Speaking to GamesIndustry International , Jonathan Lander, EVE Online's exec producer, said that CCP has a five year plan for their FPS spin-off Dust 514 and enough ideas to furnish the game with another 20 years of development. It is most certainly not going to be shelved when the current console cycle runs out of life, he said - the implication being that other platforms will get a taste of CCP's shooter when the exclusivity deal with PlayStation comes to an end.
"Shipping the game on PlayStation 3, that's where 100 per cent of our focus is," said Lander. "But our intention is this game will continue to run and operate for many, many years."
Does that mean it'll come to PC? Lander wasn't going to say, but he was clear that the game would outlast this console cycle - and it's hard to believe that it wouldn't eventually make it's way to PC if that was the case.
"Our plan is that we want in another ten years to be having 'EVE is 20' and 'Dust is 10' [events]" he said. "The whole way that we're doing our development process is so that we can push out expansions on a regular basis. We're not going to ship a unit and then in six months it's off the shelves and people have stopped playing it."
Making a shooter, not least one which connects to a huge, complex, persistent universe on an entirely different platform, has proved quite a daunting task, however.
"We have to be cognisant of the fact that one of the reasons for doing this is to target a different type of gamer from the guy who has a tower PC, with his mouse, strategising and playing a spaceship game. We want the people who want to play for 15 minutes and shoot somebody."
Let's hope he realises people with tower cases and mice like shooting, too, eh?
