Dust 514: Warlords is the latest build of the Free-to-Play First-Person-Shooter set in New Eden and connected to Eve Online. Here’s information on the release of the Warlords 1.0 devblog involving the new progression system and Planetary Conquest, as well as some analysis.
The main new feature Warlords 1.0 introduced was the warbarge, which is basically a passive bonus system. You start out with a Level 1 warbarge with a mobile factory pre-installed. This subsystem passively makes warbarge components, which are to be claimed and used to build four other subsystems.
The five warbarge subsystems released are shown in the order they are unlocked.
There were also New Faction Dropsuit BPO’s introduced that are available for Aurum and found in locked strongboxes. The eight initial BPO’s were based on four New Eden corporations, one from each of the empires.
There are also Quafe weapons and vehicles, colored in the corporations iconic colors, available as both BPO’s and individual items in the same way as the Faction Dropsuits.
Finally, there was the introduction of officer gear named after the winners of the Sidearm Expert Challenge.
There were plenty more updates to the user experience and visuals, which can be found in the patch notes linked here.
The Good
The first build of Warlords put in a lot of content for new players and veterans alike, while also fixing up several bugs and exploits involving learning skill points in battles.
The Bad
The warbarge is a poorly executed plan, due to how long it takes to level it up without paying real cash. While paying with cash is not a bad thing (I’ve invested over $200 into the game myself) it seems a little too fast and convenient to put down even $2 for over 1,000 components. While that does not seem like a lot, it can mean a lot of saved time for new people just starting to work on the warbarge or for a veteran looking to use it to the fullest extent.
Hotfix Echo introduced a plethora of different changes to the warlords build, the main one being the introduction of the Specialized Heavy Attack Vehicles (SHAV) which only have one large turret slot and no small turret slot. They are called the Marduk and the Gladius. This hotfix also made the HAV’s, the Madrugar and the Gunlogi require small turrets to always be on the fits. This was set up so that players who don’t use small turrets on their HAV don’t have a fitting advantage as opposed to those who do. Along with these changes comes a progression system for HAV’s, along with new vehicles modules, which are designed to help add more diversity to HAV loadouts.
Another set of changes came to some handheld weapons, particularly the Plasma Cannon getting a 13% damage increase, and the Assault Scrambler rifles getting a huge increase in damage.
The biggest change came to the HMG (Heavy Machine Gun) collection. The regular and burst HMG Variant’s range were reduced, while the Assault HMG variant had its rate of fire reduced. This change was, according to the devblog, because “The normal HMG is completely prevalent in Planetary Conquest, has a K/S ratio above what it acceptable, and renders short range rifles such as the Gallente Assault Rifle moot, something needed to be done”.
Finally, there was a reduction in backwards walking speed by 15. This was due to three reason according to the devblog, “1) It’s silly to walk as fast backwards as forward, and not the case in common fps’, 2) It’s too easy to kite an opponent at range, for example, tilting the favor to range over DPS on rifles, 3) Melee attacks are difficult to master, especially if you can’t catch up after your first swing.”
These changes and others can be found here
The Good
This hotfix made The Plasma Cannon and Assault HMG viable options for fighting Caldari Vehicles and LAV’s respectively, as well as made The Assault Scrambler rifle, one of my favorite weapons, a good racial rival to the Assault Combat Rifle.
The Bad
The only worrisome part of Hotfix Echo was that there was a glitch with SHAV’s where you had militia blaster turrets that were not supposed to be allowed and were unremoveable because you couldn’t find them while fitting the SHAV.
Warlords 1.1 Brought us a new game mode called Acquisition, which is basically King of the Hill with a moving hill, into public matches, and the new SKIN modules, which are basically color swaps for certain dropsuits, along with a number of bug fixes.
Full patch notes can be found here.
The Good
Acquisition is a pretty fun game mode and the SKIN modules are pretty cool.
The Bad
There were a lot of bad glitches, including the inability to see the chat user list in battles and thus the inability to join squads mid battle because of the chat list being remove. Nothing can be worse than this unfinished part of the game, which I tweeted out, which makes me believe that either CCP doesn’t know how to use the Unreal engine or are too busy or lazy to fix this.
Hopefully these are fixed by the update after downtime, because it’s still there. Otherwise I doubt the future of Dust 514.
