3 important ideas if the developers and publisher want a game people come back to:
- Permit offline solo play.
- Allow for player made mods.
- Release a custom 3rd party server binary.
Its joever. If you haven’t played it, it may be worth $10 to play through the missions. They are all voice acted.well and the art design is nice. But once you build your base, all youre doing is keeping your base fed every 20 days and paying taxes.
With any live game, the main measurement I look at is long term support.
I don’t play live games on Day 1.
A decade of watching games launch and fail only to spend 3-5 years of dev time to finally become good (FF14, FO76, All the open world games, no mans sky, Cyberpunk).
I played New World last year (4 years after launch) and it was awesome!
Game was fun for a couple days, but everything felt copy/pasted as you progressed further. Also felt like everything was “good enough” and then set aside and never expanded on. Its unique thing was the threat of the worms, which was exhilarating at times, but they again made it just good enough and not great. Landing in a spice field on the open desert and constantly having to retreat into my Ornithopter after literally 5-10 seconds of my feet hitting the sand got real old real fast.
I still don’t know if it was a glitch or intended, but the fact that if you used a sand crawler at minimum speed the worm would never get attracted was so disappointing. The whole thing with the sand crawlers and harvesters is that they quickly attract a worm so you gotta work fast, this was the opposite: go super slow and get the entire field with no danger. In the entire time I played I didn’t even ever get a chance to engage in any PVP, dunno if that was just the server I was on or not, but it also wasn’t encouraged by the game mechanics.
I’d play if there were private servers, but the game as is was kind of underwhelming. A shame too, because some private Dune servers could be awesome for voice roleplay.
I mostly enjoyed their previous survival game Conan: Exiles, but lost all interest in Dune the moment I learned you couldn’t play solo offline. Conan was live service too, so it’s not like forced multiplayer is necessary to the formula.
Conan is fantastic for modding and for private servers. You can do sooo much with it. Dune is… inflexible. Not a bad game, but Conan wouldn’t be as successful as it is if it just had to go off of the base game either.
