Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yep, as CCP have detailed in this dev blog, after downtime tomorrow their console team shooter Dust 514 and their space MMO Eve will be a hybrid game, with players from both inhabiting the same world. CCP Nullabor explains: “…you will begin to see unfamiliar faces in local. They may look a little funny and talk about bizarre concepts such as tanks, grenades and “running around” but I promise they are as friendly as New Eden citizens can be and want to learn everything they can about this world you now both share.” Moreover, corporations are going to be able to employ Dust folk as mercenaries to fight over planets in factional warfare, and then reap the benefits. It’s a fascinating experiment, and I will fascinated to see whether it blossoms in the coming months. CCP still seem to be making a big gamble.

Lovely Dust trailer below.
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We are under siege. Each day this week, and inevitably over the next one too, our inbox is assaulted by endless press releases about in-game Christmas events, seasonal well-wishing from free-to-play titles we’ve never heard of and news of flash sales on sinister-sounding virtual currencies. I don’t know how we’ll cope. Well, I do – we’ll just ignore 99% of it. But one piece of festive gimmickery did manage to force itself past the steely defences of my intractably cynical brain. The below is EVE Online’s batshit crazy tidings of the season, and it includes pervy troll-men, Santa being murdered with a ray-gun, live-action Eve and authentic Icelandic mythology.
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I think I only truly became An Adult right around the time I first heard of EVE Online. Growing up, you see, the concept of space conjured notions of adventure, heroism, and utopia. The possibilities, my naive peanut brain figured, were endless. But time has a way of imparting essential kernels of wisdom upon even the most head-in-the-stars of youths – mainly, that people are complete jerks to each other. And so it is with EVE Online. Catapulted into the endless reaches of space, human existence is… pretty much the same. Corporate shenanigans, frequent backstabbery, and – if a new trailer’s anything to go on – lots of dubstep continue unabated. Only difference is, there are super nifty space ships, which make being a bounty hunter a viable career path – even for people not named “Dog.” And so we arrive at the new Retribution expansion, the bounty-hunting-est one yet. It’s out now, which means you’re probably already dead.

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The next big Eve update, Retribution, looms like an obsidian space monolith, and it’s going to be bringing a new world of bounties and bounty-hunting to the game. Players will be able to put bounties on individuals and corporations, and hire in trouble-makers to deal death to their rivals. It’s going to be a fascinating thing to see implemented, and I expect a frenzy of player-generated stories in the weeks following its implementation. There are other changes in the patch too, including overhauled drones regions, new ships, and rennovations of old ships. Should be quite the player-pleaser, this one. Watch, below decks.
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‘Retribution’ is hopefully a self-aware title for the latest Eve expansion, given the frequency with which the game’s playerbase seems to declare war on it. It’s the 18th add-on for the convention-breaking space MMO, and it concerns itself with bounty-hunting and crimefighting.

It calls the latter feature Crimewatch, which has a certain evening telly resonance that suggests no Brits were heavily involved in its creation.
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The world can be an incredibly miserable place sometimes. Case in point: a recent assault on a US consulate in Benghazi, Libya resulted in multiple deaths, which served to underscore all manner of related violent conflicts that have been going on for ages. That’s simply nauseating to even think about – let alone be a part of in any way, shape, or form. One of the now-deceased victims, US state department official Sean Smith, was an integral member of the EVE Online community. But, in an unlikely turn of events, that fact gave rise to something positively incredible.

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As mentioned in our sprawling Eve Online interviews, the next expansion, Inferno, is all about what makes Eve tick: warfare. It overhauls the war declaration system, factional warfare, killmails, missiles, and creates a “mercenary marketplace”. There’s plenty more though, with some graphical and UI tweaks, work on the character creator, overhauled incursions, and a bunch of new toys. This is the seventeenth Eve expansion, and it really is a big one. Hnngh. So tempting. Trailer should be up soon, too.

I’m not an EVE player. I know it sucks in some people like a massively multiplayer black hole, but the actual act of playing it has never exerted much of a gravitational pull on my attention. I’m probably dumb. Regardless, though, I can’t help but admire the sheer insanity this place constantly generates. Years-in-the-making corporate conspiracies, thousands-strong space battles, the very existence of Dust 514 – it is, at times, nearly unbelievable. Case in point: the ever-mischievous Goonswarm is up to its old tricks again. And by “tricks,” I mean bringing an entire economy to its knees. The best part? CCP’s totally loving it.

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The Mittani, Eve Online’s most famous and infamous player, has learned the hard way that the internet is serious business after all. The controversy arose at last week’s Eve Fanfest, where in a public talk he first mocked and then urged others to hound a player who was apparently suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. “Incidentally, if you want to make the guy kill himself, his [in-game] name is [REDACTED]“, Mittani declared. Unsurprisingly, this quickly spread beyond the Fanfest.

After initially appearing to shrug off complaints as he had been drunk at the time (which he acknowledges was entirely his own fault) and didn’t have total recall of what he’d done, Mittani offered a lengthy public apology a few days later, and promised his resignation as Eve Online Council chairman. Since then, Eve devs CCP have decided his actions were a breach of the EULA and are enforcing a harsher penalty.
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