CCP Frame announced today that Dust 514 will shut down on May 30, 2016. He also confirmed that CCP is still working on a first-person shooter set in the New Eden universe, and that the new game will use the Unreal 4 engine. There will be rewards given to any Dust player who moves to this new game. More information will be provided at Fanfest in April. The announcement is reprinted below.
“Dear DUST 514 Community,
CCP’s development team in Shanghai has been working on a prototype for a first-person shooter for PC with the goal of building a great FPS set in our sci-fi universe of New Eden (the universe in which EVE Online, DUST 514, EVE: Valkyrie, and Gunjack are set). Their experience is being utilized to build a new game from scratch using Unreal Engine 4 while harnessing all our learnings from DUST 514. This is in many ways an evolution of Project Legion, the concept we announced at EVE Fanfest 2014, but without the limitations of technical debt and development paths we quickly discovered in that effort that could never serve as a future-proof technology base for a full production game. This new project is still in an early phase of production, and we feel like we’re on the right track and plan to give an update at EVE Fanfest on April 21st as a part of the free livestream of the event. Since this new game will be different from DUST 514 (although keeping many of its great parts), we will provide tiered recognition rewards to our loyal DUST customers, details to be announced.
We are very proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished with DUST 514 on PlayStation 3 over the past three years and it is an honor to be a part of such a dedicated community. We consider DUST 514 one of the best free-to-play offerings on the platform, but the years have caught up with us. It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that DUST 514 will be shutting down on May 30th, 2016. We therefore will not be releasing the 1.3 update as we had planned. Players will continue to be able to play for free on our servers until then, but all further PSN packs and purchases have been removed and disabled from the in-game marketplace and the PlayStation Store. Players with existing Aurum will be able to continue to purchase items from the in-game marketplace.
Thank you for being a part of DUST 514 on the PlayStation 3. We look forward to the next chapter, and hope you’ll be a part of it and continue the journey with us.”
Dust 514 is still popular in Latin America markets, and the peak concurrent user metric has remained stable at 2,000 players throughout the past year. At Fanfest 2015, CCP Ratati claimed Dust 514 was finally making a profit. Free-to-play games require a constant influx of new players who make microtransactions, as established players often buy less items from the store over time. Perhaps CCP saw profits declining, or perhaps they simply needed to reallocate development resources away from Dust 514.
The announcement confirms that CCP is still working on a first-person shooter set in New Eden. The #PortDust514 campaign on twitter last year clearly showed that a large portion of Eve players want to play an FPS set in New Eden. Kevall Longstride, a.k.a. Dennie Fleetfoot, the leader of Dust University, had this to say about a PC port. “DUST University is the oldest Dust Corp in the game having been founded in 2009, so I’ll be damned if a little thing like a format change is going to alter that. The move to a new game, on a new format presents a Corp like us a fantastic opportunity to press for the tools that we’ve always lacked on the Sony format.”
Burseg Sardaukar, the leader General Tso’s Alliance—one of the largest Eve/Dust alliances—said this about the future of his ground forces in New Eden. “We are still powerful Dust-side, but I’m far less involved than I was back before the Rouge wedding. We have a lot of guys that have been itching for a new FPS to play on PC. We did TF2, a touch of COD, a lot of BFBC2 and PS2. Now we just play Heroes (of the Storm) for that “quick fix” since there aren’t really any interesting FPS’s. Dust on PC could be exactly what we need.”
To date, themittani.com has published over 100 articles about Dust 514. This was not only due to its relation to EVE Online – there have been many TMC contributors passionate about the game and its potential. While it is sad to see this experiment come to an end, the prospect of a CCP shooter on PC is truly exciting. CCP has always pushed the boundaries of any genre it enters, and there were some very ambitious goals for Dust 514. Hopefully those goals can finally be realized on PC.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Turk Fezzik.
