to us through the procedures.
It is Agati who provides the commentary on what we are seeing from the more technical level: weapon precision, on-board systems, what happens when certain pieces of armor are fired, while Baillie speaks in a more aspirational way, discussing the big goals. design for PvP. Dual Universe, which will see a beta release in August, is a massive multiplayer online game where you can take on almost any profession and travel space, all in a fully editable world and always shared by everyone else in the game.
‘Fully editable’ means that everything can be built, modified, and terraformed by players, and that includes ships ranging from fast interceptors with just enough room for a pilot, to massive motherships carrying multiple fighters on board and bristling with huge cannons and missile arrays.
All of these are built from materials mined from planets, reminiscent of mineral mining in No Man’s Sky. So you’ll build a metal alloy armor that you dug up or bought in the player-driven economy, and it’s the same armor that will overheat and explode to pieces in a skirmish with pirates in interplanetary space.
It is important to emphasize how granular all of this is. There are no abstract ship health meters. The shells make real holes in the ships they hit, creating ‘real’ damage to the hull, weapons, propulsion, and radar systems. The armor can be welded onto the hulls to give them added protection, and even if parts of your ship look like Swiss cheese after a fight, you’ll still be able to limp home if your engines are intact.
But the effect is strangely terrifying, even moving at the relatively heavy beat of Dual Universe. “When you shoot a construction, you do real damage and the angle of the shot really matters,” explains Agati. “So if you are very plated and you have prepared a ship that can suffer a lot of damage, then that works, but if you are shot from behind and your engines are exposed or your container is exposed, then that is something you should also be thinking about “
It also means that the materials you choose to build your ship with matter, as different elements and alloys have different strengths. Certain armor is resistant to kinetic damage from physical projectiles, while another type is better against energy rays.
Things get even more complex when you start wiring onboard systems to command and control interfaces on large cruise ships. A gunner’s chair can be connected to various weapon arrays and detection systems using a simple drag-and-drop interface combined with the Lua scripting system in the Dual Universe game. The pilot and captain may have control surfaces connected to navigation and general command systems, so that they can design ships that function the way their crew rank structure is configured. Everything flows in a simple on-screen interface within the game that allows you to select targets and activate weapons as they connect.
All of this taken together means that when ships hit Dual Diverse’s designated PvP zones, huge investments of time, treasure, and effort are at stake. Like Eve Online, the Dual Universe fights are literal bets: You are betting that the resources you have sunk in your ship will survive the encounter, and that you can hold on to any valuable cargo. The tangible value of everything in the game is intended to change the way players approach combat, and it’s a compelling idea.
However, Dual Universe will impose some limitations on what players can do in battle. Weapons do actual damage, but Novaquark says they’re still looking for ways to limit pain and the kind of dadaism that’s often found in player-created games. “We are trying to design things so that it is not an efficient strategy to build your ship as a huge super heavy iron cube, inside which you have your cargo,” says Baillie. She explains that absurd Borg-style ship designs could technically work within the Dual Universe system, but “we have an idea in mind,. [so] we have to make some restrictions on the way the game works in order for it to go in this direction. “
For space battles, Agati says that means setting rules so ships are identifiable and thematic. “I think that’s the direction we want to go, where it’s fine if you’re not fighting in a Porsche, but you need to be fighting something that still makes sense visually, right?”
Collisions between large ships could, given the damage system of the Dual Universe, be spectacular and devastating, and that opens the door for players who want to create flying rams or suicide bombers. Here again, Novaquark is stepping in to guide the experience: Collisions will only cause damage to the ‘attacking’ ship. “We did not want [collision] to be used offensively, but we still wanted the collision to be a punishment, “says Agati.” Even outside of combat, if you hit the ground, you will take damage. And then it’s more or less the same system [with ship-to-ship collisions]But we spend a little time cleaning that up and making it make sense in combat, too. “
This also helps Novaquark avoid running against the limit of computer power: Large ships colliding with each other could send parts and subsystems flying in all directions, multiplying the number of entities to track as they rip apart hard. .
This highlights the underlying improbability of Dual Universe: what is it really going to be like? job? Even with some limitations, it seems that this game is simulating more than modern PCs and servers can handle. As you may recall, all of these battles, player-created space stations and cities, and the interactions within them in the Dual Universe, supposedly exist within the same instance of the game’s universe, albeit distributed through what Novaquark has called its’ Single Continuous Shard Cluster Technology. There’s an amazing amount of stuff going on all the time, and the Dual Universe seems almost reckless in its choice of scope given what we’ve come to expect from modern MMOs.
We’ll find out more about how it will all come together when the Dual Universe beta launches on August 27, and for now Novaquark seems focused on making sure players don’t get completely lost when they first introduce themselves. Limitations on where PvP can occur and complicating difficulties for potential hooligans can help keep things friendly as players take their first tentative steps in the game.
“It won’t be that easy to appear in the game and try to blow everything up, you will be crushed very quickly,” says Baillie. “That doesn’t mean we won’t have chaos organizations, whose goal in the game is to wreak havoc everywhere.” And we understand that it could actually be a lot of fun … but it’s not like a group of people could just decide on Saturday, ‘Hey, let’s destroy the Dual Universe.’ It won’t work like this. “
Baillie pauses for a moment and reconsiders. “At least we have tried. We will see if it happens or not. But we have tried to design the game in that spirit: there are many unknown things here, and that is what makes it interesting. It’s like a giant experiment, and we’ll see what will come of it. “
