Dust 514: Uprising 1.2

Dust 514, known simply as Dust, is CCP‘s, the developers behind EVE Online, first foray into the world of console games. And is just over two years old. This week on July 2 the Dust 514 development team released Uprising 1.2 which promised the community a host of new features, fixes, and gear. What follows is a break down of the new update and a few choice thoughts on it.

In the interest of full disclosure and professional journalism it should be known I am an avid member of DUST 514.

Go commando

In Dust you play the role of an immortal mercenary. If you die one of your clones is activated and you jump right back into the ground based battles of New Eden. Until 1.2 players had the choice of light, medium, and heavy armors. Each with their own advantage.

With 1.2 the community see’s the introduction of the commando style dropsuit, which is a heavy dropsuit. Unlike most heavy dropsuits the commando suits allow the user to move faster, though not by much. The game rates movements as so, a typical heavy dropsuit has a drop suit rating of 5, while the basic commando suit is rated for 5.5. So you train into the commando suit for an extra step every few feet.

So far the community hasn’t been entirely impressed with the commando’s movement ratings despite what CCP Remnant said in the Dust dev blog, “The heavy Commando dropsuit is less durable than the Sentinel but is faster and more agile, allowing you to better engage and disengage from firefights.” But keep in mind all equipment and dropsuits do come in a variety of colors, sizes, and with varying technical specifications.

The commando suit also allows you to wield two light weapons. Which is a huge change as most heavy suits you come across are welding large chain gun style weapons.

Weapons

“With Uprising 1.2 the long-awaited changes to the range system are finally in game!” Remnant said on the dev blog.  Basically this amounts to a more realistic weapons damage system.

In EVE, like in Dust, all weapons have an optimal range and a maximum range. When firing a weapon up to its optimal range you will inflict 100% of the weapons damage. Armor, shields, and other defensive equipment not withstanding. As your target leaves the optimal range your weapon does less damage. Now this is where EVE and Dust will differ. Dust weapons at their maximum range wouldn’t inflict any damage. Which isn’t realistic at all. Now the weapons damage will continue to do damage to a target that they hit all the way up to your maximum range and into the absolute range which would be the furthest range your guns bullet, laser, or other ammunition type could reach.

“As an example, the standard tier Assault Rifle’s damage will drop from 34 HP at optimal range (40m) to 10.2 HP at its effective range (65m). As we fill out the weapon roster in the coming releases we’ll be adjusting ranges based on metrics and your feedback to make sure all weapons adhere to their established profiles and fit nicely within their intended niche. To that end, we’ve adjusted the Scrambler Rifle’s optimal ranges (up to 50m from 45m for the base variant and up to 45m from 30m for the assault variant.)”

Weapons profiles are being worked on, according to Remnant. These profiles help to distinguish how a weapon works against a targets armor & shields.

The rest of it

When you log into Dust the launcher update includes a lot more updates that you won’t find on the dev blog.

• Improved weapon handling, in most cases weapons have less kick
• Log out of a character. Before you could only quit the game and would have to start the game again to select a new character.
• The Dust launcher displays the total number of players on the entire Tranquility server, which host both the Dust & EVE universes as a single game.
• A call for help button has been added to the death screen and it is now easier for logistics to find and distinguish between players that have or haven’t called for help.
• Neo dropsuits has been added for all roles
• Increased weapon swapping speed.
• Reactive armor plates, which the community both loves and finds a bit over powered.

And these are still not all the updates, which are so many for Uprising 1.2 to mention.