PS3 shooter Dust 514 going offline

Developer CCP has said that it is calling time on online PS3’s EVE-themed shooter Dust 514.

In its place will arrive an in-development and untitled PC project that will build on what the defunct shooter tried to offer. Dust 514 will be shut down on May 30th.

We are very proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished with Dust 514 over the past three years and it is an honour to be a part of such a dedicated community,” the developer said. We consider Dust 514 one of the best free-to-play offerings on the platform, but the years have caught up with us.

It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that Dust 514 will be shutting down on May 30th. We therefore will not be releasing the 1.3 update as we had planned. Players will continue to be able to play for free on our servers until then, but all further PSN packs and purchases have been removed and disabled from the in-game marketplace and the PlayStation Store. Players with existing Aurum will be able to continue to purchase items from the in-game marketplace.”

Of the new title, the studio added: CCP’s development team in Shanghai has been working on a prototype for a first-person shooter for PC with the goal of building a great FPS set in our sci-fi universe of New Eden (the universe in which EVE Online, DUST 514, EVE: Valkyrie, and Gunjack are set). Their experience is being utilized to build a new game from scratch using Unreal Engine 4 while harnessing all our learnings from DUST 514.

This is in many ways an evolution of Project Legion, the concept we announced at EVE Fanfest 2014, but without the limitations of technical debt and development paths we quickly discovered in that effort that could never serve as a future-proof technology base for a full production game.

This new project is still in an early phase of production. Since this new game will be different from DUST 514 (although keeping many of its great parts), we will provide tiered recognition rewards to our loyal DUST customers, details to be announced.”