If you're not familiar with Dust 514, it is a Playstation 3 exclusive FPS released back in 2013 and set in the EVE universe. Dust 514 was an interesting experiment but locking it away behind a PS3 exclusivity when the original EVE MMO is a PC only game was a rather questionable move that has now reached its sad conclusion.

So while Dust 514 is unfortunately going to kick the dust on May 30th CCP has announced they are working on a new PC exclusive FPS set in the EVE universe that will allow the team to implement everything they've learned from Dust 514 but without the technological limitations that come with ancient consoles. Here's the announcement message:

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). 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. This new project is still in an early phase of production, and we feel like we’re on the right track and plan to give an update at EVE Fanfest on April 21st as a part of the free livestream of the event.

Since this new game will be different from DUST 514 (although keeping many of its great parts), we will provide tiered recognition rewards to our loyal DUST customers, details to be announced.

As you can see this so far unnamed new FPS will essentially be a sequel or a spin-off to Project Legion, a game that was apparently doomed from the start due to some poor future-proofing from the team. And while Project Legion might never see the light of day the game that follows it should in theory be a lot better as it has two games worth of experience to draw from.

My only hope with this new project is that it successfully connects EVE the MMO and EVE the FPS because I can only imagine what great stories would appear if big EVE corporations had squads of elite FPS players on their payroll. Dust 514 attempted something similar but it never even came close to the full potential of the premise so I look forward to seeing how Project Legion's successor will handle things.

As of right now however we have basically no information and will need to wait for the EVE Fanfest to begin on April 21st. The one thing we do know is that the PS3 exclusive Dust 514 will be discontinued on May 30th with the silver lining in all of this being a loyalty discount on (most likely) the new shooter.