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DUST 514 claims five-year roadmap with expansions
DUST 514 Executive Producer Jonathan Lander is in it for the long haul, as is his team. Lander said that CCP has a five-year roadmap for the upcoming console MMOFPS that includes expansions and enough "crazy ideas" to last for 20 years. "The whole way that we're doing our development process is so that we can push out expansions on a regular basis," Lander said. "We're not going to ship a unit and then in six months it's off the shelves and people have stopped playing it." Lander said the team's been working closely with Sony to overcome technical challenges and make sure that it's as stable and accessible as its EVE Online counterpart. DUST 514 is currently exclusive to Sony's PlayStation 3. Of course, the big unknown is what will happen to that exclusivity if DUST 514 outlives the console's lifespan.
CCP contemplates selling more EVE Online physical merchandise
Fresh off a successful attempt to sell graphics cards for virtual currency, CCP Games is mulling over additional in-game sales options in EVE Online for real-life merchandise. Senior Producer Jon Lander said that this will be the beginning of a trend: "It was an interesting experiment and one we're going to follow up." The studio recently made 100 Nvidia graphics cards available to players in the game for 20 Plex apiece and sold out of them in two minutes. In addition to items like graphics cards, CCP is looking into ways to create and sell EVE Online merchandise. "We need to just look at what the right opportunities are now," Lander said. "We've got lots of people beavering away trying to work out what the right thing to do is." Due to players' ability to buy and sell Plex for other in-game goods, Lander reports that 25% of EVE Online players are able to enjoy the game for free.
EVE Online announces an impending Inferno
EVE Online Senior Producer Jonathan Lander says now that some of the nitty-gritty reorganization within CCP has been completed, the devs "are back in the serious business of making EVE better and better." Citing several small releases over the next few months as proof, Lander lets loose with the announcement of the game's next big expansion: Inferno. Inferno will hit EVE "just before the summer" and will attempt to bring EVE's conflicts to a whole new level. Concord-sanctioned warfare and factional warfare will be getting tweaks as a result of this focus. More specific details about Inferno will be revealed at the EVE Fanfest in March. And while he won't go into specifics (yet), Lander says that CCP will reveal "more concrete steps" of how both EVE Online and DUST 514 are connected in the next couple of months.
