Dual Universe Is More Blatant Than Minecraft Because You Can Build Spaceships

If you want to control a spaceship in Dual Universe, you won't necessarily have to build it. As in real life, you rarely build your own tram, if you are a tram driver, no: In the best case, you will be trained in the profession of spacecraft control, take on a few small jobs and then join an organization in which you can do your job as a pilot can execute.

Of course there are other professions and opportunities to pass the time in Dual Universe: spaceship builders, fighters, politicians. I'm not talking nonsense, because since Dual Universe is dominated by players and thus also takes on social forms, you can be almost anything in Dual Universe that your heart desires:

This is what developer Novaquark told me after I had an hour watching two giant space cruisers fight each other. In Dual Universe you can also build what your heart desires - and the game is more complex than Minecraft: there are no pre-made blocks besides some important devices, everything is malleable; round, angular, color selectable. You build your house, spaceships, cities. You can reshape planets, although that may take a while - after all, you are unable to dig the earth with a spoon.

All that Dual Universe needs is a community that wants to live it out. And it was already busy in the Alpha to form a civilization:

Dual Universe - Community Outposts

Star Wars in Dual Universe are slow, massive, and devastating

First, Novaquark showed me some exemplary spaceships that were made by players: small space cruisers in a wide variety of designs, medium-sized research ships and space cruisers that are so large that player avatars next to them disappear like pinheads into the room. To control them, up to 30 players are required, all of whom enter the ship with their figures and take their places: captain, pilot, scanner, weapon officer. A bit like Star Trek: Bridge Crew, each assigning you a role on the Enterprise to make you feel like you are really an officer on a spaceship.

Space battles in third or first person perspective: First of all, you have to learn to read the displays in your ship before you can operate it fully

PvP is the next step that Dual Universe wants to take. In addition to a handful of planets, the game, of course, offers a lot of space in between: Zones in space that are either peaceful or designed for the battle between players. The goal is to have player-dominated organizations vying for planets and territories, with the value of the ships calculated based on the time it took to build them: weeks and months in real time when we look at the giant space cruisers from to whom I just spoke.

But how does PvP work? The best answer is: realistic. You decide which types of weapons are built into the ship; You get ammunition through an access to ammunition boxes. Each cannon has as much ammo as you have attached. In addition to the space cruisers, there are also ammo transporters; smaller ships, the only task of which is to fill up the cannons during a fight.

Spaceships have no life indicators. If you hit an opposing cruiser head-on, something breaks away from the hull - if you hit a generic weapon system, they could explode away from the ship and are therefore unusable. If you fire at a ship long enough, it will be punctured and broken exactly where it was hit. It doesn't matter where you meet, which is why it is essential to have a good weapons officer on board. The whole thing is called real-time damage, and there are only a few games that can implement this concept.

The space battles don't look realistic yet, but at least they feel that way

A space battle in Dual Universe is slow, massive, and devastating. It's the next thing to a realistic battle between spaceships that I've seen so far. And that also means it's complicated - that, as I said, players have to learn their jobs before they can pilot or captain on a cruiser. It's not easy for beginners, but Dual Universe would not be so realistic if players could understand everything in this game within an hour.

Ay, Captain - enemy cruiser ahead:

Dual Universe: PvP Trailer "Like Shall Fight"

Graphically, Dual Universe is not yet an AAA title, although it gets nicer every time I look into the game every few months. There are also necessary limitations on realism: Kamikaze spaceships can fly into enemy cruisers, but they are not harmed. Novaquark explains that they want to prevent a spaceship scooter in which players only crash their ships:

Much of the Dual Universe is brave: trying to create the most technically outstanding single-shared MMO with the goal of uniting 1 million players in one solar system at the same time. A world that is hardly subject to rules; apart from those made by players. An experiment what exactly the players will make of it - do they take Dual Universe seriously and try to live in this sci-fi world? Or do you destroy them? Since planets are degradable, that would be quite possible.

Who knows, maybe they will destroy everything and build something completely new from the individual parts, because ultimately destruction is always a form of creation. Whatever happens to Dual Universe, it still has time to catch its breath: until now, the game only existed in Alpha, which will spill into beta on August 27, 2020. Novaquark, meanwhile, are working hard to gradually bring more gameplay variations into play: PvP, building space stations, more possibilities in the crafting system that already comes close to Minecraft.

What players have built in Dual Universe so far is impressive

They are also constantly trying to keep entry into the game as easy as possible. I assume that this is possible to a certain extent, but will become an independent snowball if Dual Universe slides into the release at some point. In the meantime, only 30,000 avatars consisting of bots and players could act simultaneously in the game, so the millions are still far away. Imagine the computing power it would take to evaluate actions by 1,000,000 players at the same time. In view of this, 30,000 already seems impossible.

If you want to take a look at Dual Universe yourself, it is of course already playable: You can buy various packages on the official website that give you access to both Alpha and Beta.