Edit: While no official statements have been made, NQ appears to no longer actively be supporting DU. Physical rewards for Kickstarter founders are still undelivered. 1.4.X is likely the last major update to DU. Focus has been quietly shifted to an unannounced Unreal engine based titles based on updates on their linkedin and careers pages.

If you are looking at this game and have your wallet out - put it away and play the demo first.

If after that, you still go "Well that was...interesting - surely the game itself is better and after all - it seems to have a lot of *potential*!" - well, read on and save yourself some money.


Before all that – if you just love to build stuff and a game where you can build space ships and constructs that can look like pretty much whatever you want – and that’s all you need. Great – get DU – because that’s what you can certainly do in DU. The ability to build pretty much any shape in the game is a unique offering in a space ship game.

If just building cool stuff isn’t enough – then put that wallet away and never look back.


Now for some background on DU, and NQ. I backed this game on Kickstarter – specifically because I as sold by the supposed server tech and the demo of it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeZtqoydXpc

And yes - that tech is impressive and that tech is in the game.

If you watched the server tech demo you may notice something a bit different from how DU actually is in real life - the issue isn't DU 'players' walking around - it's constructs.

The DU tech falls flat on it's face even if it's just you alone in an area heavily populated by constructs. Just flying your ship up to a heavily built up area would cause significant stuttering as your client was fed data about the game world you were entering and then struggled to render it. There are actually multiple bottlenecks in play in that case - one is the ability of the server to pump data to the client and the other is the ability to turn that data into actually renderable data for the GPU - and it's actually core count limited. Intel even used that difference in a marketing video:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/intel-core-i9-processors-reduce-open-world-load-times.html

Once again the video is an empty game world but already shows that on thread limited machines trees appear late. (Trees by the way used to be collidable objects, but that was changed exactly due to this issue.) The same is true for constructs - and it's much worse. You can be flying your ship through what you see as empty space - only to have a space elevator appear right in front of you with no ability for you to evade - because it just finally got downloaded, processed, and rendered - and now you are dead. Height limits were put in place to 'fix' this issue and of course make space elevators no longer viable.


The whole mess of world changing data is why mining got taken out. Players digging up the world just created too much data. As is, the game ships with the base terrain and your client is fed updates about player made modifications to the terrain which the game client stores as cache. With players being able to basically dig up the entire planet, that was just too much deviation for them to handle the data. So that's why they scrapped the whole thing and just made temporary spawnable asteroids minable, so that the modified world state for those can just be reset weekly.

So let me be clear here – the server tech does NOT deliver the playable game that NQ promised due to it’s inability to handle voxel modifications well. (If you really want to nerd out, the whole game is hosted on AWS in a kubernetes cluster and thus is able to scale as needed and the voxel data is pushed out via cloudfront and there are several blogs about it)

It gets worse – the game has made very little progress in terms of development and viable gameplay loops.

Economy is essentially non-viable since the mining change with ore being infinitely generated daily by autominers the value of ore is in an inevitable race to the bottom as is everything else as a result. Quanta itself is ultimately worthless and easily farmed via missions especially by those who have multiple accounts and can cheese the missions by logging out multiple characters on a single ship to ‘remove’ the weight they are carrying and logging them back in at the destination. Destinations maybe more random now than they were at beta making this harder to cheese.


There is no territory control on the ground. It will likely never come. Even in the early Beta or Alpha days when NQ was asked about how territory control would work – they had no answer. It’s been 6 years and I firmly believe that not a single line of code has been written to address atmospheric combat, ground combat, or territory control. It’s never going to happen.

The PvP that does exist is largely pointless and even in beta, finding PvP was almost impossible. We would arrange fights. We would actually talk to other orgs and agree to meet up and fight. This was at a time when more people played than today – so keep that in mind as well. The current game population is lower than beta. So your odds of actually engaging in 'emergent' PvP are even lower.


In short – there is nothing to do in DU but build stuff for the sake of building it.


Now you may read all this and go “Well ok, there isn’t much now – but there is a lot of POTENTIAL.

No. No there is not.

Let me explain why I say this, which requires some history of NQ and DU. NQ was started by a partnership of JC Baillie and an investment from Andurance Ventures.

The original game was supposed to get pushed out in 2nd half of 2020. You know what happened in 2nd half of 2020 instead? The paid beta launched instead. Why? Because funding ran out.

It gets worse, the subscription count for the beta failed to deliver the desired numbers and JC was kicked out of the CEO position in early 2021 – the new president s Nicolas Grantino – the guy who runs Andurance Ventures and the CEO is also AV assigned.

In short, since April 2021, Novaquark has been run by the investment firm with the only goal of recouping their investment. Headcount at NQ has been in a steady decline.

Please for your own sake do not buy this game on the hopes and dreams of “potential”. This release is nothing more but the venture capitalist investment firm trying to recoup their investment out of this dying game.

Nothing that I am saying here is news to anyone who has been following the game and has been active in the community (or what's left of it, NQ has been busy banning from their official forums for any kind of criticism of the game since the new CEO took over. During the JC days they pretended to listen to the community. In the Grantino days they just banned you.)