All week long, we’ve been inundated with E3 news. Livestreams of million-dollar presentations,hundreds of game demo videos, countless press releases, and a show floor packed with people tweeting and posting posting pictures.
I was at the show and have posted my thoughts on what it was like from a PC gamer’s perspective (check out Day 1 and Day 2). PC gaming felt overlooked, even purposefully neglected at times, during the biggest gaming event of the year. But the more I thought about it, the less it bothered me.
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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.
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Slipping on the boots of a bloodsucker is one of the biggest draws of CCP’s long in development MMO World of Darkness but, as well as the chance to sprint along rooftops hunting mortals and other vamps, there’s a great deal to be excited for besides.
Taking Eve’s sandbox gameplay as a model, a model which generates endless stories of skullduggery, CCP are developing a game which will have their players develop friendships and rivalries with a freedom unlike almost any other game yet made. And all on top of the lore of the infamous Vampire: The Masquerade series.
At this year’s Eve Fanfest, CCP finally showed some footage of the game in action, so we thought it was about time we collected together everything we know.
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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.
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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’s next expansion is due out this Tuesday, 4 June. Considering its wide spread of changes, including a significant reduction in the game’s ice supplies which should encourage a good deal of ship on ship violence, CCP have released a video that gives an overview of the major alterations.
The developer wins double plus points for using the awfully good Portsmouth Sinfonia for the video's soundtrack.
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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.
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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.
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During last week’s Fanfest CCP finally opened up to talk about the changes coming in this June’s Odyssey expansion. We’d already had some specifics, like the new private hangars in Player-owned Stations, but it was only during the event in Reykjavik that the developers were free to talk about all the granular adjustments.
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.
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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.
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Do you long to recreate in a virtual world the difficult teenage years of Bella Swan, moping through life, desperate beyond belief to secure the love of a sparkling blood sucker with a perpetual frown? Well if you do, CCP’s upcoming World of Darkness is not the game for you. Executive Producer Chris McDonough has said he’s banning the names Edward and Bella from the game.
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The star of Eve Fanfest 2013 was EVR, a 6v6 space shooter that runs on virtual reality headsets like Oculus Rift. It’s the best fit for the technology I’ve seen so far and it was ridiculously good fun.
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?
Andy smiled.
“I’d love to see that."
So we’ve gone and made a petition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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It’s been a big year for CCP, it’s the 10 year anniversary of EVE Online’s launch and also the year they launched their PS3 tie-in game, DUST 514, so the developer is putting on a pretty major show for this year’s Fanfest.
If you were able to get hold of a ticket before they all sold out then it looks like you’re in for a real treat, there’s panels aplenty, parties, PvP events, and even a wedding to go to.
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EVE Online’s executive producer Jon Lander AKA CCP Unifex is stepping down from the role and transitioning to another position within the developer, where he will lead CCP’s mobile development.
CCP are looking outside the company to fill that role.
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