Player reactions to the game have been as mixed as any game of this sort can get, ranging from those who have panned it outright to those who have dedicated themselves to it so much they’ve joined the Council of Planetary Management. However DUST 514 is a console game, and the importance (however misguided) of games industry reviewers has a significant impact on new player interest and uptake. To that end, lets see how DUST is doing in the eyes of the industry by using one of the most popular — and infamous — review aggregation sites: Metacritic.

At the time of this writing, DUST’s overall score by critic reviews is 59 out of a possible 100. This isn’t as fantastic as CCP would hope to have seen, I imagine.  But as with most serious game reviews, staring at a number is the tiniest part of the story; the devil is in the details. Note that I’m going to be cherry-picking from each review, obviously for the full context I encourage you to visit each site and see their complete opinion.

The Escapist is a pretty reputable reviewer, they tend to give fair assessments of games, providing good descriptions to back up their numeric scores.

Some choppy framerate or the occasionally bit of wonky terrain geometry still hasn’t been completely smoothed out, and along the same line the textures are optimized for quantity not necessarily quality. Not everything looks that great up-close. However, the game has improved substantially over the years that I’ve seen it, and CCP is known for the constant iteration.

If you’re willing to really delve into all the facets of Dust 514, and a few technical issues, there’s a satisfying shooter with some stakes for you and your corporation mates to be found. If you’d rather not get that invested, then Dust 514 might not be for you.

Pretty even I’d say, and generally mimics my own feelings on the game so far.  There’s fun to be had, but it’s not a perfect experience.

Oh IGN. Not one of my personal favorite sites to go for …well anything.  However, it’s also extremely popular, so much so that CCP has gone out of their way to provide new trailers to IGN as timed exclusives.

For context, lets see what IGN had to say about DUST when it was previewing it back in March 2012:

But now that we’ve seen it in action and know that it actually DOES work, it’s safe to say that this is a game worth getting excited about for a whole array of different reasons. I now have confidence that CCP can actually pull this off

With that in mind, some highlights from their review:

Like a mad scientist, Dust 514 seeks to merge a free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter with a skill system more robust than most modern RPGs, and battles that decide the fate of a vast MMO universe that exists on an entirely different platform. While it sounds amazing on paper, there’s a reason most games aren’t so ambitious: because so much can go wrong.

…such ambition is in vain if you don’t have a solid foundation, and Dust’s crumbles almost from the get-go. Its wonky mechanics, weak graphics, and microtransaction fueled grind make it numbing to play long enough to explore its depth, and its persistent elements are completely lost on anyone who doesn’t already have a foot down in the EVE universe.

The contrast is striking.  This is by no means a unique thing in the industry; previews are often all roses and bubblegum while the review showcases the real opinion. I tend to find IGN one of the worst offenders for this.  I’m not saying their opinion on DUST is wrong, as they do raise some valid points. It’s the two-facedness that annoys me.

It’s interesting that the lowest of the larger reviewers comes from EDGE Magazine, arguably a well respected source of game news and reviews.

Divorced from its ambitious, cross-game context, Dust is a lacklustre shooter that provides little more than the bare-minimum framework for large, objective-based battles. The functional visuals reduce a galaxy’s worth of planets to a series of smearily textured rocky surfaces that seem to have rolled off the production line next to the one making Dust’s prefabricated industrial buildings.

Combat has about as much personality as the bleak, dust-blown worlds. There’s none of Halo’s gently exaggerated physics, Shootmania’s relentless velocity or Call Of Duty’s immediacy. There’s just shooting people with guns, albeit while battling against some suspect hit detection and sludgy controls.

Now I don’t agree with the score nor do I agree with some of the points being made. The reason for this is that in some cases it seems like the reviewer may not have spent a significant time investigating some of issues noted, which may have given some more perspective on why certain choices were made with the designs.

To conclude, one has to take any professional reviewer’s opinion with a grain of salt. These folks usually don’t spend as much time with individual games as I’m sure they’d like, and there’s always the usual controversy of the practice of shilling for developers and publishers. Scores alone never tell the whole story, and even low scoring reviews will have some excellent points to make on what works with DUST 514.

So, why should we care about this at all? Well, EVE Online’s done really well for itself since its release, and I would have no problem saying the majority of that success was due to word of mouth advertising. Contrasting this, bad reviews are murderous to games like DUST 514. Lets face it, there’s a lot of competition out there for first person shooters on consoles, and the average shooter player is going to stick with franchises they’re both familiar with and can play with their friends. DUST being free to play lowers that barrier to entry significantly, but everyone can agree that there is a significant grind involved that can eventually degrade long term interest. Potential new players are much more likely to read a review and decide the game’s not worth their time.

After a month I was hoping for much more positive reviews for the bigger names that people tend to pay attention to. With luck, DUST 514 will be something they will stick with on their personal time and get the itch to revisit it later as CCP continues to support the game. It has a lot going for it with regards to long term play, not the least of which is the support of a developer who actively listen to what the players want and need.

