In the second part of our look at CCP's Dust 514 (read part one here), creative director Atli Mar Sveinsson elaborates on how the game will intersect with the world of Eve Online, with Eve's corporations ordering battles in Dust to claim control of planets.

CCP doesn’t want to damage its crown jewel in the process of expanding upon it. “We understand Eve very well at this point,” says Sveinsson. “The political system is so deep that I don’t think something like Dust could actually harm it.” And as for the perspectives of fiercely territorial Eve players themselves? “I think opinion is kind of split,” he admits cheerfully. “There are naysayers. It’s not that they don’t like the concept, they’re just concerned about putting the fate of a planet into the hands of console people. But the use of that system is entirely up to them. If they want to use mercenaries to attack someone, they can. If they don’t, they don’t have to. And you have another, bigger part of the community which has already seen the value, and they’ve started recruiting Dust players and organising them. The more we tell people, the more the userbase accepts it.”

“In terms of connecting the games, the word we’ve started to use is ‘meaningful’,” agrees Emilsson. “Potentially, you can change the world, and others can see your changes. That’s entirely new. If we manage to make a meaningful connection between Eve and Dust, then the whole thing is going to work: to have a single gameworld which you access through different clients and different game logic is very inspirational to us.”



Such meaningful interaction is likely to emerge over time, as CCP will be easing the games together cautiously, depending on feedback as to what the players themselves actually want from the pairing. “We have aspirations to add on to Dust twice a year – we have plans for expansions like we have with Eve, and we’ve already drafted out a wishlist of things,” says Sveinsson. “These will involve more involvement for Eve players with Dust, but we’re being very careful. Take the economy: this needs to be regulated at first, as the exchange rate of ISK [Eve’s in-game currency] cannot be affected by one game or the other too much at the start. Eve is a player-driven economy, Dust will use a hybrid model and then, as we learn more, we’ll deregulate in stages. The players of Eve have always been the greatest source of awesomeness. We tend to facilitate the things they invent for themselves, helping them to make their ideas work. Dust will be that sort of thing all over again.”

The excitement for the project is palpable, yet the team isn’t entirely relying on quirky use of existing IP to make a name for its new game – particularly in a console market where a niche PC product might have little cachet. “Dust is a game in its own right and an MMO in its own right,” Sveinsson insists. “Some of the players will know about Eve, but not a majority of them. Others will come to it as a shooter, and hopefully the deeper experience will just unravel. The trick for us is to not force players to understand it, but to guide players towards the good stuff.”