Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We’re catching up with our favourite, maddest, favourite and most mad MMORPG, EVE Online. If you missed part 1 of our interview with EVE’s Lead Game Designer, Senior Producer and Community Developer, click right here. Then you can blast on through to part 2, featuring player-run universities, Nicholas Cage, and an answer to the taxing question of how one runs the largest-scale arms race videogames have ever seen.
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EVE Online! Since the servers first rumbled to life nine years ago the deeply political, single-shard MMO has been a source of endless fascination for RPS, on a par with helicopters. How do they stay in the air?

But what’s happening in EVE? Last we heard, some of its most famous chaps were grumbling or rioting, followed by something that continues to feel like a controlled peace. We needed an update, and so it was that CCP sent over a crate containing Senior Producer Jon Lander, Lead Game Designer Kristoffer Touborg and Community Developer Sveinn Kjarval. Together, we would get to the truth.
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Next up from the dusty annals of prehistoric RPS is a 2008 barnstormer of a tale from our all-too-quickly-departed gentleman caller Quintin Smith, and probably the best thing you’ll ever read about the one-time greatest videogame in the history of existence, Planetside.

Planetside, then. Do I have any veterans in the audience? At ease, gentlemen.

It might not have dredged up the subscribers Sony were hoping for, and you personally might have found it a disappointment, a bully, a bastard, or most unforgivably, a bore. The developers were perhaps overambitious, and in any case they managed to screw up both on paper and in practice. But their game has achieved one beautiful thing, and that’s the creation of the same invisible veterans’ club that results from a real life war. If you played Planetside you might have already encountered this phenomenon- the mutual respect that instantly exists once you find out someone’s an ex-Planetside player. Since I can’t think of a name for this whole process, I’m going to dub it “I WAS THERE, MAN” syndrome.
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Multiplayer, eh? Bit of fun! Having a laugh with friends. Persistent unlocks. Leaderboards. And all I can think as Relic demo Space Marine’s multiplayer component to me, is this: Frivolity! The Emperor would not approve. My tune was, however, changed slightly following several hours and a dozen matches of hands-on.
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Death, the second horseman (and hoarse man) of the Apocalypse is locked in battle with an enormous beetle. Deftly rolling out of the way of its charge attack with an agility never showcased by War in the first game, Death promptly delivers a series of all-business, blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em slashes with his scythe. And what should come tumbling out from the beetle? Viscous, nightshade-coloured ichor? No. Numbers. For Darksiders 2, Vigil are taking the first game’s paltry handful of RPG elements and pushing them as hard as they can.
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Last week at least a couple of you complained that it’s been ages since our weekly Cardboard Children column covered a board game you could reasonably be expected to take home to meet your mother or non-gamer friends. Something that didn’t feature goblins anywhere at all. Not even in an expansion.

Have you all really bought Survive! already? Well, here’s another one anyway: Tobago. A game of archaeology, buried treasure and open betrayal.
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Indie squad tactics game Fray seems purpose-built to secure a place on RPS’s radar, and since we have impeccable taste, that means you should be keeping an eye on it too. Not only is it going to offer top-down squad strategy, they’re appealing to RPS’s love of paradoxes- that same squad strategy will be real-time and turn-based. Don’t think about that too hard, because (1) you’ll get a headache, and (2), we’ve got an interview with French developers Brain Candy explaining just what Fray is after the jump, as well as the first ever screenshots.
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