Cool Dual Universe Beta Not Ready For Single Player, Much Less Multiplayer

In 2016 I heard of a game in development called Dual Universe which sounded like an incredibly ambitious game on par with the much-maligned and still in development Star Citizen. The aspirations of the developer Novaquark called for a massively open sandbox sci-fi universe with no load times and procedurally generated planets that theoretically lead to an infinite universe with endless planets with intricate crafting of space ships, bases, entire cities and even a player driven economy with factions, taxation system and so much more. 

It honestly sounded like a massive project that seemed doomed to failure. The idea that every player would exist in this world and possibly interact with one another sounded a lot like No Man’s Sky and its attempt at a sort of unified span of galaxies, which ultimately fell short of what players wanted, but had to settle for. 

It’s now 2020 and Dual Universe has entered beta with a lot of Novaquark‘s initial promises actually in place. Right out of the gate, some issues prevented me from getting into the beta test of the game but soon enough they resolved themselves either through software updates or just a few reboots of my system. To say the tutorials were long and tedious is an understatement and my friends on Discord could hear my howls of frustration at what felt like an endless amount of tutorials that seemed to go on forever. It almost reminded me of the video lesson ‘classes’ that my job required of me during which I struggled to stay awake. 

Every time I thought I got close to the end the game pitched me another tutorial to go poke around within a digital museum-meets-teaching center. The tutorials also had other more extensive tutorials located in another part of the startup city, in case you really wanted to learn absolutely everything before setting out into the universe. Honestly, the tutorials really put me off a lot as I personally tend to enjoy tutorials that are more interactive and have you go out into the world and walk you through an introduction to what you need to know by building it. 

Alternatively, I can understand why their tutorials were done in such a way as the concept they have is simply so vast and expansive that a simple walk-through tutorial wouldn’t do it justice. Hopefully in the future a better, less boring tutorial can be made that makes all of it more accessible and less overwhelming.

After finally completing the tutorials (off and on over the course of a day because “grr”) I zipped off on my jetpack to go pick up a starter vehicle. Of course I get to the terminal and I’m reading all of this stuff and it asks me to go to what I thought was a teleporter to the next location but instead was a teleporter to a different location that locked me within its structure without an exit. From there I had to respawn outside of the area and spend a good few minutes trying to locate the marker that guided me to the terminal needed. My entire screen was BUSY from markers all over and I tried to find within the UI/menu where I could whittle down those markers or at least remove a lot of the titles and pop up names. But for the life of me I couldn’t find it. It reminded me of the UI in Amazon’s upcoming MMO that just had a lot of needless tabs and extra pages to access some of the stuff needed. A more streamlined, intuitive interface would make things a lot easier to do as players don’t want to spend their time going from menu tab to menu tab to try to find a setting that might be buried some place within it. Hopefully as development progresses it’ll be reworked.

A word on lag — I had a lot of it and it was not fun to have that much while you’re moving about. I turned the settings way down and still had enough lag to put me off continuing too far into it. Accessible games bring in more players and no one wants to team up with their friends and spend most of their time stuttering through areas, cities and so on. 

One of the goals of Dual Universe is to create a universe that players can build and share together which includes player-built cities, space stations and so much more, all shared through shards. If a player can’t enter those cities and places without manageable levels of lag and stuttering then they simply will move on to other games that don’t have these issues.  

I’m hard pressed to think of what could be done, as players’ computers vary wildly from a work machine to a gaming rig and it’s hard to apply a single workable lag fix across the spectrum of equipment and specs. I recommend that players really dig into the settings and notch them down a bit lower in stages until Novaquark can achieve some level of stabilization and optimization to help the game run smoother. 

The developers are active in updating the game and have a roadmap that is outlined for their projected future functions and core updates. I look forward to testing this game in 6-8 months and writing a follow up article but until then I will give Dual Universe 2 out of 5 stars, because I am in love with what they have so far and the potential for a massive space-faring game with true multiplayer hasn’t fully been realized yet. This game seems to be moving in that direction but all the technical issues and problems make it difficult to enjoy the current experience.