CCP's Olafsson: 'The Shooter Market Is Ready' For Dust 514CCP's Olafsson: 'The Shooter Market Is Ready' For Dust 514

Author: by Staff

As part of a new Gamasutra feature interview, EVE Online creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson tells us that players want persistent, meaningful shooters -- and that opens the door for PlayStation 3 FPS tie-in Dust 514. Dust 514, which is under development at CCP Asia in Shanghai and due to launch on the PlayStation Network as a downloadable title in 2012, hooks directly into the same server infrastructure as the PC MMO EVE Online. This means that the player bases are unified across the two different games, as are the in-game economies, chat channels, and more. EVE creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson says that the time has come for a shooter with this scope of connectivity. According to Olafsson, his experience with the highly-engaged player base for the MMO tells him so. "Fifteen years ago, people wouldn't have told you that somebody would care about as much about EVE as they do about an MMO. Or 20 years ago, before MMOs existed," says Olafsson. "We think the shooter market is ready for this. People want to do this. They have been assembling in clans, and they've been fighting, but never for a proper purpose -- always for a position on a leaderboard, or some random achievement. But conquering the universe with tens of thousands of other people? That's just mind-numbingly cool, I think." Dust 514 producer Thomas Farrer told Gamasutra in a prior interview that the company hopes that "through the connection to that universe and to the players of EVE, you still become part of that meaningful world." According to Farrer, the console game is an attempt to make the EVE universe "more accessible." The full interview with Olafsson, in which he discusses how the creative seeds planted at EVE's inception are now coming to bloom in its connection with Dust 514, is live now on Gamasutra.