Shooting Games Online

CCP Games Earlier this week, CCP Games announced a new cross-platform game at E3 entitled “Dust 514.” The gritty first-person shooter (FPS) allows Sony PlayStation 3 and PS Vita handheld gamers to play in the EVE Online universe, which is a massively multiplayer online sci-fi game (MMO) that allows PC/Mac gamers to build starships.

Dust players are terrestrial mercenaries that are contracted to fight on the planets that EVE pilots can only see from space. Typical grunt objectives are to capture or destroy ground targets, and this can be done with a multitude of weapons and armored vehicles that can be purchased in the game marketplace.

Players can also form their own corporations since the core of the game will hinge on guild socialization and the economics of jointly acquiring the resources needed to build and equip characters and build empires. “There is no magic in this game so things don’t just appear out of nothing,” said Torfi Frans Olafsson, creative director for EVE Online. “Everything has a cost, including the creation of clones.”

In many first-person shooting games, players will “respawn,” meaning they’ll eventually come back to life after they being killed in the game. In Dust 514 and EVE, characters are cloned after death, so you have a finite supply of manufactured bodies that have to be purchased, produced and transported to your facilities. So every loss in the game has a painful economic cost, which tends to discourage reckless behavior like suicide charges.

The game play itself looks similar to Activision’s “Call of Duty” franchise, complete with assault rifles, holosights and shell shock—though Dust does include Sony “Move” controller support. The demo showed players in powered-armor descending in landing craft onto scorched battlefields. Aside from the other-worldly setting, combat looks typical FPS with blood and sweat splattered across the faceplate. Even the magazine-fed projectile weapons looked very present day, though Olafsson said laser and plasma rifles are available to those that can afford them.

At the end of the demo, a ground-based energy weapon destroys a spacecraft in orbit. “That’s just for show,” said Atli Már Sveinsson, creative director at CCP. Dust 514 is an MMO hybrid so doesn’t allow Dust players to fully move in and out of the EVE universe yet. But being able to destroy a ship in orbit is the kind of interactivity that CCP is striving for. For now, Dust players can communicate and strike agreements with EVE players and the outcomes of battles can influence the global balance of power.

EVE online costs $14.95 per month to play but Dust 514 has gone the free-to-play micro-transaction route, meaning that there are no subscriber fees. All revenue is generated from the in-game sale of virtual goods like weapons and equipment.