Another problem Dust had was that it was a cod clone. Sure, it had the novelty of orbital bombardment strikes from EVE players, but that’s not really enough to differentiate it from a genre as competitive as the fps shooter genre is. Cod and battlefield are already very well known, so when people go to pick up a title, you’re fighting an uphill battle. The more similar you make your game to something that’s already out there, the more difficulties you’ll have getting people to play it.
An EVE fps needs to lean hard into the mmo aspects of the game. So… more destiny… less cod.
Imo, what CCP should really do… is do a mix of a shooter and an rts. Have ai generals that control a battle space (within empire fw space) with rts controls so you end up with a living ,breathing battlefield, and then let the players spawn in the bases those ai generals create.
Once all that is ironed out and works well… release the rts feature to the players so they can use it in their null sec wars.
Why do this? Games that are pure pvp will have at least half your player base with a negative kd ratio. Usually it’s more than that due to some people being very dominant… and the people who are utter trash, will have a terrible kd ratio.
Eventually people at the bottom will bleed out and stop playing giving rise to a new bottom rung. So unless the game is able to constantly bring in new players (marketing $) at a substantial rate, the game will eventually die.
What can be done to stem this tide, is to have compelling pve as an essential component to the game. The developers can cheat by having ai generals direct npcs to various sites all over the battle field.
Of course, these npcs don’t need to look like players either. EVE has the lore of drones being prevalent in the universe, so use them as npcs. This way even the most trash of players can feel amazing when they take down the npc hordes and contribute to their faction’s goals in some way.
Games are meant to be fun, and to be fun, game developers need to facilitate the player’s ability to feel successful in their goals. Not all goals will be within reach for every person… but some will be if the game is developed properly.