Dust 514

» see dust514.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 30 may 2016 the servers went off and the ground war in New Eden stopped. Above it, EVE Online carried on without a pause, same database, same corporations arguing over the same systems. One half of a shared universe died and the other half barely registered it.

CCP announced Dust at GDC Europe in Cologne on 18 august 2009. The idea was a console shooter wired into EVE Online's live server rather than a spin-off with matching artwork. CCP Shanghai built it on Unreal Engine 3 for the PlayStation 3, with Sony publishing. The closed beta ran from late 2011 under the name Mordu's Private Trials and was open only to EVE subscribers, which says something about who the audience was assumed to be. The two games were connected for real on 10 january 2013, open beta followed on 22 january, and the full release landed on 14 may 2013.

It was free to play, with ISK you earned and Aurum you bought. Reviews averaged 59 on Metacritic. Most of the complaints were about the frame rate and about a progression curve measured in months rather than hours, and under both of those sat a PlayStation 3 doing work a five year old console was not built for.

On 3 february 2016 a forum post from CCP Frame gave the end date. Purchasable content came out of the store the same day and the 1.3 update that had been promised was canceled with it. Players got just under four months of notice, which is more than most games manage.

EVE Online I knew the way a lot of engineers knew it, from the stories rather than the client. The spreadsheet economy, the alliance betrayals that made news outside the gaming press. Dust was the part of that world you could only reach through a PlayStation 3, and consoles were never my machine. My gaming years in Turkey ran through internet cafes and whatever PC was at home, and by 2013 I was doing engineering work in Ankara with no living room this game could reach.

~ the dossier ~

~ two games, one universe ~

The connection was not cosmetic. A Dust squad on a planet could mark a target and an EVE pilot in orbit could fire on it, which meant somebody at a PC in Europe dropping ordnance for somebody on a console in Texas, in the same fight, at the same minute. Planetary Conquest let corporations hold districts on planets and lose them to whoever showed up with better gear. Factional warfare on the ground moved the same counters that factional warfare in space moved.

Names were unique across both games, one namespace covering a spaceship pilot and an infantry mercenary. That is a small detail and it gives the design away. CCP was not building two products that talked to each other, it was extending one product onto a second machine.

~ the console problem ~

The PlayStation 3 was chosen in an era when a console exclusive still sounded like a strategy. By the time Dust shipped, the PS4 had been announced and the audience CCP needed was moving to hardware Dust did not run on. Free to play on a closed platform also meant the store and the patch pipeline belonged to Sony, on Sony's schedule, which is a bad arrangement for a game whose whole premise is that it changes daily alongside a PC MMO.

At Fanfest 2014 CCP showed Project Legion, a PC version of the same idea, to a room that included the people still playing Dust. The message underneath was that the future was somewhere their game was not. The 1.3 update kept being described as coming. It never shipped.

~ what new eden kept ~

Legion was canceled. On 21 april 2016, five weeks before the servers went off, CCP unveiled Project Nova at Fanfest, an Unreal Engine 4 shooter for PC built from scratch. Nova was canceled too. The idea kept moving anyway and surfaced again on 22 september 2023 as EVE Vanguard, still the same bet that the ground under New Eden is worth walking on.

Nothing of Dust survives in playable form. It was free, so nobody lost a purchase price, but everything bought with real money went with the servers and there is no offline mode underneath. A PlayStation 3 with the game still installed gets you a login screen and stops there.

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