It’s been a long strange trip for the Kickstarted sci-fi sandbox MMORPG Dual Universe, studded with unusual monetization and the ousting of its founder partway through. But as of today, six years after the game raised over $630,000 in crowdfunds and eight years after development began, Novaquark is finally announcing the game’s formal launch: September 27th. The Steam page will be online today as well.
“After eight years of development, developer Novaquark has announced that ambitious, multi-planetary MMORPG Dual Universe will launch September 27 on PC via Steam and on the game’s official website. This will mark the first time the game will be available on Steam. Dual Universe is an innovative single-server experience shared by everyone. Players are able to build almost anything as they participate in a player-driven economy, form organizations, and wage war with one another. Numerous improvements and new features have been implemented during the game’s beta period, including space warfare, new VFX, asteroid discovery and mining, space markets, automated mining, a new first-time user experience, visual and performance enhancements, and more.”
Readers will recall that DU has been a buy-to-play title with a subscription throughout its test phases, but Novaquark has a plan to sweeten the deal for the launch: a new free trial (on a separate Steam server) for looky-loos. And as for returnees? “Previous players of the game will also be given a free 2-week long opportunity to come back and see the improvements of the game by themselves, while all players with an active subscription will have access to a Talent Point (XP) booster for the first six months after release.”
Finally, don’t worry about being too far behind the folks who’ve been playing throughout development; as we noted last week, the game will be wiped ahead of launch.
