Your optimism hurts my soul.

Mostly because CCP dragged me into one too many dark alleys over the past two and a half years and did unspeakable things to my own optimism.

Hold onto that innocence.

- Aeon Amadi The pessimist sees a dying IP (legion and dust combined) and a company trying to recoup whatever losses they can before scrapping the whole thing once it's no longer paying for it's own maintenance.

- The optimist gets a new patch, which was previously said not to be possible, and sees new life and actual investment into what was a dead-end game with no new content planned. They believe that further development is not only possible, but actually in the pipeline.


I think I'm in the middle. My best guess (which is worth as much as anyone else not working for CCP, which is to say, not a whole heck of a lot) is that Legion has not been canned, it's either on the back-burner due to more pressing issues with EvE development, or is on track but not fully greenlit for various reasons:

Think about it this way. You are CCP. Your big splash into the console market (really, any market that is not EvE) crashed and burned. You probably lost a lot of money; if not outright, at the very least revenue you planned on having when making your budget for upcoming years is gone. You make the hard but probably financially sound decision to scrap it and start over, but completely and utterly botch it, creating a PR disaster and angry fan base.

What's your next move? Job one is to un-alienate the fan base. Continue to **** them off and you may as well not bother making Legion to begin with. Easiest way to do that is to make cost-effective changes to Dust that improve our playing experience.

Job 2 is to right the ship and try to keep yourself from being a one-hit wonder and develop a successful second game. One thing you don't want to do is repeat past mistakes by over-promising or releasing a fundamentally broken product. Think about it: If Legion fails like Dust did, it's over. Nobody, whether they be players, investors, or upper management, is going to give them a third chance. So you have to get it right on day 1:

- Don't hype or release an unfinished game
- Don't promise ANYTHING that is not already implemented and tested
- Don't get yourself into an eternal nerf/buff cycle

How does Dust fit in? For one, it helps fund it. Thus the push to sell aurum. Two, since they run on the same engine, by far the easiest way to test your new assets is to have the Dust playerbase break them. You may or may not be happy with being a glorified playtester, but some people are probably fine with that if it means new toys in Dust and successful development of Legion.

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It really comes down to perception. If you are very suspicious of CCP, which is not unreasonable, this is dishonest, plain and simple: A cash grab and they are using whatever nearly-finished content they already had to create the illusion of continued development and will shut it down once they've squeezed every cent out of us. Caveat emptor, I guess. On the flip side, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for them to be doing things the way they are doing them.

Easy if legion dies, more time and efford for dust, what i actually prefering more boyo

Just so we're clear, I never once said that either Dust 514 or Legion was dying. I said that they seemingly had no mid or long-term plan, that there isn't any transparency at all, and gave conclusions that can reasonably be drawn from the evidence given. I'm not a pessimist in the slightest (and I'd appreciate it if you didn't act as such), if anything I'm a hopeful optimist but I'm not certainly not brain-dead enough to reasonably believe that the situation is in any way good.

That aside, by not repeating one mistake (over-promising) they're making the exact same mistake that we had in the first place (no communication). Neither of which are good for the game, the community, the studio, or the franchise.

As for the nearly finished content bit - we have every reason to assume that's the case; especially considering the recent utilization of the Caldari Production Facility which we were seeing near-completed screenshots of back in November 2013 when CCP LogicLoop was still with the company. Hell, it was -supposed- to come out in 1.7/1.8 (I can't remember which). To completely ignore that and say that it's "dishonest" is naive.

Dust 514 -DOES- have an expiration date. You can try and pretend that it doesn't and that CCP doesn't have some end-goal to turn off but it's absolutely, 100% the truth: There are no plans to provide continued, active development for the game. There are no plans to port it to the PS4. It -is- going to die someday, be it next year, five years from now, hell it could be when the PS5 is released... But it's more logical to assume that since they're already working on Legion, that at some point they're going to cease -all- focus on Dust 514 for the betterment of their own progression. That is not unreasonable for them to do. Either way, Dust 514 only lives as long as it's playerbase keeps playing it, whether Legion is out or not. That was the entire point of what I was trying to illustrate; not some "herp derp Dust 514 is dying" speech.

The catch here is that if Dust 514 -DOES- start getting development (which looks to be increasingly likely as of late) then it really does meant there is no mid or long-term plan to keep the studio in action.