Sources:

• DUST 514 Metacritic Page

The list goes on, but now we’re lucky to be treated to a day in the life of CCP WhiteTrashNoise, one member of Team Klang who are largely responsible for me turning back up the volume slider in the settings menu after years of space silence. The audio in EVE has evolved massively over the last couple of years, and with Odyssey things continue to be tweaked and improved; this new blog shows us how these changes were accomplished.

To create a whole new jump sequence when the actual jump is performed I was greatly inspired by a feature I had previously made sound for, the micro jump drive module.  It has a charging period, a jump and an arrival which is different depending on whether you are the ship actually jumping or you are a 3rd party witnessing a jump. I took apart the old jump gate sounds and began manipulating the sound when being fired away through the jump gate and used those waveforms to design a sort of traveling sound, which could then be used to morph between the jump gate sound and going through the wormhole.  In this way no matter what jump sound is used, we are certain that the sound of traveling will always fit the actual jump as well as the arrival.

The complexity of the audio system EVE wields is quite impressive. Instead of just playing the same audio asset no matter what, thought is put towards contextualizing its use for the player and also the observers. The reuse of existing sound assets for new audio means that new sounds will situate themselves naturally with everything else.

The audio team is working hard to get more “Information” in EVE’s soundscape.  This doesn’t mean that this information is a game or experience changer, but more that this is sound that is adaptive to the current situation; it may be very small changes but they are, none the less, important.

Such changes could be that the undocking sound is faction dependent, so depending on your ship’s faction and the type of station you are in the sounds will generate differently.

It’s not so much that they put these little details everywhere, it’s the forethought to leave it open to even more depth to be added later, such as the above point about having faction specific undocking sounds.

The new experience will be that you are dying. And I mean really dying like only a frozen space corpse can.

The sound of the explosion is now much more prominent (to complement with the new visual sequence of the players body floating in space) and is accompanied by the sound of the defeated capsuleer choking in the vacuum of space and taking his or her final breath, along with a re-spawn sound which is race and station dependent.

Name another game where you’ll see the equivalent of “Dying now sounds more realistic” in their patch notes.

…the entire soundscape is changed once entering the hacking interface.

A combination of soothing sounds, atmospheres and interaction sounds will take over, with each type of node has a unique interaction sound depending on the result of the node once clicked.  Every type of tool or object picked up has a sound.

The most important and coolest audio feature in this case is the ability to hover over the yet-to-be-clicked nodes and, as part of the soundscape, hear very subtle changes to the sounds of the computer you are trying to hack.

Having been messing with exploration a lot lately, I started to notice these little sound cues and I honestly figured they were totally random.  For the most part I’m trying my best to be quick about a hack before someone else scans down the anomaly and goes after cans I’ve not checked yet, so I never really fully paid attention to the audio details. Thinking back on it though, I can remember there being a lot of different and interesting audio cues going on for both hacking and archaeology minigames, and I’m definitely going to be paying more attention to them as a hinting detail.

These behind-the-scenes glimpses are pretty rare in the games industry. I can’t think of any other game which delves into this kind of detail about how specific aspects of the game was developed.  The history of EVE’s dev blogs show that CCP is like a proud parent, always willing to point out the achievements of its creation, big and small, and the role they took in its development.

EVE’s always been full of these tiny meticulous details in places you’d never imagine, even though for the most part they’re completely unnecessary. That said, I still love that they are there.  They’re like little signatures made by the developers, indicators of the care and attention brought to the game by the individuals working on it.

Sources:

• An Audio Transition: Introducing Odyssey’s New Transition Sounds
  

… and then ruin it, with that terrible voicework right at the end. Bleh. Still, there’s some great showcasing of new exploration content and environments, as well as the hilarious use of a Nemesis stealth bomber throughout.

EVE Online: Odyssey has been deployed. The 19th free expansion for EVE Online brings a new age of discovery to New Eden with new exploration challenges and improved career missions to support and guide pilots through the new changes.

EVE Online: Odyssey also brings a whole host of visual and usability improvements including the new radial navigation tool, an improved soundscape, and dynamic transitions that replace many of the loading bars of old, as well as four new Navy Issue Battlecruisers, a rebalance of Navy Issue ships, improvements to starbases andnull sec outposts, and a new spacescape for New Eden.

The full patch notes for Odyssey are available (link below), and are insanely huge.  So huge in fact that I don’t even want to start discussing them here, since it would turn this post into a book.  Instead, lets peek at a word cloud of the patch notes content:

As I’ve discussed in previous posts here, there’s a LOT of changes coming to facilitate the exploration concept of this expansion. But there’s also a ton of quality-of-life fixes and tweaks, more ship balancing, Navy ships, and just a ridiculous pile of updates and features that will no doubt affect you in some way no matter what you do in game.

The servers are up, the patches are ready, so get out there and get exploring.  I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s opinion on this patch, so if you have something to say please feel free to toss an opinion or two in the comments.

