Although Icelandic developer CCP Games launched its EVE Online-integrated first-person shooter Dust 514 just last year, the team has decided that its universe is just too big for one shooter. In a blog post this morning, the studio announced Project Legion, a second shooter tied to the massive, venerable space sandbox, EVE Online. The game is in early development by CCP’s team in Shanghai, and it’s coming to PC.
The goal of this new project is suspiciously similar to the stated goals of Dust 514 when it launched: namely, to “merge a deep sandbox experience with an FPS in New Eden, to create a massive living world more meaningful as real life,” centered around four pillars of “a fun and balanced competitive shooter; player vs. environment allowing for emergent behaviors; a player-driven economy that is distinctly CCP; and deep immersion that brings it all together.”
Why the new game, then? Apparently CCP feels that Dust didn’t quite hit the mark, so Project Legion amounts to a do-over. Executive Producer CCP Rouge elaborated: “We realized we would never be able to do it by iteration, any more than one could overhaul the engines of a plane in flight, and to do this right it would need to become something new — a distinct and separate experience from what we’ve previously offered on Dust 514.” Fans of Dust needn’t worry, though, as CCP is committed to continued development on both projects separately, and the prior game still “has a lot more shooting-in-the-face action to come.”
Project Legion will see you join the ranks of New Eden’s mercenaries, scanning the universe for battles and loot to scavenge. Shooting mechanics and environmental interactions have been overhauled so as to encourage more “emergent” gameplay. It also wouldn’t be a CCP game if it didn’t require a PhD in Economics to fully understand. Scavenged loot can be used or sold on the open market, generating one of the player-driven economies for which the studio is so well known.
With its usual commitment to community involvement early in the process, we’ll no doubt be seeing a lot more of Project Legion in the coming months.
