DUST 514 | BETA
And in the space of four minutes, the rare and near-unbeatable $1,000 ship became a scrapyard in the sky. It was one extraordinary night in a living, growing anthology of many.
BACKSTABBING IS IMPORTANT Now CCP wants PS3 owners to leave their own mark on the universe. “There have been cases in Eve where
players, not through any design of ours, have engaged in incredible metagaming and skulduggery,” says Gunnarsson. “We’ve seen players infiltrate enemy
corporations as spies and take them out from the inside. Backstabbing is an important component in the world of Eve, and we are building Dust 514 to work in the same way. “Our goal is simple; the actions of a PS3
player can have huge ramifications for large corporations within the world of Eve. “At CCP we’ve always believed that what happened in the PC space, when it was reborn around online gaming, would eventually happen with consoles. It is at that very point that we wanted to come in and lead the way.”
KICKING UP DUST Dust 514 battles take place not in Eve’s star systems, but on a select number of planets. PS3 players sign in to Eve’s own social network and can negotiate various missions and contracts with PC players. For an agreed ISK bounty, a Dust mercenary
could take control of a planet’s anti-aircraft weapon and fire at co-ordinated targets into Eve’s outer space – all in real-time. They could, on the other hand, be paid to
take command of an entire planet so a contractor is free to plunder the area. Players will need to decide, and haggle, on objectives and rewards for themselves.
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With Sony allowing CCP to bridge
connections between console and PC, the developer’s primary goal is to create a seamless connection where actions occur on both games simultaneously. Voice chat between the two is a necessity as factions rapidly form new strategies in swings of a battle. “Both Dust and Eve share the same back-
end. It’s not two separate world servers, these are both the same,” says Gunnarsson. “A Dust 514 client is just a different instance of the same clients running on Eve across PCs right now. That’s an incredibly powerful notion. You have the same game space, the same gameworld co-ordinates.
We don’t need to make the big pop at
retail to make a big impact – and I think that’s a reasonably new
approach. Thor Gunnarsson, CCP
“When you’re fighting in Dust, that’s a real planet in Eve – that’s a real planet that people on PC are trying to fight for the control of. And PC users can support them or thwart them on the ground.” CCP has a volatile relationship with its PC
customers, and is clearly cautious of how Dust 514 could be seen as an Eve party crasher. It is one of the reasons why PC-bound players can, in fact, be instrumental in aiding battles taking place on PS3. “The level of connection between both games will be dynamic,” says Gunnarsson. “We won’t pretend we’ll know what will
CCP’s development empire stretches from Stone Mountain in the US state of Georgia, across the Icelandic capital Reykjavík, to the world-leading Chinese city of Shanghai. But the company also, and rather quietly, opened a UK
development arm in Newcastle last year. Gunnarsson tells Develop that the studio has hired more than twenty engineers since, and much of the group’s work will shape Dust 514’s future beyond PS3. “Ultimately, CCP Newcastle will be working in full capacity
on technology for the next generation of hardware,” he says. “Newcastle really is an engineering office for us, that’s the
kind of people we’re looking for. They’re working on internal tech, and with various middleware, and game engines too.”
NOVEMBER 2011 | 21
CCP UK’S ROLE IN DUST 514
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