Update 1:

CCP have released a neat training video showing off some of the archaeology/hacking concepts in Odyssey.  It’s worth of a watch if you’re curious what the new minigame is like.

 Sources:

• Odyssey Patch Notes
• Odyssey Issues Thread
• Odyssey Feedback Thread

The good news: things are working fine again, CCP has plugged the security hole with space spackle, and reports that no customer data was compromised in the process.

CCP have released the following statement about the downtime experienced by both EVE Online and DUST 514 this weekend:

At 02:05 UTC June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers.

Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 UTC, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.

While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, at 14:51 UTC we became aware of additional information that led us to re-evaluate our decision. With the highest sense of precaution we took the decision to take Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure.

What we can now confirm is that a person was able to utilize a vulnerability in one of the back-end services that support the operation of the Tranquility server. This vulnerability has now been secured and thoroughly tested.

We would like to stress that at no time was customer data compromised or accessible in any way.

The effort of returning the complex server structure of the EVE Universe and associated websites to service in a methodical and highly-scrutinized fashion began hours ago and Tranquility has now been brought online (at 10:13 UTC). Our teams will monitor the situation carefully in the coming hours to ensure that our services are accessible and that all customer data remains secure.

We will be looking at ways to compensate players in both EVE and DUST for the outage and expect to announce what that compensation will be very soon.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our players on EVE Online and DUST 514 for their patience and understanding during this unexpected downtime and the investigation. We are grateful for your support, as always.

Regards,
Jón Hörðdal Jónasson,
Chief Operating Officer
CCP

With the recent attacks against gaming sites resulting in customer and billing data being lost and certificates being stolen for use in the proliferation of malware, I can only applaud CCP for their approach of shutting it all down in order to properly assess the situation.  Sure unplanned downtime like this is annoying, but at least the right steps were taken in time to prevent something more serious.

The Odyssey patch appears to still be on target for release tomorrow on June 4th, however CCP have already stated they have delayed the signups for the next Alliance Tournament by one day due to the downtime.

Sources:

• Tranquility Downtime on Sunday, June 2 and Monday, June 3
• Server status graphs courtesy of EVE-Offline.net

Probe Scanning and other Goodies for Odyssey

There certainly has been no shortage of drama over the upcoming scanning changes. It seems that with every new release of information, be it official or unofficial by folks trying it out on the test server, there are more worries that the changes are reducing the complexity of probing too much. CCP SoniClover gives a giant infodump of details just ahead of Odyssey’s arrival.

Rather than delve into all the details, lets explore a few of the more interesting highlights.

The recall and expire options have been changed a bit – recall is now instantaneous and happens automatically on system jump or dock. Probes still have a timer, but instead of being lost when the timer is out, they automatically recall instead. The system remembers your last probe setup before they were automatically recalled so they can be quickly deployed again in the same pattern (by activating the launcher).

I’d like to chalk this up as a streamlined process, and sure it will save people’s time, but words like “instantaneous” and “automatic” scare me when referring to things in EVE.

We changed the terminology of some of the exploration sites:

• Radar sites become Data sites
• Magnometric sites become Relic sites
• Gravimetric sites become Ore sites
• Ladar sites become Gas sites
• The Unknown type has also been split into Combat and Wormholes.

Updating the terminology makes a ton of sense to be honest. The current system doesn’t make a ton of sense when you consider that probes don’t have an explicit sensor type like ships do. This way you know what you’ve got in your results list right away so you can make an informed decision about which scan hit you want to pursue.

As part of the work Team Five-0 is doing, Ore sites (aka Gravimetric sites) are being made Cosmic Anomalies instead of Cosmic Signatures, meaning you no longer need probes to find them.

Every so often someone hints at the current mineral system of asteroid belts becoming scannable anomalies. While this isn’t being applied across the board, could this be a hint of things to come? With ice fields no longer appearing as belts with Odyssey, things could be getting more interesting in the future for miners.

Alliance Tournament Rules and Format

CCP Bro is probably going for a word count record with his Alliance Tournament blog. There’s way too much information there to comment on explicitly, so hit up the blog in the link below. They do want folks to pay attention to the following:

Major changes from previous years that you shouldn’t miss include:

• Tournament format has been converted to one 64 team double-elimination tournament, with no pre-qualifying or group stages.
• Minimum entry payment has been reduced to 5 plex, as we pass our cost optimization improvements on to you.
• We will be providing a dedicated tournament practice server for competing teams.
• We have a new tiebreaking system that takes advantage of time dilation.
• Several ship point changes, remote reps allowed on T1 Support Cruisers and Support Frigates, and a limitation of one remote energy transfer module per ship.
• Number of identical ships allowed reduced back to three.
• Hardwirings beyond 3%s are not allowed (Leadership mindlinks are an exception)
• The ship banning system from the New Eden Open is being introduced into the Alliance Tournament during the second and third weekends.
• Flagships are immune from banning.

