Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Today is competition day on RPS. For the first time since it was released in 2003 the brilliant space-faring MMO Eve Online has a retail box, and to celebrate that CCP have sent us six copies to give away. Somewhat unusually for RPS competitions there is no region-constraint on any of our prizes today, so anyone may enter. If you want to find out how to win Eve Online then click onwards.
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Based on Eve chronicle The Breakout, this epic piece of fan film by Eve player Dire Lauthris tells the story of the early years of Eve’s faction warfare. Mr Lauthris explains the background to his work here on the Eve forums, including noting some mistakes in the narration. He’s been working on it since 2007. You should go watch, below. Thanks to Spiffeh for the link.

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Or “I’ve got something stuck in my wormhole.” This is only likely to be of interest to Eve players, or people interested in the exploits of Eve players, but I think it’s worth a post. Beyond the jump is a video tutorial for the new exploration system for Eve Online, the probe cleverness that allows you to find wormholes, and other exploration sites. There’s also some detail on this developer blog, and also this one. Via Massively.
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We’ve begun exploring the unknown systems of wormhole space in Eve Online. I had my first encounter with the freaky Sleeper alien ships last night. I then returned to normal space slightly richer, and slightly wiser. The wormhole – an unstable, temporary gate to an uncharted region – was still open when I logged out of Eve, and so I let my corporation chums know it was there. About an hour later one of them IM’d me: “We’re trapped. The wormhole closed behind us.” His account of the event is posted below.

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EG have posted an enormous interview I did with one of CCP’s designers, Noah Ward, about the forth-coming “Apocrypha” update to Eve Online. It includes information about wormholes, tech 3, the new-player experience, and the general enhancements within the game, as well as some more detailed thoughts about how the development team actually produces patches. That last bit perhaps goes some way to answering the age old Eve-patch question of “why did they fix x when they could have fixed y?” The answer being because X actually has a team dedicated to working on it…

Anyway, go read.

In what is probably the biggest backstab in Eve Online’s rather stabby history, a director of one of the key corporations in key PvP alliance Band Of Brothers has turned out to be an agent of their biggest enemies, the Something Awful spawned GoonSwarm. The consequence of this is some huge in-game material losses, but also the disbanding of the alliance itself. This means that the sovereignty game mechanic which holds Band Of Brother’s galactic empire together has gone offline, leaving them horrendously exposed to attack. Worse, Goonswarm have stolen the name and ticker of an alliance that has been running for almost five years.

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In what will probably be the biggest change to Eve Online in the past three years, developer “CCP Whisper” has announced some details about how the new wormhole system will work. The wormholes will be added in the upcoming March expansion, which is timed to coincide with Atari’s boxed release. Whisper says: “These wormholes are unstable and will spawn and vanish randomly throughout the known universe. A pilot who stumbles across one of these stellar phenomena can fly through it and travel to unknown space, where there are no stargates or stations, just the unexplored void of a new solar system. And when I say “new solar system” that is exactly what I mean. It will not be moving you to instanced space but rather to one of the thousands of new solar systems we will be adding to the EVE universe.” Lots more after the jump.
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With the news that Eve Online is to be re-released by Atari as a retail box, along with a major new expansion named Apocrypha, I thought it might be timely to point out some of the extra-curricula Eve Online writing I’ve been doing. Then I go on after that to rant about Eve’s principles of human interaction.
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Thank goodness for those guys over at Massively, who have summarised the larger text produced by Eve’s Council Of Stellar Management (run by democratically elected players) as they got to grips with the recent starbase exploit scandal. My precis and wibble after the jump.
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A multifarious bunch of videos of the Eve fanfest 2008 have emerged, and a couple of them hold interest for a more general audience, and I’m going to post them up here. The first and foremost is the Walking In Stations, or ambulation, presentation. This discusses Eve’s continuing inward journey, with ever more detail being burned into the universe – in this case the creation of full-body avatars that can move around in the internal environments of space stations. Avatars will be able to interact, play games, get cosmetic surgery, or even run businesses. There’s some footage of the proposed engine at about thirty minutes in.

The second video I’ve posted covers graphics and the future of Eve. It’s fairly hard going, and full of tech-gibber that won’t be of interest to most people, but there are some interesting moments such as running and vast resolutions (8-9 megapixels) at about eighteen minutes in, and some clever particle magicks later on.

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