It's been a long time coming, but Icelandic developer CCP Games is ready to plug its free-to-play multiplayer shooter
Dust 514 into its ten year old, behemoth MMORPG
Eve Online.
Dust was originally announced back in 2009, and acts as a strategic first-person shooter than both exists and connects with the
Eve universe. It's been in closed beta since last year and kept separate from
Eve, but CCP is finally ready to cross the streams.
From tomorrow, January 10,
Dust servers will be migrated into the
Eve world, and
Dust players will be able to get involved with
Eve veterans, joining their corporations and sharing information. What makes the move all that more interesting is that it's cross-platform --
Dust is a PlayStation 3 title, while
Eve Online is Windows PC and Mac.
CCP engineer "Nullarbor" notes that joining up the worlds of a subscription-based game and a free-to-play title has never been tried before on such a grand scale, and as such certain elements will not be readily available from the get-go.
For example, in a bid to keep the economic balance of each game stable, transfer of the universe's in-game currency between
Eve and
Dust isn't yet possible. "It is of course very important that we do not upset the serious business of internet spaceships," says Nullarbor.
It's also notable that all character skills and corporations in the
Dust universe will be reset as part of the migration, although CCP says that this will be the last reset to affect
Dust players.