Whether you plan on competing in the event or viewing it, some or all of the following dates will be worth keeping in mind.

Alliance Signup Period – June 3rd until June 9th at 23:59 UTC
Live stream of the 32 team random draw – June 11th
Silent Auction Period – June 12th to the 16th at 23:59 UTC
Participating Teams & Schedule Confirmed – June 19th
Tournament Weekend One (Non-studio, no banning) – July 20th & 21st
Tournament Weekend Two (Studio, Banning active) – July 27th & 28th
Tournament Weekend Three (Studio, Banning, Finals) – August 3rd and 4th

U and I made some changes: Odyssey UI changes

CCP Karkur spills the beans on a fuckton of UI fixes coming, most of which centered around maintaining player sanity and improving quality of life for players.

The blog included the following screenshot of the right click menu improvements made to the Watch List.

This is the kind of thing that smacks you as a no-brainer for anyone designing a UI, and calls into question the decisions behind the “Before” layout. My guess is that while implementing the new radial menu changes, all of the right click menus came under intense scrutiny in order to identify most frequently used items.  However I do have to giggle a bit at an initiative designed to remove UI clutter, at odds with one designed to reduce menus within menus.

So we made a small change so now when the ship is popping off your target list because it’s dead, it will blink a few times before it disappears so there should no longer be any confusion about whether the ship went down in flames or managed to warp away. Tl;dr: It blinks: “He’s dead, Jim.” It disappears: “She got away, captain.”

The fleet window also gets some love, with current features being improved as well as copy-pasting of fleet compositions. Hit the blog for all the details on these and other changes.

I realize of course that UI is the front and center part of EVE for all of us so there are certainly efforts by other teams to improve other less in-your-face aspects of the game. However, these guys have really been impressing me with what they’ve done to the front-end of EVE. Their team is one whose blogs I look forward to reading.

EVE on Steam: Past, Present and Future

EVE’s been on Steam for quite some time now, but soon its presence will be a bit more than just a basic game storefront on the Steam Store. CCP Spitfire gives us some details about what’s coming.

Coming soon you’ll not only be able to log in to EVE with your Steam credentials, but you’ll also be able to pay for your game time through Steam’s billing service.

First of all, tomorrow you might notice a new Steam icon on the EVE web login page. This means that you no longer need to manually create an EVE Online account after buying the game activation key on Steam; instead you use your Steam credentials to log into the game and the websites. This has been made possible by the Single Sign-On (SSO) technology developed by Team GForce.

Furthermore, players who have bought EVE Online on Steam from May 31 will be able to pay for their subscription on a recurring basis and buy PLEX packages directly via Steam, thanks to the back-end work done by Team Mammon.

One of the most compelling future possibilities was mentioned as well:

Other aspects of Steam we are potentially very interested in are the Community Hub and Steam Workshop – our community team has already started looking into the possibilities here, and we would love to hear your feedback on this as well.

Now those who’ve played other popular Steam games such as Team Fortress 2 will have already perked up their ears about this point. For those who don’t know, Steam Workshop opens up a whole world of community-created content possibilities for games. Who knows what kind of interesting things CCP could enable through this, but the success of the Steam Workshop with other games proves that it’s a viable platform for fan made content.

Summary

All in all, this has been a really busy week for dev blogs, not entirely unusual as the Odyssey expansion is right around the corner and major feature development has probably been frozen for a while.  There’s a lot of cool stuff coming, and it’s always nice to have the sneak peeks.

Sources:

• Probe Scanning and other Goodies for Odyssey
• Alliance Tournament Rules and Format
• U and I made some changes: Odyssey UI changes
• EVE on Steam: Past, Present and Future

It’s no secret that EVE has a considerable reputation as having a user interface that’s more like an office application suite than a game. Over the last year or so, CCP has put a ton of effort into improving the game’s interface and making things a lot more usable, while at the same time keeping the functionality intact. With Odyssey, the first steps towards revitalizing the mouse clicks you make on your most common tasks is coming. I decided to take these new changes for a spin on Singularity.

Clicking and holding the left mouse button on your ship pulls open the new eight-slice radial menu. CCP has previously written that all the radials will contain eight slices, making sure the items on that menu will be the ones that should be there. The overall concept is simple:

• Primary functions at 12:00
• Submenu at 3:00
• Targeting at 6:00
• Show Info at 9:00
• Navigation options each of the 45 degree slices

In the case above, the ship is missing a couple of slices since you can’t target yourself, nor can you do something weird  like orbit yourself.

Zipping your pointer to the right changes the side three slices to let you reset the camera and bookmark your current location. The action can be performed quickly.

Other menus are available for items like planets and stations, each with their own tailored set of commands.

Items on the overview will also show the new radials, and this is where the interface kind of accidentally hits itself in the face while reaching for greatness. Two competing visual styles come together like milk and lemon juice, turning the simplicity of the overview into a Mensa test. It’s still functional, but I wonder if the clutter at the wrong time might lead to an undesirable outcome.

