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1413400cookie-checkDual Universe, Sandbox Sci-Fi MMO Lets Players Build Planets
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2016/05

Dual Universe, Sandbox Sci-Fi MMO Lets Players Build Planets

French gaming studio Novaquark recently announced that their MMO, Dual Universe, is coming for PC and is currently in development.

The science fiction, massive multiplayer online role-playing game features a large world for players to explore a vast universe with various planets waiting to be discovered and massive ships waiting to be built.

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It’s running on tech that allows them to render a continuous single-shard cluster on a 64-bit planetary engine. This means that players will all experience one giant universe, and with the added voxel manipulation technology as small as 25cm cubic blocks, gamers can modify the game world and create their own structures with a rather in-depth level of detail.

Due to the proclaimed “unlimited” level of detail, gamers are able to construct planet-sized structures. Does this mean that we could see a planet building planet like in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Hopefully so.

As players explore the universe they will also uncover procedurally generated planets, not unlike the ones you might find in Hello Games’ upcoming No Man’s Sky.

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This is all married to custom LUA scripts that will allow players to build, share and expand the universe with functioning ships, utilities and robotics.

This in-depth level of utilitarianism is unsurprising given that the founder of Novaquark is an artificial intelligence and robotics expert and scientist, Jean-Christophe Baillie. He commented in the press release stating…

“I am a huge fan of games like Eve Online and Space Engineers. I took inspiration from such games to imagine what could be the future of the MMO experience: a continuous world with planets, huge building possibilities, social and political aspects, but without the boundaries that so often restrict the gameplay. This idea needs a lot of tech and emergent game design that is not so far from AI and other fields I’m familiar with. So, I got a first prototype working back in 2014, and Novaquark was born soon after.”

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At the moment, the whole thing is still in pre-alpha development. They’re working through the foundation of the game’s mechanics before taking things a step further, which means that it’s going to be in development for a while.

If you want to get your hands on this bad boy, you’ll be waiting a while. The game won’t see its preliminary alpha release until early 2017. You can learn more about Dual Universe by paying a visit to the official website.

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