Dust 514's Uprising 1.5 update: how objectives will help new players stick around

DUST 514 developer CCP Games is introducing a new objective system in its Uprising 1.5 update with a little more hand-holding than before. It is hoped that by better sign-posting the shooter, new players will stick around for longer.

Rather than give newcomers a simple pat on the back before throwing them into DUST 514's free-form open world, Uprising 1.5 will introduce clear instructions and objectives to help players understand what they need to do.

The details were outlined in a PS Blog US post by 'CCP Grayscale', who writes, "Our target audience is, for the most part, gamers who are familiar with other console first-person shooters and want to try something a little more interesting. This led us to focus primarily on teaching the differences between DUST and other FPS games, rather than trying to teach people, for example, what a gun is and how to move around.

"To accomplish this, we considered two major approaches: instruction-driven and objective-driven. An instruction-driven approach ensures that players are clearly shown what to do at each point along the way. Commonly this means highlighting every interaction, locking out everything else, and ensuring that every single step is explained. An objective-driven approach, by contrast, tends towards giving players goals to complete, and telling them just enough to let them figure out how to complete it."

CCP decided that most shooter fans know the early basics of the genre, so in the end it went for the objective-driven approach. The post continues, "With the assumption that our players are mostly familiar with the genre, we can be more confident that they’ll be able to complete the objectives.

"DUST is also a fairly dense and free-form game, so people who are likely to stick with it in the long term are assumed to be more likely to find an objective-driven approach a good fit. And objective-driven tutorials are a safer long-term investment in a continually-changing game like DUST, since they’re much less sensitive to changes in UI, mechanics, etc."

We'll be interviewing CCP Games about these new DUST 514 changes soon. Stay tuned for our article on the site.

For now, do you feel these are positive steps? Will players stick with the game as next-gen and other bigg shooters emerge on the horizon?

Let us know below.

Via Polygon.