Dust 514 Attempts to Take Epic Scale to Epic Levels

If you haven't already heard about DUST 514, it's a new FPS that takes place in the universe of EVE Online.  EVE Online is an MMO sci-fi game with its own economy of corporations and populations spread throughout.  The premise of DUST 514 is that corporations will literally battle over important worlds, handing out contracts to DUST mercenaries to do their dirty work. 

DUST 514 offers a unique gameplay hook.  The skirmishes and battles players take part in will actually have an impact on the world of EVE Online.  Planet side battles can be influenced by players in EVE via support roles.  An EVE player with a warship can provide orbital strikes to opposing forces and swing the tide of battle.  If the EVE player gets distracted though, his allies on the ground could be overwhelmed instead.  It's a brilliant idea and developer CCP thinks DUST 514 will be a less intimidating and more accessible entry into the EVE universe. 

Obviously getting two MMO games to carry on in harmony is a large task, especially when one is a hardcore RPG and the other is a shooter.  Lin Luo, a Server Architect at CCP discussed some of those challenges on the Playstation blog.  "Unlike traditional FPS multiplayer servers, we will host DUST battle servers around the globe. Since the centralized server hardware resources are pretty limited in number, we have to find ways to utilize existing server resources as much as possible. Instead of having a dedicated server machine to host one battle, we aim to have a dedicated multi-core server machine to host as many DUST battle servers as possible!" 

Lin explains in the post that they have gone out of their way to keep the FPS gameplay as smooth as possible while still being able to have a good level of interactivity between DUST and EVE players.  "Unlike normal FPS multiplayer games, DUST 514 has heavy MMO elements. And unlike normal MMO FPS games, DUST has heavy interaction with one of the most successful MMO space games – EVE Online! This imposes challenges on what technologies we should use in order to have this level of interaction with EVE, while keeping FPS gameplay as smooth as possible."