The other place receiving radial treatment is the HUD. Specifically, the scanner button now flings out a four slice menu, letting you (clockwise from top) toggle on the new sensor overlay, activate directional scanning, analyze moons, and jump into the probe scanner.

So far I’m interested in the direction they’re going with this. Radial menus normally aren’t the most awesome UI concept, but CCP’s method of implementing them shows a considerable amount of forethought. Using them can be fast and intuitive, and the consistency of where commands are located means that with very little practice you can probably fire off commands faster than the normal right clicking method.

Nice job, Team Pony Express.

]]> http://www.warpdriveactive.com/2013/05/27/the-radial-menus-of-odyssey/feed/ 0 http://www.warpdriveactive.com/2013/05/21/comic-184-pimp-my-patch/ http://www.warpdriveactive.com/2013/05/21/comic-184-pimp-my-patch/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 00:53:49 +0000 Michael Lastucka http://www.warpdriveactive.com/?p=2084 Today’s epic patch contained a single patch note: “EVE Client fixes related to the new Single Sign On mechanism”. Sounds simple enough, but the result was a launcher that didn’t work at all. They got on a fix as soon as possible, and things are currently working just fine with the new launcher looking pretty snazzy.

The downside is for some people (myself included) your user preferences will be screwed when you fire the game up.  If that happens, check out the post by Byrrssa Crendraven in this thread that details a fix, which will involve moving around some settings files. Remember to back up both source and destination folders first.

Update: Just a heads up to folks, an easier fix for the user settings issue is to simply shut down EVE, close the launcher, and then reopen it.  Your old settings should then be ready to rock and roll for you.

Also, the comic is meant to be ironic, so yes it doesn’t fit the meme 100% on purpose. :)

…we will do away with the usual format of qualifying rounds and group stages and go for a double elimination bracket format from the start.

This time around there will be no qualifying and group stages to deal with, as the tournament is entirely defined as a double elimination bracket. I always found those other stages to be a bit of a drag, doing more to provide intel on the other teams’ composition and tactics. I imagine that this change will result in more espionage of teams testing their fleet compositions on Singularity. That kind of metagaming is something I’ve always chuckled at, since its such a quintessential EVE thing.

This Alliance Tournament will also include bans, similar to popular competitive games such as DOTA. This is new to Alliance Tournaments, but was featured in the New Eden Open where it seemed to work pretty well.

The big controversy so far is over the final change, where by the dev blog posted on May 15th states that you can only fight alongside an alliance you’ve been on since downtime… on May 15th.

Now people come and go from alliances all the time, and often the friendships between pilots and their former corpmates will persist. Historically, some Alliance Tournament teams have been assembled like an internet spaceships version of The Avengers, with some teams made up of PVP pilots from all over the place. Alliances will bring in others to either buff their teams with highly skilled pilots, or sometimes just to let someone they know compete in the limelight for fun. CCP Fozzie explains the spirit behind this change to the rules:

Alliance Tournament is essentially the Olympic Games of EVE. People can move from one country to another, but it’s intended that you represent the country that you claim as your own the whole year round.

You can probably predict the resulting action on the forum. To be honest I agree with points on both sides.  The Alliance Tournament isn’t necessarily about stuffing your team with ringers, however there are those who might have floated away from their alliance that would like to compete with their friends. For the latter cases, there is a silver lining:

In cases where a corp or member are caught by surprise outside of *their* alliance for one reason or another, we can make exceptions to get them back in. What we don’t want is people jumping from one alliance to another just for the tournament.

If you have a request for an exception, send a petition to the community queue and we’ll take a look. But if you’re trying to move from your home alliance to another one just for the tournament, I don’t expect we’ll grant those requests.

A simple petition to “Other Issues > Community” to present your case should do the trick.

Along with the announcement comes a call for more commentators. If you think you’ve got the skills to present the tournament to the masses, feel free to hit up the dev blog for details on how to do so.

We will once again be opening up the application process for players who would like to be PVP commentators. These elite players are handpicked by us to fly out to Iceland for the tournament finals played over the final two weekends, joining the team here at CCP HQ to help us run the live broadcasts.

A free trip to Iceland isn’t a bad deal, however commentating Alliance Tournaments is not really a vacation trip. Raw knowledge of EVE gameplay isn’t going to guarantee that people are excellent presenters, and I can’t imagine the challenge it is for CCP to hand pick those with the right combination of game smarts and people skills. Nobody wants to see someone flip to “deer caught in headlights” mode when the cameras hit them.

Applications for the position close May 26th, so if you’re interested definitely throw your name in sooner than later.

Sources:

• Alliance Tournament XI… And a Call for Commentators

Team Prototyping Rocks has been working hard on improving the depth of gameplay that explorers will enjoy in their day to day lives. The devil is in the details and until this release the details behind Hacking and Archaeology have been very sparse. Our brief was to make the tasks you do in sites much more immersive and interactive.

