Novaquark revealed a new trailer for their sprawling, emergent, player-driven space sim called Dual Universe. The cinematic trailer arrives with the launch of the game’s new Twitch channel, which will host content and livestreams for the game.
The hook for Dual Universe is that the game all takes place in a single instance shared among countless players who can create their own ships, space stations, and terraform planets using the game’s advanced voxel manipulation tools.
You can see how the creation ties into the game’s player-driven economy and the larger universe that you will be able to explore modify at your whims.
The trailer is quite impressive, and basically outlines a game that will rival Star Citizen in terms of scope and gameplay variety, but with the added bonus of building your own cities and vessels using the voxel technology.
In some ways it’s like a combination of Star Citizen and Space Engineers, or a better looking version of StarMade.
I do worry about optimization and performance, though. Even in the trailer the game was chugging along in the player-built cities, and I can’t imagine that getting any better as players continue to expand cities either outward or upward.
I do love the concept of commanding capital ships and going into large-scale battles. We just don’t get to see this enough in games.
Hopefully the physics are solid and there’s a good, grounded sense of combat whether you’re doing one-on-one dogfights or engaged in fleet-tier battles over a planet or throughout a space station.
The game was inspired by the scope and economy of EVE Online, so there’s certainly a strong focus on the mining and exploration aspect of the game, which in turn should keep the player economy and travel bustling.
Dual Universe is still a long ways out from release but you can follow the development with new videos and Q&A livestreams over on the Dual Universe Twitch channel, or you can pledge some funds to the project and gain access to the alpha build by visiting the official Dual Universe website.
