Digital Foundry did a writeup on the MAG beta (obviously the game is not even out yet) last week, if you guys are interested in the technical details of what they discovered. They actually seemed pretty impressed with it.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-mag-factor-article

As far as MMO-ness goes, the big difference between EVE and MAG is that MAG is realtime, like any shooter, and EVE is "pseudo realtime" which is really just the rapid-turn gameplay found in most MMOs, where realtime precision is not really a factor. You see yourself swinging your axe... and then you see a text message saying you hurt the guy a bit later. Or, in EVE's case, you fire a missile, and you see it travel out and impact the target... but there's some delay between that impact and the results, really -- you just don't really notice, thanks to the way the gameplay works.  There are no raycasts, no bullets travelling across the map in fractions of a second, no split-second dodging or taking cover -- instead you target someone abstractly and tell the server that you "want to fire", and it reports results back to you, after a series of effective die rolls.

I doubt the FPS action in Dust 514 is as massive scale as MAG, in the per-battle sense, if it is realtime -- its probably small, isolated battles that feed back into a larger strategic system.  I didn't hear any actual numbers stated in the interview.  The "thousands of players" he's talking about are those in the greater EVE strategic universe, obviously.  

I've played a LOT of EVE, btw, and its good fun. =)

If you look at the third video down the developer said that communication with EVE players will be done through kosmos (whatever that is) which means it will 'not' be real time. Communication with other dust players within Dust will obviously be in real time, this game is not larger than M.A.G. because the developer said that battles can be as small as 16 vs 16 or as large as 256! So the title is incorrect by the OP.

I'm gonna keep an eye on this game, I used to play a little big of EVE online long ago which was allright space mmo.

I think they're gonna do the same thing as zipper did for MAG, since EVE online has a lot of planets this could mean that every server in the game is one planet and you join that server/planet to fight. Just like in MAG where you decide in which conflict you want to fight in at the combat hotspots on the world map. and every win on the server/planet will affect the EVE online gameworld. This way they could make the game run 64-256 players without fps-hiccups and not downgrade the graphics too much.

I don't actually have high hopes for this "EVE extension" product.

These guys have made a great non-realtime spaceship MMO. Their team is fairly small, though, and they lack experience with realtime networking. It takes a LOT more server horsepower to run a realtime game (per player) than it does a stock MMO model, which will cost them a load of money. I can't see this being as grand as it has the potential to be, without a big surcharge for monthly EVE fees, and a big investment (both money and time) for development as well.

+1 and I still do not see how they are going to get this running on live, they still use the PVP model and not dedicated servers.  The largest game on Live currently is 24 players so you can see why there is cause for concern; the other thing is there probably will not be cross communication between ps3 and 360 players.  I will wait to hear from the dev on the last concern, other than that it seems like it could be something special.

I was not reffering to how many characters take on how many. I'm reffering to a persistant game world. MAG doesnt have one. Huxley does, but Dust's persistant game world is massive. On a Universe scale.

What is your definition of Persistent world? Is it the type found in MMORPGs or otherwise? If so, what made the Persistent worlds found in MMORPGs the single definition of Persistent Worlds? In MAG the world is there, never goes away and is always changing (what faction has the upper hand, etc), if that is not also a persistent world, I don't know what is?

traveling from town to town. Taking on AI enemies. Quests together with your team. Etc Etc. That is an MMO. Anything else is a continuous Multiplayer shooter with maps.

And like I said, those are from MMORPGs and do not represent the entirety of Persistent worlds. And that is a Online RPG, not MMO. MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online.