Five years ago, a 2009 dev team, in whose shadow we live today, presented to us their vision of the first true Sandbox Shooter: DUST 514. This momentous vision came as a great beacon of light and hope to thousands of players who were bored with the monotony of the Lobby Shooter. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But five years later, the FPS player still does not have a sandbox shooter. Five years later, DUST 514 is still sadly crippled by the manacles of FPS tradition and lobby shooter mechanics. Five years later, the DUST Mercenary lives on a lonely island of FPS poverty in the midst of a vast sea of broken dreams and abandoned clones.

(10 million ISK to the first clone who can name the source material upon which I based the first two paragraphs)

My wife constantly asks me why I continue to play DUST 514. It is frequently frustrating, disappointing and downright broken. The only response I have is this; DUST 514 is a promise of a better future for the FPS genre. The promise of a sandbox shooter mirroring the complexity and intricacy that New Eden can bring. But five years later, I find myself losing hope.

Balance in the Force.
DUSTGÇÖs underlying systems (skills, destructible equipment) were built with a sandbox in mind. If you remove the sandbox and replace it with a lobby, the whole system is imbalanced. The lobby removes the cost/benefit ratio and replaces it with mostly benefits. Risk free access to gear, vehicles and installations destroys most of the incentive to play smart.

DUST mercs should have to move their assets to the battle space (and risk losing it to player conflict along the way), they should have to commit resources to the MCC BEFORE the battle begins, and if the MCC is lost, so is all that unused gear. When a player dies, they should spawn in a clone tank in the MCC. If they want to use a mobile uplink, they step into a mobile transporter and are transported to the selected mobile uplink (no spawning on objectives unless a mobile uplink is present, and mobile uplinks only accommodate 1 player at a time, so no team spawning). If the player wants a supply depot on the battlefield, they need to have committed one to the warbarge/mcc with dropsuits inside! Once those dropsuits are depleted the supply depot cannot be used. If the supply depot is destroyed, so are all the dropsuits left inside the supply depot. If a player runs out of gear, they spawn in the Warbarge and sit out the rest of the match. If players want vehicles deployed to the battlefield from the MCC, they better have RDVGÇÖs, and once those are destroyed, the player will have to return to the MCC in order to deploy their gear manually.

All these factors and more are the balance against running all Proto gear all the time. Because even though you may only die once or twice on the battlefield, those 10 other proto dropsuits or HAV's you committed to the battlefield were destroyed in the MCC because you were KDR whoring and not actually trying to accomplish objectives. It's your perogative to do this, but there is a real and balanced price if you bet wrong.

Implementing sandbox mechanics like these is the first step to making DUST the sandbox shooter we all hoped it would be. The next step after good sandbox mechanics is a good sandbox system. For this, I present you with GÇ£My DreamGÇ¥ See below.