Saturday 11 August 2012

DUST 514 for dummies

I managed to score some points today. Hurray! And it happened rather by accident.

I was mulling over how to be effective late last night as I fell asleep and I had the bright idea of making a healer. After all, sure it's hard chasing players who are hostile, are shooting you and who don't want you near them but how hard would it be to chase players on your own team and heal them?

As it turns out, still pretty hard. I don't think I managed to find and heal anyone and am not very sure how the medical gun works. Do you aim it like a pistol and shoot your team and it heals them? Perhaps.

However I accidentally landed in someone else's ship after I cloned and found something brilliant. A gun. Just a gun, on a platform someone less clueless is maneuvring. What's more it had infinite ammo so I could just hold the fire button down and scroll around hoping to get some shots on target. I started to get kills. In fact quite a number of kills and kill assists.

What's so great about being a turret gunner in someone else's dropship is that I don't have to pat my head and rub my belly at the same time. Someone competent moves us and figures out canny approaches to the enemy I just look out the side and shoot. Being passively moved by someone is, for me, the answer for the time being. I've upgraded from being utter cannon fodder to being a useful member of a team that is doing something worthwhile.

If you are starting DUST and are as confused as I was, turret gunner is the role to aim for. It's not always possible to find a vehicle, someone else needs to call one and be flying it around. I think too the basic vehicle doesn't have a cloning bay, someone has to buy a more advanced vehicle type from the shop. Look for a spawn point that moves (sounds obvious but took me a while to even figure that out).

On the crest of a wave of confidence I even tried piloting a dropship a few times. I made three attempts. Each time I bounced off a few hills before crashing into the side of something concrete in a big ball of fire. So let me make a little caveat to my advice for clueless newbies: turret gunner is a fabulous role for a new player - unless Stabs is driving!




4 comments:

  1. Nooo. Sounds sooo good. I managed to sign up right at the beginning many months ago but my PS3 died to overheating after I created my character and I've never actually STARTED a game :(

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    1. It's great fun so far, especially as I'm so invested in Eve but I'm no connoisseur of shooters so what do I know?

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  2. I applaud their daring, but limiting the game to the PS3 seems suicidal to me. The core EVE audience is PC. Dust is not being promoted to console gamers in any sensible way that I can tell. Jo Average console gamer would have little reason to go for Dust over the jillions of other FPS options they have. Cut that audience in half by being a PS3 exclusive, and you have nearly guaranteed failure.

    I love the idea of DUST, and I would really like to see it flourish. I just don't see how it can.

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    1. I think their original idea was for a multiplatform console shooter crossover. Which makes a lot of sense. The best selling games are all console games, if they sold a tiny fraction of what the lead titles sell they'd be doing very well.

      I think they then a) fell out with Microsoft and b) got sweet-talked by Sony into making it PS3 exclusive.

      But yes, effectively for Eve players it's an expansion that costs £250 if (as in my case) you'd never have otherwise considered buying a PS3. There can't be many of us who will do so.

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