Now I’ll admit that hacking/archaeology in EVE has never been one of those things I’ve fiddled with a ton.  It’s not that there’s no reward for doing it, it’s just that the activity itself isn’t awfully exciting. With the upcoming Odyssey expansion, CCP is hoping to change that for the better.

Instead of the current mechanic of shooting all the NPCs in a site, and hitting locked containers with your specialized module until they open, and looting the contents when it unlocks. If you’ve done salvaging then you can see the similarities here. With Odyssey will come a new minigame, pitting you against the device you’re trying to unlock.

The window shows the user the computer system mapped out as a network of interconnected nodes. One of the node’s contents is already visible as this was the penetration point of the activated module. Users hack a system by exploring the nodes adjacent to the nodes that they have already explored. Their goal is to find the core or cores in the system and taking them over by destroying them.

If all this sounds a lot like something you may have seen before, here’s a screenshot from Deus Ex: Human Revolution for comparison.

Deux Ex’s hacking was an easy to grasp concept that could still present challenges as the game progressed, and I feel it’s an excellent thing to draw inspiration on.  The addition of a minigames to EVE in order to spice up the hacking and archaeology processes is a fantastic one in my opinion, adding an element of randomness and interactivity to what is a mostly passive process right now. The blog also speaks of future enhancements which will bring more variety to this in the future.

Your success in the game is rewarded with a kind of loot piñata of sorts, whereby the contents of whatever you’re trying to get into spill out into space and disappear after a few seconds.

Once the core is destroyed the system has been hacked and the module forces the site to scatter its contents from the cargo hold into the vacuum of space. The hacker, his friends and anyone else around can then collect the scattered contents. We’ll be releasing another devblog shortly that will go into details of how the contents of the site are distributed and how they are collected.

It looks awesome when it happens, and I like their concept of teaming up with others providing a benefit to collecting the loot. Most people will probably do this solo, and I’m willing to bet someone will come up the perfect ship setup to collect it all without needing others, but CCP’s sentiment with this is a good one.

Odyssey is proving to be an interesting expansion for me. Playing around with some of these features on Singularity gives me that sci-fi nerdy feeling of exploration that wormholes did when they first came on scene.  There’s just something cool about jumping to a new system and having a sensor sweep light up the anomalies for you. In systems you frequent, it’s a little like discovering a new room in your house you didn’t know was there.

Since it was first introduced, very little has been done to keep things fresh and interesting; hell, I’m sure there’s a huge percentage of people who didn’t even know it existed, much less gave it a try or focused on it as a profession. My hope is that making this kind of content more front-and-center to more people gives CCP incentive to continue to develop it.

Sources:

• Hacking in Odyssey

Introduction

CCP unveiled changes to DUST 514 during its Fanfest this year, showcasing massive improvements to almost every aspect of the game. With this week’s release of the Uprising 1.0 patch, a lot of these anticipated improvements have been applied, and with the game shedding its beta clothes we should finally be able to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced.

The Upgrade

To say this is “a patch” is a tremendous understatement. The patch notes for Uprising 1.0 would probably be blank if they pointed out things they didn’t update, so you’re pretty much re-downloading the entire game over again. For me, this process was exacerbated by a patch for my PS3 itself, so I ended up with a painful trifecta of PS3 patch, DUST 514 patch, and DUST 514 content update when the client finally did launch.

This isn’t really CCP’s fault, it’s more of an issue with the PS3 update architecture, however it’s worth noting in case you think you’re going to be playing in five minutes. In the end, they’re able to push out content updates to make changes rather than deal with the onerous console patching process, and that means quick responses to most issues with the game. This is a good thing.

Initial patching aside, one of the things announced at Fanfest — to much applause from the audience — was a faster launch time to actually just get into DUST. I could fold a load of laundry in the time it took for the DUST 514 beta to boot up. With Uprising this time has been cut down to a fraction of what it was before, so you’ll go from the PS3 menu to standing around in your quarters queuing up for battle in no time. My own timing showed that from the moment the ESRB logo shows up on screen to when I was in my quarters took around 1m08s. To say that’s a massive improvement from before is an understatement.

Renovations All Around

Once you get your way past the silly unskippable PlayStation Move instructions (seriously, Sony?), one thing is immediately apparent: attention has been paid to almost every single aspect of DUST 514’s user interface. The basic artwork and layout of all the UI is totally overhauled, and is all much more intuitive.

If you were playing before Uprising, all your skills and fittings will have been removed and you will have a giant pile of money and skill points to apply to your character. Special vanity and officer items are exempt from this, so don’t panic if you’ve dropped some real world cash or won something cool; they will still be there for you after the patch.

Where before there was just a spreadsheet of skills to scroll around in, you now have a skill tree. This tree gives an excellent sense of how your character can be developed that simply want there before. No matter which category of skill you’re looking at, the progression is clear and concise. You can purchase and/or train each skill from the tree, decide immediately how you want to specialize your mercenary and figure out what skills you should be looking at in order to accomplish your goal.

