Dust 514

Dust 514 was a first-person shooter with elements of massively multiplayer online games. Combat took place on the various planets found in Eve Online, each offering a substantial amount of unique maps and sockets. Planets were divided into several large districts, which held resources and installations that dust players had to fight for control over in Planetary Conquest battles, or PC battles for short. Only the natural landscapes of each planet remained constant; the placement of buildings and surface structures was controlled by the player corporations.

Infantry in Dust 514 were equipped with "dropsuits" which functioned similarly to the ship hulls in Eve Online. Dropsuits had various module slots which players could utilize to fit different weapons, equipment and skins. Dust 514 entities had two different health meters: Shields and Armor; of which each had individual advantages and disadvantages. In addition, certain weapons affected one health type more than the other.

Dust 514 took place in the same fictional universe as Eve Online, a science fiction massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set 21,000 years in the future. The Eve Online backstory explains that humanity, after using up the Earth's resources, began to colonize the rest of the Milky Way. The development of faster-than-light travel allowed mankind to expand at an extremely fast pace, leading to violent competition between space-faring corporations. A natural wormhole was discovered, and humanity entered through it to find an empty new galaxy which they began colonizing.

However, the wormhole connecting the two galaxies collapsed, leaving the young colonies cut off from the worlds that had supplied them. Without support, many of the colonies in the new galaxy died off, and over time the few that remained lost their knowledge of both their technology and of their origins from Earth. Eventually, a new era began when civilization was rebuilt and faster-than-light travel was rediscovered. Five unique space-faring cultures emerged from the colonies to become the only interstellar powers in the new galaxy; the Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, Jove and Minmatar.

Dust 514 was announced on August 18, 2009, at the Game Developers Conference in Cologne, Germany where it was introduced with a short trailer featuring real time footage of the game.

In 2010, CCP updated Eve Online with the Tyrannis expansion. Tyrannis introduced planetary interaction, allowing players to harvest resources from planets using ground installations. A developer blog by CCP mentioned that, while the expansion alone would not include planetary combat, the upcoming Dust 514 game would deal with the combat aspect by allowing players to "project military force for attack and defense of planetary installations." Planets in Eve Online previously held no value; the Tyrannis expansion was intended to tie into Dust 514 by giving players "a reason to want to fight over [the planets]."

Before release Dust 514 was considered innovative for its connection to another game. IGN said that the game was highly ambitious and called it "...a Glimpse of the Future", while PC Gamer praised the orbital bombardment mechanic and the unprecedented amount of customization available.

Upon release the game received mixed reception from critics. It attained an average aggregate score of 59.10% on GameRankings and 59/100 on Metacritic, indicating mixed or average reviews.