Gamers ”have to pre-buy credits” to enter the MMO, which is ”something like $10-$20”. Dust 514 ”might go fully free-to-play down the line” but not yet.
”In the beginning you have to pre-buy credits, so you pay something like $10-$20 to enter the game and you get the equivalent number of credits in the game once you do that,” said CCP boss Hilmar Veigar Pétursson.
Dust 512 is an MMO exclusive to the PlayStation 3 which ties into PC exclusive MMO EVE online. ”We call this the cover charge,” he continued.
”We might go fully free-to-play down the line, but in the beginning we have a cover charge just to manage the initial launch of it.” Outside of this initial ‘buy in’ the MMO is free-to-play - the studio wants to recover their development costs.
”We might go fully free-to-play down the line, but in the beginning we have a cover charge just to manage the initial launch of it.” What content is purchasable hasn’t been decided.
”We have some initial assumptions but we’ll put it out there and see how the player base during the trials reacts to it,” said Pétursson. CCP will have to tread carefully as micro-transactions in EVE Online recently caused a huge uproar.
Dust 514 connects to EVE Online as each user-base will come to serve the other. Dust 514 will play the role of mercenary armies doing the bidding of player run corporations in EVE Online. CCP hope it adds a whole new level of strategy and interaction.
Why isn’t Xbox 360 getting Dust 514? ”Sony allows us to use our systems,” explained CCP CTO Halldor Fannar. Sony is open to letting studios do their own thing.
”Microsoft has Xbox Live. They’re very strict on that. There are a lot of issues we run into. It may be a basic thing people don’t realise, but with Dust and Eve on Sony’s network, we can allow them to chat together. Voice chat, text chat, that’s all one world.”
”One of the reasons for the partnership with Sony is because they’re opening up new ways to do these things.”
”We’re going to be managing most of it. We’re using PlayStation just for credentials, stuff like that. Then it’s all our stuff,” he continued.
”With our agreement with Sony they seem to be fine with our three month expansion cycle. They’ve been looking at the MMO space for a while, trying to understand why something like that hasn’t still happened on the console. They’re coming to terms with it. There are certain things they have to relax just to allow these things to function.”
Are you looking forward to Dust 514, videogamer? It’s due in spring 2012.