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Free-to-play PS3 shooter DUST 514 is to close down on May 31, making way for a new PC shooter being developed on Unreal Engine 4, CCP has announced.
“We are very proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished with DUST 514 on PlayStation 3 over the past three years and it is an honour to be a part of such a dedicated community,” reads a community blog post. “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, 2016. 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.
“Thank you for being a part of DUST 514 on the PlayStation 3. We look forward to the next chapter, and hope you’ll be a part of it and continue the journey with us.”
This next chapter is a new PC shooter from the Shanghai development team.
“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),” explains the blog. “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.”
Although in the early phase of production, CCP believes it will be able to offer an update at EVE Fanfest on April 21 as part of a livestream of the event.
Loyal DUST 514 players will be given recognition of some form in the new game, with details to be announced at a later date.
Source: DUST 514 Forums
