8 December, 2011. CCP CmdrWang – DUST 514 Community Manager, CCP posts artwork for a few infantry light weapons designed for the upcoming DUST 514 with some explanation of "things that were important to us."
Now don't get the idea from any sarcasm below that, carpal tunnel permitting, I'm not leaping head first into DUST 514 when it finally does arrive. But that's not going to stop me from chuckling a bit over CCP CmdrWang's spin for "the community."
He writes:
- Firstly, we wanted to avoid the feeling of “Vietnam in space” that you sometimes see in sci-fi games. The goal was to create weapons that had recognizable roles but used more advanced technologies than the equivalent weapons of today....
- Secondly, it was important to us that the weapons felt like a natural part of the EVE universe. In the same way that the ships in EVE have distinct racial designs and specialties, the weapons of DUST 514 had to encapsulate the values and technology of the race that created them....
- What we didn't want to do though, was to limit players to the use of one racial type. After all, you are a mercenary, so you use what works best for the job at hand. This way players are able to use a variety of different weapons to find what suits them best, regardless of its origin.
Which perhaps translates as:
- Vietnam is too old and, let's face it, tragic-themed for the hordes of trigger-happy pimply punks that Sony insists we target, so we must pretend infantry weapon "roles" are somehow already fundamentally different for the Imperial Storm Troopers engaged in planetary combat in Iraq and Afghanistan today, that they will be so much more so in future ground grunt combat.
- We want strong cross-marketing of EVE and Dust 514, so the pictures of these weapons will look like spaceships even if the weapons, in action, will be about as blurry as a Doom II double-barrel shotgun ... and no less fun for it!
- Itchy-twitchy console players, certainly, and MMO players, increasingly, would throw a fit if there were any storyline inhibition of their ability to pick up and pop someone, right now, with whatever weapon/armor combo is fashionably considered "The Best" this five minutes. (Which is why WoW and other, let's call them, X-MMORPGs are now little more than arcade games not worth the time of day, as the combat model and "physics" of networked FPS are so much superior.)
In any event, the samples are pretty indeed....
