Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

DUST 514 (pronounced five-fourteen) is the newly announced MMO first-person shooter currently in development at CCP Asia. It’s a shooter, and as a shooter it’s all about “killing people and blowing sh** up,” according to Atli Már Sveinsson, Creative Director for CCP Asia, where the game has been in development for at least the past one and a half years.

What makes DUST 514 an MMO is that the game shares the same single-sharded, persistent universe as EVE. But what makes DUST 514 unique among MMOs and shooters is its heavy ties to EVE Online’s universe.  In short, DUST 514’s “mercs” will work with EVE Online alliances to gain control of sovereignty districts on planets through contracts. There are no classes; gear will define the role of the player.


The theatres of war, as the DUST 514 battles are called, are really districts of planets within alliance sovereignties. As such, the benefits to EVE Alliances are separate and in addition to the benefits currently enjoyed with system sovereignty. That’s not to say that these battles are purely optional; if a rival alliance or NPC faction has boots on the ground, you’ll need to contract mercs and win the ground game in order to achieve sovereignty. But the additional benefit is clearly there for alliances wanting to truly cash in on their claims.

For the demo, we saw a battle waged over a Caldari pharmaceuticals factory. As you’d expect with CCP, the graphics are top notch and highly realistic. DUST 514 gameplay is fairly similar to Battlefield 2142’s titan maps, but without the boarding elements.  Basically, theatres of war revolve around MCCs, mobile command centers, which house Commanders. Infantry gathers war points by killing other players and capturing objectives (war points are match-based, not persistent).

As war points allow, Commanders create spawn points and drop installations and vehicles (including an APC and a VTOL fighter, which were demoed for us) and move the MCC around the map, and infantry work to cut off the fueling of the enemy’s MCC so that it loses shields and becomes vulnerable to attack. Destroy the enemy’s MCC - primarily through ground “installations”  (hence the RTS elements CCP’s been hinting at) but also through aerial combat -  and you win the match.

The personal weaponry we saw was fairly traditional, including an assault rifle with grenade launcher and rocket launcher, though Sveinsson hinted at other more sci-fi’ish gear like plasma phasers. Max match size is 64 players. In-game voice will be available, and mercs will have the opportunity to join their own corporations and alliances separate from EVE Online’s. Mercs will even have their own social space, the war barge, will will operate from planetary orbit and will not be attackable by NPC players.


Merc development comes via achievements, which in turn unlock new tiers of gear. This gear is available for purchase via a microtransaction system, and as DUST 514 doesn’t require a subscription, real money exchanged for virtual goods will be the business model. At launch, EVE Online and DUST 514 will have separate economies, but CCP didn’t discard the possibility of merging their respective economies at some point.

DUST 514 is currently in pre-alpha. No release date has been set for the game, but CCP has a “phased implementation strategy.” Sveinsson noted that they fully recognize that no EVE Alliance dealer wants to contract with hordes of new console players at first. Therefore, NPC and “matchmaking” PvP missions will always be available for DUST players, and the game will roughly mirror the safe-ish Empire space to nullsec rampup found in EVE Online. Box pricing and what console or console(s) the game is being developed for is unclear at this point, but CCP seems fairly adamant that DUST 514 will be console-only. More when we know more from EVE FanFest 2009.