As a space-game afficionado, I was originally very intrigued by the announcement of an online MMOish called Dual Universe. It’s Kickstarter had positioned itself as as a Minecraft-meets-EVE Online kind of game where players could harvest, refine, build, sell, fight, and claim territory in an open universe sandbox. That specific vibe killed my interest as I don’t like to be some other player’s reason for logging in and besides, I have games like Dual Universe, such as Empyrion or Space Engineers, both of which allow me to harvest and build bases and spacecraft with other players. Plus, Dual Universe has a monthly subscription, and I wasn’t convinced enough about the game to throw down $15 a month for the privilege of not being able to do much without getting attacked by other people.

Good thing I dodged, ultimately, because SteamDB has dire news about Dual Universe.

I guess on one hand, only having one player in the game significantly lowers the chance of getting attacked, but on the other hand, for a game which is built on the idea of players meeting players for commerce and, yes, engagement, this is bad. Very bad.

Maybe to head off inevitable insolvency, developers Novaquark have released MyDU, a “personal” edition of Dual Universe which allows players to run their own server. I consider this an end-run only because it’s a different client than their MMO version which also comes with it’s own price-tag ($35USD) and is only available through their own website. Players can also download the server separately.

First off, the client itself set off Windows’ “Are you sure you want to do this?” popup. Then the server installer did the same; depending on your own security settings, your mileage may vary. Novaquark’s approach to a self-hosted game server is a bit non-standard in the realm of “games with self-hosted servers”: it runs in a Docker container, meaning that in order to spin it up you need a Linux machine or Docker Desktop for Windows. On one hand I commend this approach as containerization is intended to provide apps with a stable and universal way to ensure that the program will run no matter where we put it, but on the other hand I looked into the ecosystem that the MyDU server deploys and there’s a lot going on there: 19 different containers running custom apps and third-party support. That means there are 19 different points of potential failure, and that seems a bit fragile to me. To wit, after having set it all up yesterday, I had trouble logging into the server from the MyDU client; I examined the docs and ran a script that came with the server install to re-set the administrator password for the server — which I had done during setup — and that seemed to fix things. This morning, however, I had to tear everything down meaning I had to shut down the server and delete all images and volumes created in Docker, and then I had to re-run the installation and reset the password for the admin account. Only then could I log in, but I had to start over. At this point I don’t know what’s going to happen the next time I reboot my PC.

Speaking of which, MyDU (and I assume Dual Universe actual) has a good amount of things to do, which I appreciate, but I am not sure it brings anything new to the table that other games haven’t done, done better, and done without a monthly sub (for the official game) or the hassle of setting up a server (for the play along at home edition). I followed the pretty exhaustive tutorial, or at least as many steps as I could stomach for the topics I was interested in, and that got me started with a bit of claimed land, a prefab home, and a speeder bike. I set the integrated mining device working to pull up some kind of minerals just because I could, and then went off to look at a nearby platform that I had purposefully built near.

This ended up sending me on a wild goose chase across the known universe as I took a shuttle to another planet, and then traveled by a series of teleporters through a new player shelter and eventually a community marketplace.

And here’s the rub: MyDU is basically pointless. Many, many games like Valheim or Palworld or even Minecraft allow for self-hosted or even professionally hosted servers so people can play with friends. Those games, however, can operate very well even if the server hosts a single player as those games are more “single player with benefits”. Dual Universe and it’s MyDU cousin are MMO scale games that are purposefully built on the idea of having more than one player present across a span of time. I looked around the marketplace zone in MyDU and, as one would expect, it’s empty (technically it’s broken as I fell through the floor but that’s another story) because that’s a place which was meant to house other players. I checked into the terminal in my house which offers a helpful “things to do next” series of posts, and one of them was “do missions”…except the mission system relies on players creating those missions for things like harvesting, crafting, or even organized PvP (to my knowledge, Dual Universe does have limited PvE content). Without other players setting up this kind of content, there’s not a lot of purpose to being in MyDU. And considering how cranky the containerized server design has been, I don’t know if we’ll see professional hosting companies spinning up MyDU servers any time soon (though I would like them to prove me wrong). Beyond that, I don’t even know if MyDU would be worthwhile with even a handful of friends, because the content is other people at scale. It kind of kicks the whole idea of “sandbox PvP” in the nuts when you see such a game from this perspective, as it really shows how flimsy the concept of “content is other people” is outside of a very specific, very contrived environment, and how such games couldn’t stand on their own without real people to make the project work.

The good news is that the MyDU server includes a web dashboard which allows for server management. Here, admins can manage players and massage data, though most of the actual server config is done by hand with .YML files and not through the UI. I added a non-admin player here so I wouldn’t be playing on the privileged account, and after wrestling with some issues on that front, was the account I used to test with. There is a mission editor here as well but I tried adding a new mission through the UI and I couldn’t figure out how it worked. This is apparently the same tool Novaquark developers use in the live game, but I feel bad for them because while it may be functional when one knows how to use it, it looks perpetually half finished and has absolutely zero internal support. I don’t really know how useful this would be to an actual private server admin, so it might as well be non-existent.

I regret my purchase but I’ll hold on to it like a hair shirt just in the off chance things improve, professional hosts offer the server option, and I can convince someone — anyone — to give it a shot with me. After this post, however, I doubt anyone would and I don’t blame them. Dual Universe sounds like a good idea, but not a box-price-and-sub good idea, and MyDU approach actually somehow brings less to the table than just signing up with the official MMO version.

In late breaking news, the game’s Discord just posted a message that a server update is available. I’m going to try it out but I’m not terribly confident that it will do anything at all to improve on the experience.