We first got a look at Dual Universe during E3, where it looked fairly incredible and mostly impossible. It’s a space-exploration/mining/combat/crafting game that exploits voxels to let you do, well, basically anything. We’ve seen them before, massive promise and lofty goals along with a tendency to never be finished. As part of an attempt to convince people theirs will actually come out developers Novaquark have released a video, narrated by founder JC Baille, showing its current state.
Could it end up as one of the best space games in the world?
Baille calls it a pre-alpha tech demo, but it does show off the basic capabilities of the engine, both in terms of being astoundingly pretty and being able to modify the world around you.
Clearly still a long, long way to go, but there’s something there people would pay for in Early Access already, which is better than a lot of its rivals can claim. Development isn’t far enough along that they want to make that step yet, with a “first alpha prototype” due in 2017. Whether that will include all the single-shard MMO features they’re promising remains to be seen.