US, August 18, 2009 - This could be absolutely brilliant.
At GDC Europe 2009, CCP's Hilmar Veigar Petursson announced a new product called DUST 514, and it's not at all what we expected.
DUST 514 is a first-person shooter that's being incorporated into the EVE universe, acting essentially an MMO for consoles. It's a mix of first-person shooting and real-time strategy gameplay where you play as a marine with a rifle running around on the ground. It's not only set in the EVE universe, it's actually connected to EVE. The DUST battlefields will determine who controls territory within EVE's world. The EVE Online players will have to contract players of DUST to go in and destabilize territory. CCP's hope is that the first-person shooter crowd on consoles and the PC EVE Online crowd will eventually form alliances together.
The game is being handled by CCP's Shanghai office.
More will be shown off at CCP's Fanfest in October of this year.The video shown at the session featured a number of ships floating through space, then zoomed in on a soldier on a planet's surface moving through passageways in a warzone with trucks and tanks and aircraft all firing at each other. He climbed a ramp and boarded an aircraft after shooting an enemy who was carrying a rocket launcher, and as he climbed into the air witnessed another aircraft blast another with a barrage of missiles.
No other details, such as pricing structure or release date were unveiled at the talk, but the interconnectedness of EVE Online's single-shard world and a console first-person shooter online game is really exciting. We'll have more as soon as we can.
