I'll preface this by saying that I'm sure people are going to refer back to the famously steep learning curve and harsh unwelcoming environment of EVE. That works for EVE. I love EVE, and the unforgiving and risky environment is part of what makes it great. But there is a key distinction - there is no other game like EVE. If you want to play anything like EVE, there is EVE, and only EVE. If it has warts and faults you have to put up with them.

Not so for Dust. If I want to play a scifi fps...I have unbelievable amounts of options. I chose to give Dust a try because I really love EVE and want to love Dust as well. However it doesn't seem to love me back. As an FPS, it seems to be distinctly mediocre and suffer many glaring faults.

1) The new player experience is pretty horrific. Not *quite* as bad as the new player experience in Planetside 2, where they just hurled you into the middle of a massive firefight as the very first thing in the game. My first kill there was a friendly medic who was wearing camo and healing me and I had no idea what was going on. It's not quite that bad here, but it's pretty bad. You have no idea what's going on, what you are supposed to be doing, how to not die over and over instantly. I know how fittings work from EVE, but scanning seems pretty important and is never explained anywhere. Sometimes you'll unload an entire clip into a guy, he'll casually turn and kill you. Othertimes you drop someone in 3 bullets. It all seems wildly inconsistent. New players can't learn if they can't tell what is going on. The information conveyed by the death screen in PS2 is pretty bad and I feel like this one is even less informative.

2) Spawn camping. Most games seem to go out of their way to prevent spawn camping. This game downright encourages it! Part of that is the way the different spawn options work, and I understand why they have done it the way they have, but a new player isn't really going to figure that out. All he's going to know is he keeps spawning and then getting instantly mowed down. Maybe some sort of visual indicator of 'safe' spawn points vs non safe spawn points?

3) Orbital strike. Thematic, yes. Gameplay wise, I think it's horrible. Particularly as people seem to like to drop it on spawn points. Plus, roofs don't seem to protect you.(?)

4) Matchmaking: Atrociously bad. There are almost no close fights, it's almost all hilarious one sided blowouts. Usually there's a couple guys running around from the same corp going 12/0, 16/1 or whatever, and everyone on the other team is like 2/8 or something. Sometimes you're on the team with the miracle crew, sometimes you're not. Either way, the success or defeat is pretty much pre determined for you by the matchmaker and your actions have no impact

5) Extremely poorly explained victory conditions: one match where there were no amazing 20/0 killers just wiping everyone out, it was a close match. Our MMC was very close to death, theirs was a little farther away. With a heroic effort, we managed to capture ALL the null cannons! And there was much rejoicing. Now we just have to ferociously defend them for a few more seconds until their MMC dies and..oh wait, what? Our MMC just blew up anyway? But there are no null cannons shooting at it! This wouldn't be a big deal if the game weren't full of moments telling you that what you are doing doesn't matter

6) You feel you aren't having any kind of impact at all and that what you are doing barely matters. Ok, so we're anonymous mercenaries doing whatever we want.. That's nice, but when one day I'm fighting for the Gallente in FW and the next day I'm fighting against them in FW, it really makes me not care a bit about the way the match actually ends and mostly about my own performance in it. And even your own payout seems to be mostly divorced from your actual performance. I seem to get about the same amount as when I own it up and kill 10 people and we win and I suck horribly and die 10 times and we lose. Your allies one match might be your enemies the next. One minute you're fighting at this end of the Universe the next you're fighting at the other end. Shrug. It all feels very ephemeral and pointless.

Contrast this to Planetside 2, where you are locked into one faction, the other factions are your hated rivals, you will come to trust and rely on other people in your faction and hate and watch out for other people in the other faction. At any moment, you can pop open the map and see how well 'your' faction is doing. You can organize with hundreds of other players from your faction and spend the whole day slowly sweeping across the map and turning it all blue. Each fight is a necessary stepping stone to the next fight, not a random disconnected pointless skirmish in the middle of nowhere. There is an ongoing war and at any moment you can see how it is going and you know your part in it.


(more below, apparently there is a fairly low character limit?)