Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Eve Online universe is preparing for its transformation into the PC/console hybrid game that has been proposed for Dust 514, and the first stage of that involves bring the planets – which are currently little more than pretty background scenery – into the mechanics of the game. The next expansion, Tyrannis, will allow players to survey planets for resources and begin harvesting them – even building structures on planet surfaces. It’s a move which sort of fills in the last blank space in the Eve galaxy.

The full dev blog on the expansion can be read here.

But just how big? Well, I’m glad you asked, because CCP have released a bunch of videos showing off the 3D hangars from Eve Online, which I’ve posted below. They’ve done it by race, so you get the full spaceship-porn effect of the various visual themes. What you don’t really get is the sense of scale for these things, so I’ve posted a Garry’s Mod video in which some bloke has dropped scale models of the Eve ships into the G-Mod sandbox. It really does give you a sense of the enormity of the really large Eve ships that you see in the hangar videos, as they disappear off into the Source engine clouds. (Header image from Eve comparison chart.)
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CCP have confirmed that their single-server MMO, Eve Online, hit a record 54,446 concurrent users last Sunday. The weekend also saw the eruption of a new conflict between very old powers within the game.
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The lovely Icelandic folks from CCP have provided us with a handful of PLEX codes to give away. They add 30 days of game time onto an existing account. And that needs to be an active account, sorry lapsers. If you’re a current player then mail us via this link, and I’ll pick a few lucky winners. If you win, I’ll be emailing you for your account name, which CCP will need to add the time. If you’re not already familiar with Eve then why not check out the trial?

The new Eve expansion, Dominion, is out this week, and it threatens to shake up the game’s territorial system to a degree that has not been seen since territory was formalised back in 2004. The new system will require more active maintenance for players wanting to benefit from holding sovereignty, and should reduce some of the “AFK Empires” we’ve seen in recent years. I doubt it will do anything to fragment or reduce the power of the existing power-blocs, however, since their player-owned structures will remain in places, and their immense capital fleets will still be able to project power across enormous reaches of space. I expect that it will simply produce more vassal entities, rather than genuinely allowing more access to 0.0 for smaller groups of players. Anyway, a glorious new trailer featuring a huge (and fairly true-to-game) capital-ship battle is out, and you can see it below. Delicious.
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I just wanted to remind fence-sitters and ditherers that RPS reader “Dave” is running an Eve Online corporation for us, and you can find out more about it over on the forum thread. The in-game chat channel is “RPS Community”. It’s welcoming players new and old, and is now up to almost a hundred members. In fact, MMO guilds and clans from any game should feel free to post in that subforum if you’re friendly to RPS newbies. Come on folks, help your fellow gamers find a home in the games they want to play.

I’ve also used this article as an excuse to post a trailer for Eve that was released this summer (below). It only took them six years, but CCP have finally created a trailer that captures some of the reason why Eve is an interesting game to play.
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Permaband. Do you see? A clever joke there. Eve Online operators CCP seem to have no fear of getting up on stage to strut their stuff, and they seem to have taken that habit to its logical extreme in this video, a rap about running an MMO and having studios on three continents.
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I just wanted to flag up the new RPS Eve community, details for which can be found on the forum here. If you’ve never been able to brave the dark waters of Eve Online, but still find yourself interested, then this might be a good place to start. (Along with the free trial.) I’m taking a break from Eve at the moment, so it’s good to see RPS community members pitching in to help beginners on their way. I’ll certainly be checking in with this lot when I do log back on.

Did you know there’s an Eve star system called RPS-0K?

In this, the final part of my look back on five years of the Eve Online corporation, Statecorp, we see our plucky heroes wander Eve, struggle for survival, and ultimately burn out in the long search for a home. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
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In this, the third part of my retrospective on five years of an Eve Online corporation, I discuss our guerrilla war, a heroic evacuation mission, and the few weeks of play that will, I fear, diminish all game experiences to follow. For the story so far: Part 1, Part 2.
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