After Dual Universe put out its series of dev blogs discussing the game’s future, followers of the sci-fi sandbox had a number of questions. A few of those were pulled by Novaquark and answered in their own separate post.
Leading off, the devs don’t believe that a 2021 release is feasible right now, eyeballing instead for some time in the middle of next year. “Please don’t hold this as a commitment,” the answer notes. “It could be sooner, it could be a bit later. The state of the game will dictate the date.” Incidentally, the shifting nature of developing DU means there will not be any roadmap in the immediate future. In the meantime, the cadence for updates to the beta is hopefully going to increase with the launch of the game’s PTS, with tentative plans to offer up three to four major releases for the rest of 2021 and smaller updates in-between.
The question of communication frequency was answered, with Novaquark leaning on the crutch of wanting to have something substantive to showcase as a reason for its communications cadence, noting, “Based on reactions we’ve seen in the past, we believe that communicating simply for the sake of it when we have nothing really new to talk about is never well-received.” Of course, this answer relates to communication around the game’s development as opposed to its still soupy business matters; whether that was among the questions asked is hard to know.
Finally, it sounds like PvE content won’t be in the cards for a while, if at all, as the question of its inclusion drew up this reply:
“Our current focus is on enabling emergent content between players. PvE is not one of our priorities at the moment. This doesn’t mean that it won’t ever come to the game, but it is not going to be added before the official release of the game. That said, one could potentially consider the challenges that we’re currently working on as some form of PvE, though not in the sense that you’ll be shooting NPCs or wildlife.”
