In 2013, CCP Games expanded its fictional universe of New Eden with a free-to-play title on the PlayStation 3 called Dust 514. Instead of flying ships of various sizes like in EVE Online, Dust 514 was a first-person shooter. But after two years on the now outdated console platform, the developers are shutting down the game’s servers later this year on May 30.
The game’s closure means that the planned update, version 1.3, won’t make its way to the game. You can still play the game until the end of May, but various PlayStation Network packs and other purchases have been removed from the store. If you still have some Aurum currency in the game, you can use it to buy items from the game’s marketplace.
However, all is not lost. The lessons learned from Dust 514 will be used to create a new FPS title on the PC and powered by the Unreal Engine 4. This project also serves as an evolution of “Project Legion,” an improved version of the Dust 514 experience on the PC. However, Project Legion didn’t advance very far, as the team encountered “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.”
The move back to PC game development makes sense for CCP, especially when the company’s moneymaker, EVE Online, is on the PC (along with Mac and Linux platforms). There’s also additional focus on VR with the release of Gunjack for the Samsung Gear VR and EVE: Valkyrie on the Oculus Rift.
So far, the new game is still in its early stages of development, but CCP plans to update fans on its progress later this year at the annual EVE Fanfest gathering on April 21.
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