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Please tell me why any of this can't be done in dust?
Because the PS3 didn't work for them as a platform. Two problems. Firstly the very obvious issue of hardware limitations. Legion runs the same engine as Dust. They've spent so much time customizing UE3 that it makes more sense for them to keep using it than switching to UE4 and recreating their customization. Compare the legion vid to the dust vid. Look at how smoothly it runs while looking far, far better. Look at how poorly dust runs. Granted, this has improved in the last year, but they're still having to remove content from the game because the PS3 just doesn't have the ability to use it without having performance issues. The PS3 simply isn't capable of executing the gameplay that they want to create.
The second problem is the really big one, which comes down to project management limitations. CCP uses an agile methodology, where you release early and often (even if that release is just to a test server). This is particularly helpful when you're creating something entirely new and huge that your customers are already using, because you can get updates to users much faster then get feedback about the updates and use that to inform you for the next update. It speeds things up tremendously. On the PC platform they control their own servers and can release updates every day if they want. On the PS3 if they make any kind of server side change development basically stops for two weeks while PSN decides whether or not the update is approved. This also means that they can't give us a test server where we can log in and find all the nasty, unexpected issues introduced with an update. On PC you just create a copy of your client, change a setting and it logs into the test server instead. These things severely slow down the development cycle. This is probably the biggest factor in why we got a year worth of bug fixing and failed balancing attempts after release. No test server for players to find how changes can be abused, and when problems are found it can take a long while before they get fixed because you have to wait for Sony to approve any changes before your fix can be tried in a real environment. Then you find out your fix doesn't quite do the trick and you have to go through the whole hassle all over again. In an environment where you control the server it goes more like:
1) Deploy fix. Didn't work exactly as you wanted.
2) Alter something and deploy again.
3) Is it how you want it to be? No? Repeat step 2 until you're satisfied.
You simply can't do this on a console. It just isn't an option. Choosing to go with a console was ambitious, and from a market perspective it was the way to go. There's far more money to be made there. But from a technical perspective it was the wrong place to start. They should have created a game that matches their vision on PC first with console limitations in mind and then, once it was feature complete, push it out to a console. I'm hoping this is what will happen with Legion.
They *could* still create some links between Dust and the new sov mechanics, but they'd have to create a lot of new content and server side changes to support it and the project management limitations imposed by the console platform are just not a good match for that. And in the end it still wouldn't be the game that they actually wanted to make. I'm expecting Dust to continue on as an eve themed shooter that is very lightly connected to Eve, while Legion will become the one that is heavily linked.