Dust 514 entering open beta January 22nd

For those of you who have been eagerly anticipating the impending release of CCP’s Dust 514, here’s a heads up: the word is that the game will be going into open beta as of January 22. If you haven’t been keeping up with this title, here’s the essentials: Dust 514 is a free-to-play first-person shooter for the Playstation 3 featuring a persistent, ‘living’ world, vehicle combat, and deep tie-ins with its mother game, the famous sci-fi MMO EVE-Online. In fact, there’s a lot going on with the technical side of Dust 514 that seems guaranteed to make it almost as unique among FPS games as EVE-Online is among MMOs, but there’s a less technical reason to keep an eye on this game – it’s just plain beautiful looking, and seems like it could be a lot of fun.

Keep in mind that as of right now CCP is stating that there are no more data wipes being planned – so if you join up for the open beta, you don’t have to worry about your character being wiped once there’s a transition to the ‘full release’ version. For those of you who feel too impatient to wait a week on this one, keep in mind that you can buy your way into the beta for 20 bucks, and get ’50 dollars worth of in-game goodies’ in the process. If you do happen to give this one an early shot, feel free to let us know here at Gaming Trend – I’ll probably give it another try once open beta strikes, just to see if I can enjoy a FPS while sacrificing my keyboard-and-mouse interface.

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