A handful of devs, in thier spare time, managed to take a new piece of kit (VR googles) and develop a functioning multiplayer game from the ground up. As far as I know the only leg up they had was existing art assests from eve. No denying this is spectacular achievement.

So why did it take a reported 7 years (5 years from the official announcement) to develop Dust 514 with an existing engine and inhouse art team?

It would be really nice if CCP could pull a "Apocrytha sprint" with dust and get it to a complete state. By that I mean, a few more maps, complete racial suits and the four races base vehicles done. Obviously there are game design teams to finish working on balance and the like too.

Some people might say, it can't be done.

But CCP lives by thier war on the impossible. Deliver it CCP.

As someone who worked on EVR I can give you a little bit of insight into this:
EVR is no where near be able to be released as a published product.

1) We used a lot of things from places like Unity asset store that make it so we can't even sell the product. We used these things to save time and cut corners.
2) The game is only launchable via a completely complicated and convoluted batch file because the launch options are insane. What I mean is it is not user friendly at ALL.
3) EVR was built knowing that all the people would be in the same room connected to a server right there on the local network.
4) When we set this thing up at E3 to demo it took us ALL DAY on Monday to do that. All day to turn on 6 computers, plug in the Rift, and install the game... yea that isn't right but should give you an insight into its actual state.
5) While it is multiplayer it doesn't talk to anything but it's own little server. No cross game stuff.
6) Lag compensation is incredibly funny in it.
7) The list goes on for a long long ways.

The thing works as a tech demo because what we demoed was the Oculus Rift. The number of corners cut, hacks made, and general wizardry in it is not something any of the team would like to release. So when it comes to the number of legs up the EVR team had compared to the DUST team, it was MANY. We didn't have to care what people thought of the product, we didn't have to make something that could be sold, we were just experimenting with some tech. We wouldn't even want to release the source in it's current state (actually we couldn't due to assets from the Unity asset store) because of how terrible some of the code is.

This is not to diminish EVR. It did what it was supposed to do. It is a fantastic tech demo and a great representation of what can be done in 7 weeks by a dedicated team... when you can cut whatever corners you want.

As someone who worked on EVR I can give you a little bit of insight into this:
EVR is no where near be able to be released as a published product.

1) We used a lot of things from places like Unity asset store that make it so we can't even sell the product. We used these things to save time and cut corners.
2) The game is only launchable via a completely complicated and convoluted batch file because the launch options are insane. What I mean is it is not user friendly at ALL.
3) EVR was built knowing that all the people would be in the same room connected to a server right there on the local network.
4) When we set this thing up at E3 to demo it took us ALL DAY on Monday to do that. All day to turn on 6 computers, plug in the Rift, and install the game... yea that isn't right but should give you an insight into its actual state.
5) While it is multiplayer it doesn't talk to anything but it's own little server. No cross game stuff.
6) Lag compensation is incredibly funny in it.
7) The list goes on for a long long ways.

The thing works as a tech demo because what we demoed was the Oculus Rift. The number of corners cut, hacks made, and general wizardry in it is not something any of the team would like to release. So when it comes to the number of legs up the EVR team had compared to the DUST team, it was MANY. We didn't have to care what people thought of the product, we didn't have to make something that could be sold, we were just experimenting with some tech. We wouldn't even want to release the source in it's current state (actually we couldn't due to assets from the Unity asset store) because of how terrible some of the code is.

This is not to diminish EVR. It did what it was supposed to do. It is a fantastic tech demo and a great representation of what can be done in 7 weeks by a dedicated team... when you can cut whatever corners you want.