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EVE Evolved: What DUST 514 should have been
It's now been almost six months since DUST 514's official release, and I think it's safe to say it hasn't quite lived up to expectations. The game was lauded for its revolutionary realtime link with the EVE Online universe, but so far there's very little back-and-forth between the two titles. Originally intended as an MMO in its own right but also as an integral part of EVE's territorial endgame, DUST now exists largely as a lobby-based first-person shooter with the twist that equipment is lost on death. Even the planetary conquest portion of DUST that could be considered its most MMO-esque element has been abstracted into a series of instanced and scheduled 24v24 battles. DUST's main rival during development was the PC-based PlanetSide 2, and had the two games released on the same platform, I'm sure that rivalry would still be in the media spotlight. I've been playing PlanetSide 2 for just a few days, and I can already see elements that would make it a far better fit for the EVE universe than the current version of DUST. So what could DUST learn from its non-console-only counterpart? In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how PlanetSide 2 handles issues of persistence, planetary conquest, and vehicle spawning, and why I think DUST 514 should be borrowing a few tricks from its game design.
EVE Evolved: Merging Valkyrie with EVE Online
Ever since its release in 2003, EVE Online has been bombarded with requests for direct flight controls and dogfighter-style gameplay. Most ships in EVE are huge lumbering hulks compared to real-world aircraft, more akin to large sea-faring ships than nimble jetfighters. Even tiny agile Interceptors can't be controlled directly, instead having the player issue commands to fly in a particular direction or move toward or orbit an object. As a result, combat in EVE has become much more heavily about the strategy of directing fleets of dozens or hundreds of ships than any kind of piloting skill or twitch control. This year's EVE Fanfest gave players a glimpse into the world of immersive twitch combat with the announcement of a new dogfighting game set in the EVE Online universe. Originally starting out as an virtual reality experiment by a few developers in their spare time, EVE Valkyrie has now become a full game in its own right and an example of what's possible with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. It was always assumed that Valkyrie was an EVE game in name and theme only, but recently developers have revealed that they'd like it to tie into the actual EVE Online universe itself. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at recently revealed information on EVE Valkyrie and speculate on how it could be integrated into the EVE universe.
EVE Evolved: Merging EVE with DUST 514
When console MMOFPS DUST 514 was first announced, players were cautious of the game's ambitious goals. Developers promised that DUST battles would decide the ownership of planets inside PC MMO EVE Online, and that this would tie into system sovereignty and ultimately ownership of entire regions of space. We expected the two games to have separate communities and economies that would interact only when EVE players hired DUST mercenaries to take over sectors of particular planets, but we couldn't have been more wrong. Two years later, CCP blew our expectations out of the water with details of how DUST and EVE will be practically joined at the hip. We learned that the two games would share the exact same corporations and that ISK would be transferable between games. We also got a glimpse of the incredible plans for realtime integration, with EVE ships able to deliver air strikes to planets and DUST players able to shoot down ships in orbit with ground cannon. But have those ambitious goals stayed in focus during development, and what can we expect from DUST when it launches early next year? In this week's EVE Evolved opinion piece, I look through the public information on DUST 514's launch integration with EVE Online and speculate on how the link may evolve after release.
DUST 514 and EVE Online 'initial integration' now playing on Singularity test server
CCP has announced that EVE Online and DUST 514 players can now officially communicate with one another in-game on the firm's Singularity test server. DUST mercenaries and EVE capsuleers can chat each other up in the local channels of several empire systems, according to a new CCP forum post. EVE-mail messages can also be exchanged between the two playerbases, and DUST items are now visible on EVE's in-game market (though it's currently impossible to buy them through the EVE client). CCP says initial EVE/DUST interaction is necessarily limited due to several known issues and the age of Singularity's current code base, but today's announcement marks an exciting first step in the firm's long-range plan to merge its long-running sci-fi MMORPG with its new PlayStation 3 shooter.
