I think you have to be a bit careful about how you explain the concept of Dust 514. If you start big, you wind up saying something like: “In Eve, you can wield genuine power over other players and order specs of dust about on the surface of insignificant planets. In Dust, you are that spec. Oh, you've gone."
That’s presumably why the new CCP trailer starts small, with potshots and armour customisation, before pulling back the curtain to reveal the wonders of a foreign universe run by players.
This morning saw CCP release Eve’s latest free expansion, Odyssey. The update is focussed on exploration but also brings with it massive changes to resource distribution and a host of visual and aural upgrades.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, CCP realised something was up with their Tranquility cluster - the bank of servers that powers both Eve and its sister shooter, Dust 514. What they discovered was a sustained DDoS attack. Approximately an hour later, a taskforce of internal and external experts concluded that the best thing to do was pull the game offline.
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Eve and Steam are now one. That means new players can sign-up, manage and cancel their subscriptions via Valve’s grey omni-service. And it likely also means exciting things for the future of the game’s devoted community.
A feature that’s surfaced on the Eve Online test server suggests that the Odyssey expansion will bring with it an update to the PLEX system. The update would allow players to spend PLEX to activate and train their alt characters instead of just adding playtime to their main account.
One of the announcements, moving ice belts into anomalies, may sound small on the surface but will significantly reduce the amount of ice available in Eve, making the resource that’s essential for big ship warfare significantly more valuable.
We spoke to Eve’s lead game designer Kristoffer Touborg about the changes.
If you’ve got a lot of friends who don’t play EVE (say two million of them), and you fancy inviting them to join you for a galaxy road-trip tomorrow, please don't. CCP have said that the game couldn't cope with a sudden increase in players.
At 18:49 on April 14, the CEO of a small corp named Christ’s Little Angels blew up. At the hands of two of his own pilots, 234,999,443.49 ISK worth of ship was destroyed, and another 14,054,679.85 ISK of equipment and cargo dropped. But perhaps he should have seen it coming.
Here’s the problem: there are no plans to release the game. When we asked one of the artists working on the game, Andy Robinson, about its release, he explained that it may be that Fanfest “is very possible that this is the only time that you’ll get to play it."
So what if fans want it? What if they put together a petition for the game’s release?
Ever since Dean Hall and his team were given the opportunity to develop DayZ mod into a standalone game at Bohemia, they’ve turned inwards - hollowing out Chernarus in an effort to make its spaces ever more dense and detailed. That’s meant some new and evocative interiors for previously un-enterable buildings, and long-term plans for underground bases - which Hall hopes will add an element of player-wrought permanence to DayZ familiar to Eve pilots.
Eve Fanfest 2013’s closing keynote gave a glimpse of what the future holds for Eve, Dust, and CCP. It’s a future of space elevators, boarding parties, and personal stargates. Of course, this was CCP looking years into their games’ futures but they also made some promises of what players will have in their hands by next year’s keynote.
As part of CCP’s continuing plan to take over the world, subsuming our globe into the enormity of New Eden, the developer announced during their Fanfest keynote that they’ve partnered with Dark Horse Comics and director Baltasar Kormákur to produce a run of comic books and a TV series based on the true stories emerging from EVE.
To celebrate 10 years of EVE, CCP are selling a collector’s edition of the game. You might wonder why you’d want such a thing - it’s a digital game, after all, with all the potential buyers likely already in possession of at least one account - but then you see what the box contains: another game.
Yes, CCP have finally issued a new run of their board game Hættuspil. The thing’s taken on a near-mythic quality among EVE players because it’s only available in Icelandic, in Iceland, and because the cover features Reykjavik’s mayor dressed in drag.
Eve Online is a majestic creation. Sometimes I just like to float around in space in a small frigate, gaze at distant nebula or visit pretty stars and planets. The sense of scale and awe its universe presents is sometimes overwhelming as you slowly drink in your beautiful surroundings.
The music of Eve Online is the icing on the proverbial cake for me - the game always chooses an appropriate track depending on what you’re doing. If you too love the music, then I’ve got a special treat for you: nearly an hour’s worth of orchestral renditions of the most famous Eve Online music. It’s beautiful.
Eve Online’s fanfest is ongoing right now, and the EVE keynote for the event has just finished. During the address, CCP revealed detailed the features of 4 June's Odyssey expansion, the core feature of the Winter 2013 expansion (thing space colonisation), and a little experiment called EVR.
Whipping my head round to trace the path of a rocket that was rapidly closing on my rear, looking for the moment to hit my afterburner and escape the payload before it connected with my fighter’s fuselage... that was the moment that EVR came together. EVR is special. EVR is new. EVR is a 6v6 space dogfighting game, built for the Oculus Rift and set in the Eve universe, taking place in the violent cold blacknews of New Eden.
But it leaves a question. What does this mean for Eve Online?
Early this morning, four Battlecruisers flying Goonswarm colours, flanked by their Clusterfuck Coalition comrades, closed in on a six billion ISK Golem and blew it to smithereens. It was only the most expensive explosion in a long series to rock high-sec space since Burn Jita 2 began on Saturday.
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