The Neocom itself has had a few changes, mostly centered around usability. The overall design is still the same, but they’ve corrected font sizing so things are less cramped. This also means that you don’t need to be an owl to read the text, and the developers have had to be more smart with organizing their content.

Crisp New Suits

Prior to Uprising, there were four suit types that were evenly spread among the four factions in EVE. This time around, each race has four suit types of their own with special bonus for each race and role (Edit: currently only Amarr has a Heavy dropsuit). The result is a much more balanced set of blank canvases to work with when fitting up your characters.

Racial variants are present for weapons and vehicles as well, so if you’re a die hard fan of a particular faction you can deck yourself out in the appropriate gear. This is awesome in cases such as when you want to do some logistics for your team, but prefer to not dress in Minmatar Duct-Tape Chic to do it.

I’ll take a moment here to tip my hat to the character modelers for DUST: the suits look great. Looking at the different races’ suits with their role variants and other variations, they’ve managed to capture the design language of those races from EVE while having the designs make sense for their intended roles. that’s a real challenge to do, and they pulled it off while making them all look completely badass.

The Map

There used to be a map in DUST at one point, but it was removed because well… it was terrible. They didn’t just bring it back, they’ve introduced a spectacular new way to look at the EVE cluster.

The new map presents the user with a top-down, flattened, minimalist view of the regions of EVE. This is perfect for console users to be able to pan around and explore the cluster, seeing where conflicts are situated and for what reason. Filters are available to highlight systems which are embroiled in Faction Warfare or Corporation based conflicts.

Selecting a single region zooms in to show the constellations present within.

Continuing into a constellation displays all the systems within that constellation.

Finally, selecting a specific system twirls out an abstract view of the celestials present there.

Selecting any planet that is capable of supporting ground-based combat shows the districts present there and what state of conflict each is at. Along the way, you’re told if there are any active conflicts occurring in those areas, and can join them in progress after choosing what side to go with.

It’s all really slick, and for DUST players who may not be familiar with the layout of EVE it’s a cool way for them to get familiar with it. I’m sure there’s plenty of folks playing EVE Online that wouldn’t mind the ingame map to include a similarly slick style of interface.

Joining The Fight

It’s at this point that Uprising starts to really show its most impressive stuff. The general feel of combat in DUST 514′s beta was one of the major gripes I had with the game, and I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case.

Finding a match to join hasn’t changed much, other than having the option to drop in to one in progress via the map. The usual three categories of matches are present, however there are now three match types instead of just the previous two: Skirmish, Ambush, and Ambush OMS (Off Map Support). The latter variant is new to the game, and is basically identical to the Ambush type with one key difference. Periodically, resources such as supply depots and turrets are dropped in for either side to capture and use against the others.

The user interface improvements are apparent almost immediately. The extremely basic, clunky deployment screen has been replaced with a much more intuitive version. You don’t see your full list of fittings unless you want to change it, you can see match statistics and observe the map. It’s faster, cleaner, tells you what you need to know without being a sluggish mess.

When your boots hit the ground one thing’s apparent: CCP has been hard at work on making combat feel right.

If one were to compare this to the first day of beta release, I’m almost entirely confident that all the things you can equip and fire at someone have had significant tweaks for balance and use. Guns have distinct feels to even same-class weapons, grenades aren’t the mini-nukes they first originally were (thankfully CCP patched those a little while into beta), and the vehicles no longer feel like your neighbor’s DualShock just accidentally synced with your console somehow.

I found there was less of the “getting killed by the uber gun of the week” effect that was present prior to the weapon tweaking, and grenade spam is almost non-existent. Even with basic starter gear I was still relatively effective in combat, and moving up into higher tiers of gear helped, but didn’t guarantee I’d be steamrolling the other team. This is exactly what it needs to be like.

I still find that team support in random matches is rare, there’s not a lot of people who bother to revive you and there’s little incentive to go after someone else, since they tend to just respawn rather than wait. For a team-based shooter, this is still an issue, however I’m almost 100% positive that joining a player corporation and working with them in matches will resolve this issue. It’s really just the random player matches where it’s every man for himself.

The great part is that the previous respawn snore fest has been cut down to a much shorter wait. Instead of nodding off for 20 seconds to respawn, your downtime will be probably more like five or six seconds, occasionally longer. Shorter respawns mean less downtime, and that means more time spent on the ground taking place in the battle. The result is a game that’s more enjoyable to play.

Controls have also been tuned significantly, and the result is a much more mature feel to the game. I still have a general disliking for the PS3’s controller for this kind of shooter, however CCP has done the best job they could have done so far with it. There’s still the mouse and keyboard option, but truthfully the majority of players aren’t going to go that route. At least they’ve done their best to manage the DualShock’s horrid deadzone, and that’s no small feat. There are coming enhancements to this that have been discussed by the developers to help aid aiming more, beyond just simplistic aim assist models. As a PC gamer, nothing makes me want to vomit more than aim assists, however on the console this is a necessary evil that can offset many issues with controller accuracy.

