Eve Fanfest 2013’s closing keynote gave a glimpse of what the future holds for Eve, Dust, and CCP. It’s a future of space elevators, boarding parties, and personal stargates. Of course, this was CCP looking years into their games’ futures but they also made some promises of what players will have in their hands by next year’s keynote.
It’s been a big year for CCP, it’s the 10 year anniversary of EVE Online’s launch and also the year they launched their PS3 tie-in game, DUST 514, so the developer is putting on a pretty major show for this year’s Fanfest.
If you were able to get hold of a ticket before they all sold out then it looks like you’re in for a real treat, there’s panels aplenty, parties, PvP events, and even a wedding to go to.
If you were wanting to head over to Reykjavik this April and attend EVE Fanfest to see all that CCP has planned for their space-based MMO and DUST 514 but were:
A) too slow in buying a ticket
B) Couldn’t afford travelling to a small island halfway between Europe and America
C) Scared of volcanoes
Then have we got news for you.
All of Fanfest’s talks will be streamed for free! Though, if you want you can also throw down some money for some extras.
This is what it looks like when you fire a gun so huge that it destroys stuff not only in other games, but on other games platforms. Dust 514's orbital strikes are called in by players on PS3 before being launched by real human beings in EVE Online, which is demonstrated here in this nifty Dust 514 Uprising trailer. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll grip your monitor with both hands as the strikes fall, imploring the Dust 514 player to just look up for one second and check out the fiery EVE Online heavens from whence these orbital strikes have come.
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One of the most fascinating facets of Eve Online, at least for outsiders, is its Council of Stellar Management (CSM) - the player board given a voice and an industry-unprecedented amount of impact in the game’s continuing development. Now CCP are working on something similar for Eve’s shootier sibling - a something they’re tentatively calling the Dust 514 War Council.
Eve has had ten consecutive years of subscriber growth, which in itself is an astounding thing. But in the last few months, that growth has picked up at an alarming rate. There are a number of factors at play here: CCP’s return to iteration on the game’s fundamentals with Retribution, Eve’s 18th expansion and most commercially successful ever; the impact of Dust 514, which entered open beta in January and is now inextricably tangled up with Eve; December’s Chinese relaunch, in partnership with Tiancity; and the Battle of Asakai - a humongous, player-driven massacre borne of a tiny misunderstanding.
This weekend saw one of the joys of emergent gameplay: unplanned mass slaughter.
Dust 514, Eve’s conjoined twin, will feature a PvE mode. Players will band together with other mercs, accepting missions to blow up robots. This we know. But we haven’t seen anything of it yet. Dust’s open beta, which launches today, doesn’t include it - and if anybody at CCP knows when it's coming, they're not telling.
When Playstation 3 players boot up CCP’s DUST 514 they're teleported into a dull metal cabin: a place with all the charm of the inside of a cargo container. There are no windows. No way of realising the size, scale and cynicism of the world you’ve just entered.
The players in CCP’s first-person shooter don’t get to see what Eve is really about: they’re contained in a claustrophobic annex: cut off from the majesty that has enraptured more than 400,000 PC players.
This feels like a mistake. But speaking to CCP last week at their headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland, I learned something of what it will take to knock those walls down.
It’s not a mistake. It’s a process.
In a little over two weeks’ time, a potential 52 million will turn on their little black boxes and be met with the option to download Dust 514. Some of them will do so, and whether or not you welcome them into your private chats and corporations, they’re going to change Eve irreparably.
Dust 514 closed beta players will travel to warmer climes tomorrow after a spell of scheduled downtime, upping sticks from CCP’s Singularity server to Tranquility. CCP’s absurd plan for a cross-platform universe will come to fruition, and that means big change for Eve.
Never have so many synonyms of ‘Holy cow!’ been uttered with such sincerity. On Monday night, members of Subdreddit and pxrxo tested out inter-game orbital bombardment in Eve Online and Dust 514. There’s no footage from the ground as yet, but plenty of evocative Anglo-Saxon linguastics courtesy of the shared comms channel.Without guns CCP's DUST 514 would just be a lot of people logging in and walking around alien planets together whilst the universe above them shone with the dots of 400,000 player controlled spaceships freely flying about space. That actually sounds pretty phenomenal. Damn. Well, CCP have gone the route of giving DUST 514 players guns so they can make holes in each others' spacesuits.
In September we heard that Dust 514 could be released in October. Then a month passed, and we put such excitable thoughts from our heads. As it turns out, Dust won’t even be out of beta this year.
CCP have released a new DUST 514 trailer that gets us up to speed with the game and how it fits into the EVE Online universe. At first it may seem a little drab but by the end I found my head overtaken by the scale of this game. They are players on planets, there are thousands of planets, and those planets are in a universe with thousands of ships, and each of those ships is piloted by a person.
Dust 514 is a free to play, Playstation 3 exclusive FPS set in the expansive universe of EVE Online. Something of an experiment for CCP Games, it plans on bringing PC and PS3 players together in sweet triumphant harmony. The Dust 514 open beta has been running since June, and you can still sign up. But how exactly does Dust 514 work? How does it affect PC games? Where does it fit into the already well established Eve Online universe? And most importantly, will everybody get along?
Here's everything we know.
Incredible scenes this morning as every single human being on the planet blacked out, struck by simultaneous visions of future lives in what Reddit has already dubbed a ‘flashforward’. One Wisconsin man claims to have foreseen himself reading a newspaper dated October 11th, 2032. Me? Having already dedicated myself to lifelong video game learning I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find myself playing an FPS - Dust 514, to be exact.
The next EVE Online expansion is the 18th such free update the space MMORPG business and entrepreneurship simulator will receive, and it's all about consequences. Specifically, the consequences of law-breaking, player-murdering, bounty-hunting and CONCORD-riling. Titled Retribution, the winter update will overhaul EVE's near-decade old bounty system, rework criminal activity, introduce new ships, update old ones, begin the integration of DUST and EVE and generally spruce everything else up. Here's how it will "go down", as a criminal might say. Yeah that's right, I've seen Road Wars.In an interview with Fox Business, the President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America Jack Tretton might have made a bit of a faus pax, letting something slip that perhaps should have stayed unslippen. While talking about how the Playstation 3 is gearing up for a wave of free to play games, he mentioned Dust 514 in passing. Specifically a release date next month.
