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Early Look At EVE Creators' DUST 514
CCP Games, the developer behind space MMORPG EVE Online, made waves in August when they announced DUST 514, a console MMOFPS which will tie into the EVE universe. Eurogamer is now running a preview of the new MMO, providing more information on how it will work and the way in which it will interact with EVE and its players. Quoting: "... battles take place on dynamic battlefields about 5 kilometers across. Unlike EVE itself, there will be a cap to the number of players per battle — CCP is 'still playing with numbers' (and presumably watching the development of 256-player MAG with interest), but assures us that this will not be less than 64 players. There will be a command structure, with infantry and squadron leaders on each side led by a player-commander on board the hulking Mobile Command Center airship. The commander will effectively be playing a real-time strategy game with living units, and will have an RTS-style view of the battlefield. He'll be dependent on the situational awareness of infantry players to clear the fog of war. He'll also be the target, with the ultimate aim of a battle — after several, varying sub-objectives — being to destroy the opposing side's MCC."
It will be interesting to see if they do any better.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/17/
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
The commander will effectively be playing a real-time strategy game with living units, and will have an RTS-style view of the battlefield.
And I thought sending an endless line of marines to their death was fun before!
I am really saddened that it's taken people this long to realize this was a KICK ASS Idea.
Disclaimer: Everything said below this runs under the assumption the game is made correctly. There are LOTS of ways they could mess this up, interface, command structure, how to reward playstyles, how the teaming is done, etc etc .
But IF they get this right, it will be a fantastic game. Some people love strategy, others love killing shit. Some people like both, but more often some people like one and hate the other. Lots of people love having some voice in the sky doing the thinking for them so they can focus on killing shit, as long as that voice helps them kill shit better.
This is demonstrated on a LOT of big multiplayer games with voice enabled, you end up getting 1-5 guys out of dozens who are barking out useful info, the rest feeding off them without much complaint. I think there are better system sthan the everyone can talk to everyone method, but it hink it's a good start.
This has been done before, the human side in Natural Selection had this years ago. One guy on the team was a commander with an overhead RTS view, everyone else played as a standard FPS. The commander could drop items, place buildings (but the FPS players had to actually construct them), and give orders.
My experience was that if you had a good commander, the overall game was good. If you had a shit commander, which was often, then the game was pretty bad. The problem is the ratios. You can't have everyone being the commander. What often happened was that one guy was voted in to become the commander because he was good, but then nobody else got to practice the commander role, so it was very self-reinforcing. The first few times you play commander suck a lot, everyone swears at you while you try to figure out which button does what. A lot of people never really got to play the commander at all, because they'd be kicked from the role within seconds, so they never got any practice.
I played this game at the top tiers of league play, and I can tell you that it had of the most brutal learning curve of all FPSes I've ever played. It's the reason the game never caught on, it couldn't retain new players because pub strats were not logically linked to pro strats, causing stagnation.
The game style has a lot of potential. Hopefully this will be good, as well as Natural Selection 2 (coming soon), and widen our gaming horizons.
So instead you have 1 commander and 2 lieutenants. The 2 lieutenants can be put in charge of secondary objectives and routing information for the commander. That way they get some commander exp, but they can't completely mess up a campaign.
As a player of EVE Online who really likes the game but isn't that interested in the battling aspect, I have high hopes for this interesting concept. Particularly, I hope that the MMOFPS integrates with the existing game world through the market. I play primarily industrial efforts in the current game and would enjoy another vector of marketing strategies to pursue to further fatten my wallet.
Also, I think it will be cool to play the FPS as a genre diversion where I can potentially continue to forward my in-game goals from a totally different perspective. All-in-all, as an existing EVE player, I'm definitely looking forward to this game!
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I wonder how CCP will handle issues of commanders allied with the opposing force, and commanding his/her forces to their doom? This *is* the Eve universe, after all...
This sounds very much like the Titan Assault mode in Battlefield 2142. After playing as commander a few times in that game I came to feel strangely like I had the least power to affect the outcome of anyone - being a squad leader or member in a squad that worked together and communicated well seemed much more effective in determining the outcome of a round. As commander essentially all you could do was initiate satellite tracks and dispatch UAVs, drop supplies and the occasional orbital strike, and use a large menu to attempt to give orders to the squads on your team. The problem is that nobody is under any obligation to actually follow through on those orders, and the small point rewards that squad members would receive for following orders seemed to be outweighed by the lure of "going where the kills are". The best experiences are to be had on servers where following squad leader and commander orders are mandatory or kick. If DUST 514 is going to be fun to play from a commander's perspective I would hope that the rewards or punishments for following/not following orders would be increased, or that the command structure can in some way be enforced.
After their review of Darkfall Online, which also happened to be the first time I heard of them, I'll never read or give a shit about a review by them. The chief editor for Eurogamer sided with the reviewer when called out by not only Tasos, lead 'PR' person for Darkfall who claimed to have server logs showing the guy hadn't even played the game, but hundreds of eurogamer readers and even more Darkfall players who almost unanimously agreed it was impossible for the guy to have played the game and still write the review he did as nearly none of it was based in any fact.
Until I started following links, I thought we were going for retro I/O -- a game with lots of players, and a grunt/commander split, all rendered to ASCII and running in a terminal.
On finding the truth... okay, it's pretty, but I'm very disappointed.
If CCP spend their time listening to casual gamers EVE would likely be thrown in the large pile of failed MMOs. EVE thrives because if fulfills a niche that no other game provides for myself and a few hundred thousand other gamers - I've never played an MMO where combat against other players can be as complex and fun as EVE's. If CCP spent its time listening to casual gamers there would be very little loss, the market would no longer be player-controlled, and it would be possible to obtain every ship without cooperating with other players in any form.
EVE has been a success because it knows what its players want. Attempting to cater to a casual audience and become a space-based version of World of Warcraft would destroy it and drive away the vast majority of its players.