At the end of every match, a new statistics reporting screen tells you how you did.  Beyond just a simple leaderboard for the match, you’re treated to all sorts of statistics about you performance. Some similar statistics screens are presented after each death as well, which is actually quite handy. Just like EVE Online, knowing how you died benefits you later when you’re trying to avoid it. CCP has already stated they have any statistics you can imagine, and that community suggestions will drive how these screens evolve.

The real catch is whether this all improves the overall combat experience. All of the updates from beta have significantly improved things, and its worth at least a revisit if you totally disliked the original combat concept of DUST. The controls are definitely improved, though still not up to PC mouse and keyboard level. I feel that they are close enough to other console FPS games that the issues will work themselves out over time via tweaking by CCP. As you play it more and get used to the fact that you are effectively in a spacesuit on the ground, you start to understand why movement feels stiff.

So overall I have to say yes, combat has definitely been improved and is far more enjoyable than before. You’re rewarded when you spend some time to learn the nuances, but not penalized severely if you can only play casually. I just wish there was more incentive to team play with random groups, especially in the objective based modes. Its not all perfect, but it all feels considerably less clunky and amateur and more like a shooter you want to spend time with.

Presentation 2.0

DUST 514 looks like a totally different game compared to its beta. UI improvements aside, the graphics engine looks like it’s been completely overhauled. Even standing around in your quarters, there’s a lot more detail on the environment and your character models.

The match environments…. oh wow. Beta DUST looks like amateur hour by comparison. The environments here now actually have a lighting model, allowing the artists to give each map unique character. Couple that with vastly improved textures across the board, more detailed ground and building geometry, and foliage… well, this is now something that’s competitive with other popular console shooters. Everything is crisp and clear, as if Uprising came with a new set of contact lenses for everyone.

The change reminds of EVE Online’s Trinity expansion, when considerable work was done to improve the visual quality of the game’s ships and stations. CCP made an interesting statement at the time, that finally their original vision for the EVE universe could be realized with the detail and art they always wanted to be present. I think a similar transformation has happened here as they pushed their way out of beta, whereby the game now really nails the intended vision of immersion in the world of EVE.

Overall the visual side really impressed, especially when you get all the improvements coming together. Watching the new orbital strike effect hit in the direction of sunrise, with sun rays burning through the impact of the strike with its dust and debris particles was awesome.

With a massive increase in graphics fidelity like this, one would think that the crummy framerate present in the beta would be even worse here. In fact the opposite is true, with what appears to be a slightly better framerate. Mind you we’re not talking 60 fps here, and I’d be surprised if 30 fps is achieved solidly, but it’s impressive with all things the engine is now doing. Most importantly, the framerate appears to be much more consistent than before, maintaining a solid rate without dipping into flipbook territory. I can only expect they will improve this going forward as they continue to tweak and evolve the game.

The audio side is a different beast as well. One of my major gripes was how horrid the beta sounded, from the basic audio of the UI to the totally hilarious combat noises. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case. Assault rifles no longer sound like they were made by AirSoft, with solid use of bass to really give you the feeling that you’re firing a gun from the future. Grenades pack the appropriate audio punch as well. I caught part of a flux grenade detonation and thought my home theater slipped into some weird sound diagnostic.

The music no longer consists of placeholder tracks, with new music unique to DUST that is more befitting of a game where you drop from the sky in suits and shoot people with enormous space rifles. There’s some great incidental stuff that plays in the loading screens and deployment menus, and it all works well to set the mood for the player.

Summary

In a way I find it difficult to call Uprising an improvement, when to me this is what the game should have been released to the public as in the first place. This is truly the first impression DUST needed to give to consumers, and I honestly worry that people put off by the first beta release won’t come back to retry this when they should definitely reconsider their opinion of it.

Fresh coat of awesome paint aside, Uprising represents something much more: the result of a developer actually listening to consumer input, and paying attention to the things their players are saying. Almost every single major gripe I’ve read online has had some service paid to it in Uprising, and that’s no coincidence. CCP is not the kind of developer to toss a game out and not support it for the long haul, and their experiences with the EVE Online community have taught them hard lessons about keeping a finger on its pulse.

It’s going to get harder and harder to compare this to other games on the market, simply because nobody’s doing anything quite so ambitious. Going forward, CCP is planning a lot of new and interesting additions to the game such as cooperative PVE content against rogue drones, resource gathering through district capturing, and even more compelling war economy linkages to EVE Online. All of this puts them in a genre of their own that goes beyond just simply being a good free-to-play shooter.

In my last DUST 514 blog I stated: “I have very little faith the game can and will be brought to a state that it needs to be in order to worth a long term investment of your time.” Well, apparently a little faith goes a long way.