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[Aria Jenneth]

CCP might be happy with a niche game for the time being, as they probably already got enough stake to develop WoD and Valkyrie.

Marketing aside, I don't think the clearer heads at CCP ever expected DUST to be anything but niche. You fit suits like Eve Online ships, for Pete's sake, and the major advantage of high-grade suits is additional slots to fill. Even a bit dumbed-down from Eve skills and fitting, it's substantially more involved than your typical shooter.

Niche is all I ever wanted or expected. Eve is niche, itself, and for good reason: it's utterly ruthless, cutthroat to the point where less-jaded gamers are frequently shocked at what is allowed. If DUST ends up any different, I will be gravely disappointed.

Personally, I'd like to see DUST move deeper into its niche: restore Eve-style skill advancement by killing the "unlock" skills, put comprehensive fitting information at our fingertips (let me see my signature profile, damn it!), or at least let us access an "advanced" mode that will show us the complete numbers, and let us see and fully interact with the full wealth of information available to Eve players.

Of course, I look on DUST as an RPG first and an FPS second, not the other way around, so making the sophisticated bits more-so strikes me as nothing but a plus. If DUST can be to Destiny what Eve is to Star Trek Online, I think it'll be in a pretty good spot.

Big if, but I'm happy to stick around and watch it play out.

[Reyd Karris]

Niche is all I ever wanted or expected.

Nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

Here's the thing; is the connection to EVE mechanics so important? What if there was another option that could be just as fun, just as deep, but worked within an FPS format?

Core mechanics are what should draw people in to the game, depth is what keeps them there. As it stands, new players look at the skills and fittings and everything else and just go "Why?" If it's a FPS, there needs to be something familiar to FPS players. The skills, fittings, etc. turn off more casual players, and that's a huge mistake.

That's what's lacking, because I can just not log in for a month or two and pump skill points into a couple skills, and then play for a couple days and get bored. Headshots to Proto armor with my Toxin AR? Fun for a day or so, then it's back to Battlefield to rank up my soldier. See you in a couple months to pump more skill points into AR.

What makes EVE so unique? It's not the skill point system. It's not the fitting system. It's the feeling that your actions matter, and while I applaud CCP for trying to do that, they needed the core FPS aspect first and foremost. With that they can maintain a small core while gaining traction with the larger gaming community. As a fan of EVE, and of FPS, DUST is not what I want right now.

Loyalty Points, building up rep with a faction, flaunting my Gallente LP store armor? Not there. That's the depth that could keep me playing, not SP boosts.

[Lyn Farel]

The skill system in eve is actually one of the biggest direct and content generated (opposed to player generated) part of the game that makes it addictive. A lot of people stay and are also hooked up because they have goals, short run and long run, and crave to pilot this or that. It works for a certain time before , well... you know.

Anyway it's different from DUST since the format is completely different (RPG slow paced, etc).

[Aria Jenneth]

Here's the thing; is the connection to EVE mechanics so important? What if there was another option that could be just as fun, just as deep, but worked within an FPS format?

....

Loyalty Points, building up rep with a faction, flaunting my Gallente LP store armor? Not there. That's the depth that could keep me playing, not SP boosts.

What you're talking about is a very different sort of depth. It's one I'd like to see, but which seems to be at least as tricky to add. Probably trickier. Also, it's not inconsistent with the kind of depth the fitting system takes.

What is so important about the Eve-style fitting is the flexibility and variety-- the room for imginative fittings and unorthodox tactics, and also for bungling things horribly and learning from mistakes. For example, my current favorite scout fit involves two sidearms (SMG and nova knives) and no primary "light" weapon. This, on its face, under-utilizes suit resources, but the net effect works frighteningly well.

The fit I use most often is efficient and affordable, meshes with my personal playstyle to near-perfection, and, best of all, is mostly something I pieced together myself over time out of a wide array of options. Piecing it together is something I actively enjoyed doing.

I am the sort of person who has been disappointed in the slowly-decreasing selection of skills, weapons, and even armor pieces in the Elder Scrolls games. I like my choices in a game to have meaning and variety, and, in general, the more a game challenges me to think, learn, and adapt, the more I enjoy it.

It's likely that Destiny will be just the sort of game you're talking about, Reyd. It's going to have a sort of dynamic ecology; did you hear about that? Fascinating stuff; apparently Bungee's not planning on scripting the changes and development in the world, instead letting it develop itself organically. If they can make it work....

But I have worries about their class system. Classes are often more than a little arbitrary and limiting. I want stealth options, but I'm not sure I want to play a Hunter; I like sniper rifles, but what's this about six-shooters? I'm okay with the "space magic" of the Traveler, but ... must I really go about "enchanting" my guns?

In DUST, I design my own character class. It's shaping up nicely. If that means having a few less playmates, well, that might be a problem taken to an extreme, but I think CCP would really be better off embracing the niche-ness of their game. People who are intimidated by the fitting aren't likely to be fans of AWOXing, corp theft, and scamming, either.

[Aelisha Montenagre]

Seemsv like CCP's friends at Sony couldn;t save them from this savaging:

http://www.officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk/review/dust-514-ps3-review-galaxy-sized-potential-marred-by-patchy-execution/

[BloodBird]

One upside Dust has over Planetside is that, well, it's on a single platform, the PS3. Which means if you buy a PS3, you can play it.

Can't guarantee that with a PC, as a number of Backstage users who play(ed) Planetside can attest.

I have no issue playing PS2 every day, in spite of it's issues. At this point it's my new main MMO, and I do love it for what it offers. Dust offers something similar, yet smaller and less accessible; you need a PS3 to play Dust, and at this rate the PS3 is soon to be obsolete - the vast majority of console-gamers will move to PS4 given what an utter debacle Xbox1 turned out to be, and guess what? Planetside 2 is coming to PS4. This means that console players who want a shooter get's two big options: Stick with the PS3 and a small and dwindling population to play Dust, or move on to the PS4 for a bigger population and a massive-in-scale alternative to Dust in the form of PS2. PS2's other strengths is that it's an open-world battlefield that never rests - it ebbs and flows as people log on and off, especially during the night, but it never really stops.

Unless CCP does something, anything, then as far as I can tell Dust will shrink up and eventually die, not solely out of a lack of effort on the part of CCP, but mostly the conditions on the gaming-market today. Releasing it as a PS3 exclusive was, IMHO, a huge fuck-up. Making it another arena-shooter with waiting lines in between matches was a mistake - even if they could hardly do anything else. Surely they can't make huge maps like in PS2 to represent the hundreds of worlds the battles will be on, even if many of those were air-less barren places where EVE players dumped their resource extractors and other players asked the Dusters to go fight.

The short and simple of it is that, unless CCP does something to deal with the bleak out-looks soon Dust won't amount to much beyond a niche little shooter tacked-on to EVE on a console only a handful bother to play on. That would be a crying shame, tbh.